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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson -
+Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25), by Robert Louis Stevenson
+
+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: The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25)
+
+Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
+
+Release Date: December 21, 2009 [EBook #30729]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WORKS OF STEVENSON ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Marius Masi, Jonathan Ingram and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+       THE WORKS OF
+  ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
+
+     SWANSTON EDITION
+
+        VOLUME III
+
+
+
+
+  _Of this SWANSTON EDITION in Twenty-five
+  Volumes of the Works of ROBERT LOUIS
+  STEVENSON Two Thousand and Sixty Copies
+  have been printed, of which only Two Thousand
+  Copies are for sale._
+
+  _This is No._ ..........
+
+
+  [Illustration: SWANSTON COTTAGE, THE HOME OF R.L.S. FROM 1868 TO 1876]
+
+  THE WORKS OF
+  ROBERT LOUIS
+   STEVENSON
+
+  VOLUME THREE
+
+
+  LONDON: PUBLISHED BY CHATTO AND
+  WINDUS: IN ASSOCIATION WITH CASSELL
+  AND COMPANY LIMITED: WILLIAM
+  HEINEMANN: AND LONGMANS GREEN
+  AND COMPANY MDCCCCXI
+
+  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  FAMILIAR STUDIES OF MEN AND BOOKS
+
+                                                            PAGE
+
+        PREFACE BY WAY OF CRITICISM                            5
+
+     I. VICTOR HUGO'S ROMANCES                                19
+
+    II. SOME ASPECTS OF ROBERT BURNS                          43
+
+   III. WALT WHITMAN                                          77
+
+    IV. HENRY DAVID THOREAU: HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS      101
+
+     V. YOSHIDA-TORAJIRO                                     129
+
+    VI. FRANÇOIS VILLON, STUDENT, POET, AND HOUSEBREAKER     142
+
+   VII. CHARLES OF ORLEANS                                   171
+
+  VIII. SAMUEL PEPYS                                         206
+
+    IX. JOHN KNOX AND HIS RELATIONS TO WOMEN                 230
+
+
+  THE BODY-SNATCHER                                          277
+
+
+
+
+FAMILIAR STUDIES OF MEN AND BOOKS
+
+
+  TO
+  THOMAS STEVENSON
+  CIVIL ENGINEER
+
+  BY WHOSE DEVICES THE GREAT SEA LIGHTS
+  IN EVERY QUARTER OF THE WORLD NOW SHINE MORE BRIGHTLY
+
+  THIS VOLUME IS IN LOVE AND GRATITUDE
+  DEDICATED BY HIS SON
+
+  THE AUTHOR
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE BY WAY OF CRITICISM
+
+
+These studies are collected from the monthly press. One appeared in the
+_New Quarterly_, one in _Macmillan's_, and the rest in the _Cornhill
+Magazine_. To the _Cornhill_ I owe a double debt of thanks; first, that
+I was received there in the very best society, and under the eye of the
+very best of editors; and second, that the proprietors have allowed me
+to republish so considerable an amount of copy.
+
+These nine worthies have been brought together from many different ages
+and countries. Not the most erudite of men could be perfectly prepared
+to deal with so many and such various sides of human life and manners.
+To pass a true judgment upon Knox and Burns implies a grasp upon the
+very deepest strain of thought in Scotland,--a country far more
+essentially different from England than many parts of America; for, in a
+sense, the first of these men re-created Scotland, and the second is its
+most essentially national production. To treat fitly of Hugo and Villon
+would involve yet wider knowledge, not only of a country foreign to the
+author by race, history, and religion, but of the growth and liberties
+of art. Of the two Americans, Whitman and Thoreau, each is the type of
+something not so much realised as widely sought after among the late
+generations of their countrymen; and to see them clearly in a nice
+relation to the society that brought them forth, an author would require
+a large habit of life among modern Americans. As for Yoshida, I have
+already disclaimed responsibility; it was but my hand that held the pen.
+
+In truth, these are but the readings of a literary vagrant. One book
+led to another, one study to another. The first was published with
+trepidation. Since no bones were broken, the second was launched with
+greater confidence. So, by insensible degrees, a young man of our
+generation acquires, in his own eyes, a kind of roving judicial
+commission through the ages: and, having once escaped the perils of the
+Freemans and the Furnivalls, sets himself up to right the wrongs of
+universal history and criticism. Now it is one thing to write with
+enjoyment on a subject while the story is hot in your mind from recent
+reading, coloured with recent prejudice; and it is quite another
+business to put these writings coldly forth again in a bound volume. We
+are most of us attached to our opinions; that is one of the "natural
+affections" of which we hear so much in youth; but few of us are
+altogether free from paralysing doubts and scruples. For my part, I have
+a small idea of the degree of accuracy possible to man, and I feel sure
+these studies teem with error. One and all were written with genuine
+interest in the subject; many, however, have been conceived and finished
+with imperfect knowledge; and all have lain, from beginning to end,
+under the disadvantages inherent in this style of writing.
+
+Of these disadvantages a word must here be said. The writer of short
+studies, having to condense in a few pages the events of a whole
+lifetime, and the effect on his own mind of many various volumes, is
+bound, above all things, to make that condensation logical and striking.
+For the only justification of his writing at all is that he shall
+present a brief, reasoned, and memorable view. By the necessity of the
+case, all the more neutral circumstances are omitted from his narrative;
+and that of itself, by the negative exaggeration of which I have spoken
+in the text, lends to the matter in hand a certain false and specious
+glitter. By the necessity of the case, again, he is forced to view his
+subject throughout in a particular illumination, like a studio artifice.
+Like Hales with Pepys, he must nearly break his sitter's neck to get the
+proper shadows on the portrait. It is from one side only that he has
+time to represent his subject. The side selected will either be the one
+most striking to himself, or the one most obscured by controversy; and
+in both cases that will be the one most liable to strained and
+sophisticated reading. In a biography, this and that is displayed; the
+hero is seen at home, playing the flute; the different tendencies of his
+work come one after another into notice; and thus something like a true
+general impression of the subject may at last be struck. But in the
+short study, the writer, having seized his "point of view," must keep
+his eye steadily to that. He seeks, perhaps, rather to differentiate
+than truly to characterise. The proportions of the sitter must be
+sacrificed to the proportions of the portrait; the lights are
+heightened, the shadows overcharged; the chosen expression, continually
+forced, may degenerate at length into a grimace; and we have at best
+something of a caricature, at worst a calumny. Hence, if they be
+readable at all and hang together by their own ends, the peculiar
+convincing force of these brief representations. They take so little a
+while to read, and yet in that little while the subject is so repeatedly
+introduced in the same light and with the same expression, that, by
+sheer force of repetition, that view is imposed upon the reader. The two
+English masters of the style, Macaulay and Carlyle, largely exemplify
+its dangers. Carlyle, indeed, had so much more depth and knowledge of
+the heart, his portraits of mankind are felt and rendered with so much
+more poetic comprehension, and he, like his favourite Ram Dass, had a
+fire in his belly so much more hotly burning than the patent reading
+lamp by which Macaulay studied, that it seems at first sight hardly fair
+to bracket them together. But the "point of view" was imposed by Carlyle
+on the men he judged of in his writings with an austerity not only cruel
+but almost stupid. They are too often broken outright on the Procrustean
+bed; they are probably always disfigured. The rhetorical artifice of
+Macaulay is easily spied; it will take longer to appreciate the moral
+bias of Carlyle. So with all writers who insist on forcing some
+significance from all that comes before them; and the writer of short
+studies is bound, by the necessity of the case, to write entirely in
+that spirit. What he cannot vivify he should omit.
+
+Had it been possible to rewrite some of these papers I hope I should
+have had the courage to attempt it. But it is not possible. Short
+studies are, or should be, things woven like a carpet, from which it is
+impossible to detach a strand. What is perverted has its place there for
+ever, as a part of the technical means by which what is right has been
+presented. It is only possible to write another study, and then, with a
+new "point of view," would follow new perversions and perhaps a fresh
+caricature. Hence, it will be, at least, honest to offer a few grains of
+salt to be taken with the text; and as some words of apology, addition,
+correction, or amplification fall to be said on almost every study in
+the volume, it will be most simple to run them over in their order. But
+this must not be taken as a propitiatory offering to the gods of
+shipwreck; I trust my cargo unreservedly to the chances of the sea; and
+do not, by criticising myself, seek to disarm the wrath of other and
+less partial critics.
+
+HUGO'S ROMANCES. This is an instance of the "point of view." The five
+romances studied with a different purpose might have given different
+results, even with a critic so warmly interested in their favour. The
+great contemporary master of workmanship, and indeed of all literary
+arts and technicalities, had not unnaturally dazzled a beginner. But it
+is best to dwell on merits, for it is these that are most often
+overlooked.
+
+BURNS. I have left the introductory sentences on Principal Shairp,
+partly to explain my own paper, which was merely supplemental to his
+amiable but imperfect book, partly because that book appears to me truly
+misleading both as to the character and the genius of Burns. This seems
+ungracious, but Mr. Shairp has himself to blame; so good a Wordsworthian
+was out of character upon that stage.
+
+This half-apology apart, nothing more falls to be said except upon a
+remark called forth by my study in the columns of a literary Review. The
+exact terms in which that sheet disposed of Burns I cannot now recall;
+but they were to this effect--that Burns was a bad man, the impure
+vehicle of fine verses; and that this was the view to which all
+criticism tended. Now I knew, for my own part, that it was with the
+profoundest pity, but with a growing esteem, that I studied the man's
+desperate efforts to do right; and the more I reflected, the stranger it
+appeared to me that any thinking being should feel otherwise. The
+complete letters shed, indeed, a light on the depths to which Burns had
+sunk in his character of Don Juan, but they enhance in the same
+proportion the hopeless nobility of his marrying Jean. That I ought to
+have stated this more noisily I now see; but that any one should fail to
+see it for himself is to me a thing both incomprehensible and worthy of
+open scorn. If Burns, on the facts dealt with in this study, is to be
+called a bad man, I question very much whether I or the writer in the
+Review have ever encountered what it would be fair to call a good one.
+All have some fault. The fault of each grinds down the hearts of those
+about him, and--let us not blink the truth--hurries both him and them
+into the grave. And when we find a man persevering indeed, in his fault,
+as all of us do, and openly overtaken, as not all of us are, by its
+consequences, to gloss the matter over, with too polite biographers, is
+to do the work of the wrecker disfiguring beacons on a perilous
+seaboard; but to call him bad, with a self-righteous chuckle, is to be
+talking in one's sleep with Heedless and Too-bold in the arbour.
+
+Yet it is undeniable that much anger and distress is raised in many
+quarters by the least attempt to state plainly what every one well
+knows, of Burns's profligacy, and of the fatal consequences of his
+marriage. And for this there are perhaps two subsidiary reasons. For,
+first, there is, in our drunken land, a certain privilege extended to
+drunkenness. In Scotland, in particular, it is almost respectable, above
+all when compared with any "irregularity between the sexes." The
+selfishness of the one, so much more gross in essence, is so much less
+immediately conspicuous in its results, that our demiurgeous Mrs. Grundy
+smiles apologetically on its victims. It is often said--I have heard it
+with these ears--that drunkenness "may lead to vice." Now I did not
+think it at all proved that Burns was what is called a drunkard; and I
+was obliged to dwell very plainly on the irregularity and the too
+frequent vanity and meanness of his relations to women. Hence, in the
+eyes of many, my study was a step towards the demonstration of Burns's
+radical badness.
+
+But, second, there is a certain class, professors of that low morality
+so greatly more distressing than the better sort of vice, to whom you
+must never represent an act that was virtuous in itself as attended by
+any other consequences than a large family and fortune. To hint that
+Burns's marriage had an evil influence is, with this class, to deny the
+moral law. Yet such is the fact. It was bravely done; but he had
+presumed too far on his strength. One after another the lights of his
+life went out, and he fell from circle to circle to the dishonoured
+sickbed of the end. And surely, for any one that has a thing to call a
+soul, he shines out tenfold more nobly in the failure of that frantic
+effort to do right, than if he had turned on his heel with Worldly
+Wiseman, married a congenial spouse, and lived orderly and died
+reputably an old man. It is his chief title that he refrained from "the
+wrong that amendeth wrong." But the common, trashy mind of our
+generation is still aghast, like the Jews of old, at any word of an
+unsuccessful virtue. Job has been written and read; the tower of Siloam
+fell nineteen hundred years ago; yet we have still to desire a little
+Christianity, or, failing that, a little even of that rude, old Norse
+nobility of soul, which saw virtue and vice alike go unrewarded, and was
+yet not shaken in its faith.
+
+WALT WHITMAN. This is a case of a second difficulty which lies
+continually before the writer of critical studies: that he has to
+meditate between the author whom he loves and the public who are
+certainly indifferent and frequently averse. Many articles had been
+written on this notable man. One after another had leaned, in my eyes,
+either to praise or blame unduly. In the last case, they helped to
+blindfold our fastidious public to an inspiring writer; in the other, by
+an excess of unadulterated praise, they moved the more candid to revolt.
+I was here on the horns of a dilemma; and between these horns I squeezed
+myself, with perhaps some loss to the substance of the paper. Seeing so
+much in Whitman that was merely ridiculous, as well as so much more that
+was unsurpassed in force and fitness,--seeing the true prophet doubled,
+as I thought, in places with the Bull in a China Shop,--it appeared best
+to steer a middle course, and to laugh with the scorners when I thought
+they had any excuse, while I made haste to rejoice with the rejoicers
+over what is imperishably good, lovely, human, or divine, in his
+extraordinary poems. That was perhaps the right road; yet I cannot help
+feeling that in this attempt to trim my sails between an author whom I
+love and honour and a public too averse to recognise his merit, I have
+been led into a tone unbecoming from one of my stature to one of
+Whitman's. But the good and the great man will go on his way not vexed
+with my little shafts of merriment. He, first of any one, will
+understand how, in the attempt to explain him credibly to Mrs. Grundy, I
+have been led into certain airs of the man of the world, which are
+merely ridiculous in me, and were not intentionally discourteous to
+himself. But there is a worse side to the question; for in my eagerness
+to be all things to all men, I am afraid I may have sinned against
+proportion. It will be enough to say here that Whitman's faults are few
+and unimportant when they are set beside his surprising merits. I had
+written another paper full of gratitude for the help that had been given
+me in my life, full of enthusiasm for the intrinsic merit of the poems,
+and conceived in the noisiest extreme of youthful eloquence. The present
+study was a rifacimento. From it, with the design already mentioned, and
+in a fit of horror at my old excess, the big words and emphatic passages
+were ruthlessly excised. But this sort of prudence is frequently its
+own punishment; along with the exaggeration, some of the truth is
+sacrificed; and the result is cold, constrained, and grudging. In short,
+I might almost everywhere have spoken more strongly than I did.
+
+THOREAU. Here is an admirable instance of the "point of view" forced
+throughout, and of too earnest reflection on imperfect facts. Upon me
+this pure, narrow, sunnily-ascetic Thoreau had exercised a great charm.
+I have scarce written ten sentences since I was introduced to him, but
+his influence might be somewhere detected by a close observer. Still it
+was as a writer that I had made his acquaintance; I took him on his own
+explicit terms; and when I learned details of his life, they were, by
+the nature of the case and my own _parti pris_, read even with a certain
+violence in terms of his writings. There could scarce be a perversion
+more justifiable than that; yet it was still a perversion. The study,
+indeed, raised so much ire in the breast of Dr. Japp (H. A. Page),
+Thoreau's sincere and learned disciple, that had either of us been men,
+I please myself with thinking, of less temper and justice, the
+difference might have made us enemies instead of making us friends. To
+him, who knew the man from the inside, many of my statements sounded
+like inversions made on purpose; and yet when we came to talk of them
+together, and he had understood how I was looking at the man through the
+books, while he had long since learned to read the books through the
+man, I believe he understood the spirit in which I had been led astray.
+
+On two most important points, Dr. Japp added to my knowledge, and with
+the same blow fairly demolished that part of my criticism. First, if
+Thoreau were content to dwell by Walden Pond, it was not merely with
+designs of self-improvement, but to serve mankind in the highest sense.
+Hither came the fleeing slave; thence was he despatched along the road
+to freedom. That shanty in the woods was a station in the great
+Underground Railroad; that adroit and philosophic solitary was an
+ardent worker, soul and body, in that so much more than honourable
+movement, which, if atonement were possible for nations, should have
+gone far to wipe away the guilt of slavery. But in history sin always
+meets with condign punishment; the generation passes, the offence
+remains, and the innocent must suffer. No underground railroad could
+atone for slavery, even as no bills in Parliament can redeem the ancient
+wrongs of Ireland. But here at least is a new light shed on the Walden
+episode.
+
+Second, it appears, and the point is capital, that Thoreau was once
+fairly and manfully in love, and, with perhaps too much aping of the
+angel, relinquished the woman to his brother. Even though the brother
+were like to die of it, we have not yet heard the last opinion of the
+woman. But be that as it may, we have here the explanation of the
+"rarefied and freezing air" in which I complained that he had taught
+himself to breathe. Reading the man through the books, I took his
+professions in good faith. He made a dupe of me, even as he was seeking
+to make a dupe of himself, wresting philosophy to the needs of his own
+sorrow. But in the light of this new fact, those pages, seemingly so
+cold, are seen to be alive with feeling. What appeared to be a lack of
+interest in the philosopher turns out to have been a touching
+insincerity of the man to his own heart; and that fine-spun airy theory
+of friendship, so devoid, as I complained, of any quality of flesh and
+blood, a mere anodyne to lull his pains. The most temperate of living
+critics once marked a passage of my own with a cross and the words,
+"This seems nonsense." It not only seemed; it was so. It was a private
+bravado of my own, which I had so often repeated to keep up my spirits
+that I had grown at last wholly to believe it, and had ended by setting
+it down as a contribution to the theory of life. So with the more icy
+parts of this philosophy of Thoreau's. He was affecting the Spartanism
+he had not; and the old sentimental wound still bled afresh, while he
+deceived himself with reasons.
+
+Thoreau's theory, in short, was one thing and himself another: of the
+first, the reader will find what I believe to be a pretty faithful
+statement and a fairly just criticism in the study; of the second he
+will find but a contorted shadow. So much of the man as fitted nicely
+with his doctrines, in the photographer's phrase, came out. But that
+large part which lay outside and beyond, for which he had found or
+sought no formula, on which perhaps his philosophy even looked askance,
+is wanting in my study, as it was wanting in the guide I followed. In
+some ways a less serious writer, in all ways a nobler man, the true
+Thoreau still remains to be depicted.
+
+VILLON. I am tempted to regret that I ever wrote on this subject, not
+merely because the paper strikes me as too picturesque by half, but
+because I regarded Villon as a bad fellow. Others still think well of
+him, and can find beautiful and human traits where I saw nothing but
+artistic evil; and by the principle of the art, those should have
+written of the man, and not I. Where you see no good, silence is the
+best. Though this penitence comes too late, it may be well, at least, to
+give it expression.
+
+The spirit of Villon is still living in the literature of France. Fat
+Peg is oddly of a piece with the work of Zola, the Goncourts, and the
+infinitely greater Flaubert; and, while similar in ugliness, still
+surpasses them in a native power. The old author, breaking with an
+_éclat de voix_ out of his tongue-tied century, has not yet been touched
+on his own ground, and still gives us the most vivid and shocking
+impression of reality. Even if that were not worth doing at all, it
+would be worth doing as well as he has done it; for the pleasure we take
+in the author's skill repays us, or at least reconciles us to the
+baseness of his attitude. Fat Peg (_La Grosse Margot_) is typical of
+much; it is a piece of experience that has nowhere else been rendered
+into literature; and a kind of gratitude for the author's plainness
+mingles, as we read, with the nausea proper to the business. I shall
+quote here a verse of an old student's song; worth laying side by side
+with Villon's startling ballade. This singer, also, had an unworthy
+mistress, but he did not choose to share the wages of dishonour; and it
+is thus, with both wit and pathos, that he laments her fall:--
+
+  Nunc plango florem
+    Ætatis teneræ
+  Nitidiorem
+    Veneris sidere:
+  Tunc columbinam
+    Mentis dulcedinem,
+  Nunc serpentinam
+    Amaritudinem.
+  Verbo rogantes
+    Removes ostio,
+  Munera dantes
+    Foves cubiculo,
+        Illos abire præcipis
+        A quibus nihil accipis,
+        Cæcos claudosque recipis,
+        Viros illustres decipis
+        Cum melle venenosa.[1]
+
+But our illustrious writer of ballades it was unnecessary to deceive; it
+was the flight of beauty alone, not that of honesty or honour, that he
+lamented in his song; and the nameless mediæval vagabond has the best of
+the comparison.
+
+There is now a Villon Society in England; and Mr. John Payne has
+translated him entirely into English, a task of unusual difficulty. I
+regret to find that Mr. Payne and I are not always at one as to the
+author's meaning; in such cases I am bound to suppose that he is in the
+right, although the weakness of the flesh withholds me from anything
+beyond a formal submission. He is now upon a larger venture, promising
+us at last that complete Arabian Nights to which we have all so long
+looked forward.
+
+CHARLES OF ORLEANS. Perhaps I have done scanty justice to the charm of
+the old Duke's verses, and certainly he is too much treated as a fool.
+The period is not sufficiently remembered. What that period was, to what
+a blank of imbecility the human mind had fallen, can only be known to
+those who have waded in the chronicles. Excepting Comines and La Salle
+and Villon, I have read no author who did not appal me by his torpor;
+and even the trial of Joan of Arc, conducted as it was by chosen clerks,
+bears witness to a dreary sterile folly,--a twilight of the mind peopled
+with childish phantoms. In relation to his contemporaries, Charles seems
+quite a lively character.
+
+It remains for me to acknowledge the kindness of Mr. Henry Pyne, who,
+immediately on the appearance of the study, sent me his edition of the
+Debate between the Heralds: a courtesy from the expert to the amateur
+only too uncommon in these days.
+
+KNOX. Knox, the second in order of interest among the reformers, lies
+dead and buried in the works of the learned and unreadable M'Crie. It
+remains for some one to break the tomb and bring him forth, alive again
+and breathing, in a human book. With the best intentions in the world, I
+have only added two more flagstones, ponderous like their predecessors,
+to the mass of obstruction that buries the reformer from the world; I
+have touched him in my turn with that "mace of death," which Carlyle has
+attributed to Dryasdust; and my two dull papers are, in the matter of
+dulness, worthy additions to the labours of M'Crie. Yet I believe they
+are worth reprinting in the interest of the next biographer of Knox. I
+trust his book may be a masterpiece; and I indulge the hope that my two
+studies may lend him a hint or perhaps spare him a delay in its
+composition.
+
+Of the PEPYS I can say nothing; for it has been too recently through my
+hands; and I still retain some of the heat of composition. Yet it may
+serve as a text for the last remark I have to offer. To Pepys I think I
+have been amply just; to the others, to Burns, Thoreau, Whitman, Charles
+of Orleans, even Villon, I have found myself in the retrospect ever too
+grudging of praise, ever too disrespectful in manner. It is not easy to
+see why I should have been most liberal to the man of least pretensions.
+Perhaps some cowardice withheld me from the proper warmth of tone;
+perhaps it is easier to be just to those nearer us in rank and mind.
+Such at least is the fact, which other critics may explain. For these
+were all men whom, for one reason or another, I loved; or when I did not
+love the men, my love was the greater to their books. I had read them
+and lived with them; for months they were continually in my thoughts; I
+seemed to rejoice in their joys and to sorrow with them in their griefs;
+and behold, when I came to write of them, my tongue was sometimes hardly
+courteous and seldom wholly just.
+
+     R. L. S.
+
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+  [1] "Gaudeamus: Carmina vagorum selecta." Leipsic: Trübner, 1879.
+
+
+
+
+FAMILIAR STUDIES OF MEN AND BOOKS
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+VICTOR HUGO'S ROMANCES
+
+
+   Après le roman pittoresque mais prosaïque de Walter Scott il restera
+   un autre roman à créer, plus beau et plus complet encore selon nous.
+   C'est le roman, à la fois drame et épopée, pittoresque mais poétique,
+   réel mais idéal, vrai mais grand, qui enchâssera Walter Scott dans
+   Homère.--VICTOR HUGO on "Quentin Durward."
+
+Victor Hugo's romances occupy an important position in the history of
+literature; many innovations, timidly made elsewhere, have in them been
+carried boldly out to their last consequences; much that was indefinite
+in literary tendencies has attained to definite maturity; many things
+have come to a point and been distinguished one from the other; and it
+is only in the last romance of all, "Quatrevingt-treize," that this
+culmination is most perfect. This is in the nature of things. Men who
+are in any way typical of a stage of progress may be compared more
+justly to the hand upon the dial of the clock, which continues to
+advance as it indicates, than to the stationary milestone, which is only
+the measure of what is past. The movement is not arrested. That
+significant something by which the work of such a man differs from that
+of his predecessors goes on disengaging itself and becoming more and
+more articulate and cognisable. The same principle of growth that
+carried his first book beyond the books of previous writers carries his
+last book beyond his first. And just as the most imbecile production of
+any literary age gives us sometimes the very clue to comprehension we
+have sought long and vainly in contemporary masterpieces, so it may be
+the very weakest of an author's books that, coming in the sequel of many
+others, enables us at last to get hold of what underlies the whole of
+them--of that spinal marrow of significance that unites the work of his
+life into something organic and rational. This is what has been done by
+"Quatrevingt-treize" for the earlier romances of Victor Hugo, and,
+through them, for a whole division of modern literature. We have here
+the legitimate continuation of a long and living literary tradition; and
+hence, so far, its explanation. When many lines diverge from each other
+in direction so slightly as to confuse the eye, we know that we have
+only to produce them to make the chaos plain: this is continually so in
+literary history; and we shall best understand the importance of Victor
+Hugo's romances if we think of them as some such prolongation of one of
+the main lines of literary tendency.
+
+
+When we compare the novels of Walter Scott with those of the man of
+genius who preceded him, and whom he delighted to honour as a master in
+the art--I mean Henry Fielding--we shall be somewhat puzzled, at the
+first moment, to state the difference that there is between these two.
+Fielding has as much human science; has a far firmer hold upon the
+tiller of his story; has a keen sense of character, which he draws (and
+Scott often does so too) in a rather abstract and academical manner; and
+finally, is quite as humorous and quite as good-humoured as the great
+Scotsman. With all these points of resemblance between the men, it is
+astonishing that their work should be so different. The fact is, that
+the English novel was looking one way and seeking one set of effects in
+the hands of Fielding; and in the hands of Scott it was looking eagerly
+in all ways and searching for all the effects that by any possibility it
+could utilise. The difference between these two men marks a great
+enfranchisement. With Scott the Romantic movement, the movement of an
+extended curiosity and an enfranchised imagination, has begun. This is a
+trite thing to say; but trite things are often very indefinitely
+comprehended: and this enfranchisement, in as far as it regards the
+technical change that came over modern prose romance, has never perhaps
+been explained with any clearness.
+
+To do so, it will be necessary roughly to compare the two sets of
+conventions upon which plays and romances are respectively based. The
+purposes of these two arts are so much alike, and they deal so much with
+the same passions and interests, that we are apt to forget the
+fundamental opposition of their methods. And yet such a fundamental
+opposition exists. In the drama the action is developed in great measure
+by means of things that remain outside of the art; by means of real
+things, that is, and not artistic conventions for things. This is a sort
+of realism that is not to be confounded with that realism in painting of
+which we hear so much. The realism in painting is a thing of purposes;
+this, that we have to indicate in the drama, is an affair of method. We
+have heard a story, indeed, of a painter in France who, when he wanted
+to paint a sea-beach, carried realism from his ends to his means, and
+plastered real sand upon his canvas; and that is precisely what is done
+in the drama. The dramatic author has to paint his beaches with real
+sand: real live men and women move about the stage; we hear real voices;
+what is feigned merely puts a sense upon what is; we do actually see a
+woman go behind a screen as Lady Teazle, and, after a certain interval,
+we do actually see her very shamefully produced again. Now all these
+things, that remain as they were in life, and are not transmuted into
+any artistic convention, are terribly stubborn and difficult to deal
+with; and hence there are for the dramatist many resultant limitations
+in time and space. These limitations in some sort approximate towards
+those of painting: the dramatic author is tied down, not indeed to a
+moment, but to the duration of each scene or act; he is confined to the
+stage almost as the painter is confined within his frame. But the great
+restriction is this, that a dramatic author must deal with his actors,
+and with his actors alone. Certain moments of suspense, certain
+significant dispositions of personages, a certain logical growth of
+emotion,--these are the only means at the disposal of the playwright. It
+is true that, with the assistance of the scene-painter, the costumier
+and the conductor of the orchestra, he may add to this something of
+pageant, something of sound and fury; but these are, for the dramatic
+writer, beside the mark, and do not come under the vivifying touch of
+his genius. When we turn to romance, we find this no longer. Here
+nothing is reproduced to our senses directly. Not only the main
+conception of the work, but the scenery, the appliances, the mechanism
+by which this conception is brought home to us, have been put through
+the crucible of another man's mind, and come out again, one and all, in
+the form of written words. With the loss of every degree of such realism
+as we have described, there is for art a clear gain of liberty and
+largeness of competence. Thus, painting, in which the round outlines of
+things are thrown on to a flat board, is far more free than sculpture,
+in which their solidity is preserved. It is by giving up these
+identities that art gains true strength. And so in the case of novels as
+compared with the stage. Continuous narration is the flat board on to
+which the novelist throws everything. And from this there results for
+him a great loss of vividness, but a great compensating gain in his
+power over the subject; so that he can now subordinate one thing to
+another in importance, and introduce all manner of very subtle detail,
+to a degree that was before impossible. He can render just as easily the
+flourish of trumpets before a victorious emperor and the gossip of
+country market women, the gradual decay of forty years of a man's life
+and the gesture of a passionate moment. He finds himself equally
+unable, if he looks at it from one point of view--equally able, if he
+looks at it from another point of view--to reproduce a colour, a sound,
+an outline, a logical argument, a physical action. He can show his
+readers, behind and around the personages that for the moment occupy the
+foreground of his story, the continual suggestion of the landscape; the
+turn of the weather that will turn with it men's lives and fortunes,
+dimly foreshadowed on the horizon; the fatality of distant events, the
+stream of national tendency, the salient framework of causation. And all
+this thrown upon the flat board--all this entering, naturally and
+smoothly, into the texture of continuous intelligent narration.
+
+This touches the difference between Fielding and Scott. In the work of
+the latter, true to his character of a modern and a romantic, we become
+suddenly conscious of the background. Fielding, on the other hand,
+although he had recognised that the novel was nothing else than an epic
+in prose, wrote in the spirit not of the epic, but of the drama. This is
+not, of course, to say that the drama was in any way incapable of a
+regeneration similar in kind to that of which I am now speaking with
+regard to the novel. The notorious contrary fact is sufficient to guard
+the reader against such a misconstruction. All that is meant is, that
+Fielding remained ignorant of certain capabilities which the novel
+possesses over the drama; or, at least, neglected and did not develop
+them. To the end he continued to see things as a playwright sees them.
+The world with which he dealt, the world he had realised for himself and
+sought to realise and set before his readers, was a world of exclusively
+human interest. As for landscape, he was content to under-line stage
+directions, as it might be done in a play-book: Tom and Molly retire
+into a practicable wood. As for nationality and public sentiment, it is
+curious enough to think that Tom Jones is laid in the year forty-five,
+and that the only use he makes of the rebellion is to throw a troop of
+soldiers into his hero's way. It is most really important, however, to
+remark the change which has been introduced into the conception of
+character by the beginning of the romantic movement and the consequent
+introduction into fiction of a vast amount of new material. Fielding
+tells us as much as he thought necessary to account for the actions of
+his creatures; he thought that each of these actions could be decomposed
+on the spot into a few simple personal elements, as we decompose a force
+in a question of abstract dynamics. The larger motives are all unknown
+to him; he had not understood that the nature of the landscape or the
+spirit of the times could be for anything in a story; and so, naturally
+and rightly, he said nothing about them. But Scott's instinct, the
+instinct of the man of an age profoundly different, taught him
+otherwise; and, in his work, the individual characters begin to occupy a
+comparatively small proportion of that canvas on which armies
+manoeuvre, and great hills pile themselves upon each other's
+shoulders. Fielding's characters were always great to the full stature
+of a perfectly arbitrary will. Already in Scott we begin to have a sense
+of the subtle influences that moderate and qualify a man's personality;
+that personality is no longer thrown out in unnatural isolation, but is
+resumed into its place in the constitution of things.
+
+It is this change in the manner of regarding men and their actions,
+first exhibited in romance, that has since renewed and vivified history.
+For art precedes philosophy, and even science. People must have noticed
+things and interested themselves in them before they begin to debate
+upon their causes or influence. And it is in this way that art is the
+pioneer of knowledge; those predilections of the artist he knows not
+why, those irrational acceptations and recognitions, reclaim, out of the
+world that we have not yet realised, ever another and another corner;
+and after the facts have been thus vividly brought before us and have
+had time to settle and arrange themselves in our minds, some day there
+will be found the man of science to stand up and give the explanation.
+Scott took an interest in many things in which Fielding took none; and
+for this reason, and no other, he introduced them into his romances. If
+he had been told what would be the nature of the movement that he was so
+lightly initiating, he would have been very incredulous and not a little
+scandalised. At the time when he wrote, the real drift of this new
+manner of pleasing people in fiction was not yet apparent; and, even
+now, it is only by looking at the romances of Victor Hugo that we are
+enabled to form any proper judgment in the matter. These books are not
+only descended by ordinary generation from the Waverley Novels, but it
+is in them chiefly that we shall find the revolutionary tradition of
+Scott carried further; that we shall find Scott himself, in so far as
+regards his conception of prose fiction and its purposes, surpassed in
+his own spirit, instead of tamely followed. We have here, as I said
+before, a line of literary tendency produced, and by this production
+definitely separated from others. When we come to Hugo, we see that the
+deviation, which seemed slight enough and not very serious between Scott
+and Fielding, is indeed such a great gulf in thought and sentiment as
+only successive generations can pass over: and it is but natural that
+one of the chief advances that Hugo has made upon Scott is an advance in
+self-consciousness. Both men follow the same road; but where the one
+went blindly and carelessly, the other advances with all deliberation
+and forethought. There never was artist much more unconscious than
+Scott; and there have been not many more conscious than Hugo. The
+passage at the head of these pages shows how organically he had
+understood the nature of his own changes. He has, underlying each of the
+five great romances (which alone I purpose here to examine), two
+deliberate designs: one artistic, the other consciously ethical and
+intellectual. This is a man living in a different world from Scott, who
+professes sturdily (in one of his introductions) that he does not
+believe in novels having any moral influence at all; but still Hugo is
+too much of an artist to let himself be hampered by his dogmas; and the
+truth is that the artistic result seems, in at least one great instance,
+to have very little connection with the other, or directly ethical
+result.
+
+The artistic result of a romance, what is left upon the memory by any
+really powerful and artistic novel, is something so complicated and
+refined that it is difficult to put a name upon it; and yet something as
+simple as nature. These two propositions may seem mutually destructive,
+but they are so only in appearance. The fact is, that art is working far
+ahead of language as well as of science, realising for us, by all manner
+of suggestions and exaggerations, effects for which as yet we have no
+direct name; nay, for which we may never perhaps have a direct name, for
+the reason that these effects do not enter very largely into the
+necessities of life. Hence alone is that suspicion of vagueness that
+often hangs about the purpose of a romance: it is clear enough to us in
+thought; but we are not used to consider anything clear until we are
+able to formulate it in words, and analytical language has not been
+sufficiently shaped to that end. We all know this difficulty in the case
+of a picture, simple and strong as may be the impression that it has
+left with us; and it is only because language is the medium of romance
+that we are prevented from seeing that the two cases are the same. It is
+not that there is anything blurred or indefinite in the impression left
+with us, it is just because the impression is so very definite after its
+own kind, that we find it hard to fit it exactly with the expressions of
+our philosophical speech.
+
+It is this idea which underlies and issues from a romance, this
+something which it is the function of that form of art to create, this
+epical value, that I propose chiefly to seek and, as far as may be, to
+throw into relief, in the present study. It is thus, I believe, that we
+shall see most clearly the great stride that Hugo has taken beyond his
+predecessors, and how, no longer content with expressing more or less
+abstract relations of man to man, he has set before himself the task of
+realising, in the language of romance, much of the involution of our
+complicated lives.
+
+This epical value is not to be found, let it be understood, in every
+so-called novel. The great majority are not works of art in anything but
+a very secondary signification. One might almost number on one's fingers
+the works in which such a supreme artistic intention has been in any way
+superior to the other and lesser aims, themselves more or less artistic,
+that generally go hand in hand with it in the conception of prose
+romance. The purely critical spirit is, in most novels, paramount. At
+the present moment we can recall one man only, for whose works it would
+have been equally possible to accomplish our present design: and that
+man is Hawthorne. There is a unity, an unwavering creative purpose,
+about some at least of Hawthorne's romances, that impresses itself on
+the most indifferent reader; and the very restrictions and weaknesses of
+the man served perhaps to strengthen the vivid and single impression of
+his works. There is nothing of this kind in Hugo: unity, if he attains
+to it, is indeed unity out of multitude; and it is the wonderful power
+of subordination and synthesis thus displayed, that gives us the measure
+of his talent. No amount of mere discussion and statement, such as this,
+could give a just conception of the greatness of this power. It must be
+felt in the books themselves, and all that can be done in the present
+essay is to recall to the reader the more general features of each of
+the five great romances, hurriedly and imperfectly, as space will
+permit, and rather as a suggestion than anything more complete.
+
+
+The moral end that the author had before him in the conception of "Notre
+Dame de Paris" was (he tells us) to "denounce" the external fatality
+that hangs over men in the form of foolish and inflexible superstition.
+To speak plainly, this moral purpose seems to have mighty little to do
+with the artistic conception; moreover, it is very questionably handled,
+while the artistic conception is developed with the most consummate
+success. Old Paris lives for us with newness of life: we have ever
+before our eyes the city cut into three by the two arms of the river,
+the boat-shaped island "moored" by five bridges to the different shores,
+and the two unequal towns on either hand. We forget all that enumeration
+of palaces and churches and convents which occupies so many pages of
+admirable description, and the thoughtless reader might be inclined to
+conclude from this that they were pages thrown away; but this is not so:
+we forget, indeed, the details, as we forget or do not see the different
+layers of paint on a completed picture; but the thing desired has been
+accomplished, and we carry away with us a sense of the "Gothic profile"
+of the city, of the "surprising forest of pinnacles and towers and
+belfries," and we know not what of rich and intricate and quaint. And
+throughout, Notre Dame has been held up over Paris by a height far
+greater than that of its twin towers: the Cathedral is present to us
+from the first page to the last; the title has given us the clue, and
+already in the Palace of Justice the story begins to attach itself to
+that central building by character after character. It is purely an
+effect of mirage; Notre Dame does not, in reality, thus dominate and
+stand out above the city; and any one who should visit it, in the spirit
+of the Scott-tourist to Edinburgh or the Trossachs, would be almost
+offended at finding nothing more than this old church thrust away into a
+corner. It is purely an effect of mirage, as we say; but it is an effect
+that permeates and possesses the whole book with astonishing consistency
+and strength. And then, Hugo has peopled this Gothic city, and, above
+all, this Gothic church, with a race of men even more distinctly Gothic
+than their surroundings. We know this generation already: we have seen
+them clustered about the worn capitals of pillars, or craning forth over
+the church-leads with the open mouths of gargoyles. About them all there
+is that sort of stiff quaint unreality, that conjunction of the
+grotesque, and even of a certain bourgeois snugness, with passionate
+contortion and horror, that is so characteristic of Gothic art.
+Esmeralda is somewhat an exception; she and the goat traverse the story
+like two children who have wandered in a dream. The finest moment of the
+book is when these two share with the two other leading characters, Dom
+Claude and Quasimodo, the chill shelter of the old cathedral. It is here
+that we touch most intimately the generative artistic idea of the
+romance: are they not all four taken out of some quaint moulding
+Illustrative of the Beatitudes, or the Ten Commandments, or the seven
+deadly sins? What is Quasimodo but an animated gargoyle? What is the
+whole book but the reanimation of Gothic art?
+
+It is curious that in this, the earliest of the five great romances,
+there should be so little of that extravagance that latterly we have
+come almost to identify with the author's manner. Yet even here we are
+distressed by words, thoughts, and incidents that defy belief and
+alienate the sympathies. The scene of the _in pace_, for example, in
+spite of its strength, verges dangerously on the province of the penny
+novelist. I do not believe that Quasimodo rode upon the bell; I should
+as soon imagine that he swung by the clapper. And again, the following
+two sentences, out of an otherwise admirable chapter, surely surpass
+what it had ever entered into the heart of any other man to imagine
+(vol. ii. p. 180): "Il souffrait tant que par instants il s'arrachait
+des poignées de cheveux, _pour voir s'ils ne blanchissaient pas_." And,
+p. 181: "Ses pensées étaient si insupportables qu'il prenait sa tête à
+deux mains et tàtchait de l'arracher de ses épaules _pour la briser sur
+le pavé_."
+
+One other fault, before we pass on. In spite of the horror and misery
+that pervade all of his later work, there is in it much less of actual
+melodrama than here, and rarely, I should say never, that sort of
+brutality, that useless insufferable violence to the feelings, which is
+the last distinction between melodrama and true tragedy. Now, in "Notre
+Dame," the whole story of Esmeralda's passion for the worthless archer
+is unpleasant enough; but when she betrays herself in her last
+hiding-place, herself and her wretched mother, by calling out to this
+sordid hero who has long since forgotten her--well, that is just one of
+those things that readers will not forgive; they do not like it, and
+they are quite right; life is hard enough for poor mortals without
+having it indefinitely embittered for them by bad art.
+
+
+We look in vain for any similar blemish in "Les Misérables." Here, on
+the other hand, there is perhaps the nearest approach to literary
+restraint that Hugo has ever made: there is here certainly the ripest
+and most easy development of his powers. It is the moral intention of
+this great novel to awaken us a little, if it may be--for such
+awakenings are unpleasant--to the great cost of the society that we
+enjoy and profit by, to the labour and sweat of those who support the
+litter, civilisation, in which we ourselves are so smoothly carried
+forward. People are all glad to shut their eyes; and it gives them a
+very simple pleasure when they can forget that our laws commit a million
+individual injustices, to be once roughly just in the general; that the
+bread that we eat, and the quiet of the family, and all that embellishes
+life and makes it worth having, have to be purchased by death--by the
+deaths of animals, and the deaths of men wearied out with labour, and
+the deaths of those criminals called tyrants and revolutionaries, and
+the deaths of those revolutionaries called criminals. It is to something
+of all this that Victor Hugo wishes to open men's eyes in "Les
+Misérables"; and this moral lesson is worked out in masterly coincidence
+with the artistic effect. The deadly weight of civilisation to those who
+are below presses sensibly on our shoulders as we read. A sort of
+mocking indignation grows upon us as we find Society rejecting, again
+and again, the services of the most serviceable; setting Jean Valjean to
+pick oakum, casting Galileo into prison, even crucifying Christ. There
+is a haunting and horrible sense of insecurity about the book. The
+terror we thus feel is a terror for the machinery of law, that we can
+hear tearing, in the dark, good and bad, between its formidable wheels
+with the iron stolidity of all machinery, human or divine. This terror
+incarnates itself sometimes and leaps horribly out upon us; as when the
+crouching mendicant looks up, and Jean Valjean, in the light of the
+street lamp, recognises the face of the detective; as when the lantern
+of the patrol flashes suddenly through the darkness of the sewer; or as
+when the fugitive comes forth at last at evening, by the quiet
+riverside, and finds the police there also, waiting stolidly for vice
+and stolidly satisfied to take virtue instead. The whole book is full of
+oppression, and full of prejudice, which is the great cause of
+oppression. We have the prejudices of M. Gillenormand, the prejudices of
+Marius, the prejudices in revolt that defend the barricade, and the
+throned prejudices that carry it by storm. And then we have the
+admirable but ill-written character of Javert, the man who had made a
+religion of the police, and would not survive the moment when he learned
+that there was another truth outside the truth of laws; a just creation,
+over which the reader will do well to ponder.
+
+With so gloomy a design this great work is still full of life and light
+and love. The portrait of the good Bishop is one of the most agreeable
+things in modern literature. The whole scene at Montfermeil is full of
+the charm that Hugo knows so well how to throw about children. Who can
+forget the passage where Cosette, sent out at night to draw water,
+stands in admiration before the illuminated booth, and the huckster
+behind "lui faisait un peu l'effet d'être le Père éternel"? The pathos
+of the forlorn sabot laid trustingly by the chimney in expectation of
+the Santa Claus that was not, takes us fairly by the throat; there is
+nothing in Shakespeare that touches the heart more nearly. The loves of
+Cosette and Marius are very pure and pleasant, and we cannot refuse our
+affection to Gavroche, although we may make a mental reservation of our
+profound disbelief in his existence. Take it for all in all, there are
+few books in the world that can be compared with it. There is as much
+calm and serenity as Hugo has ever attained to; the melodramatic
+coarsenesses that disfigured "Notre Dame" are no longer present. There
+is certainly much that is painfully improbable; and again, the story
+itself is a little too well constructed; it produces on us the effect of
+a puzzle, and we grow incredulous as we find that every character fits
+again and again into the plot, and is, like the child's cube,
+serviceable on six faces; things are not so well arranged in life as all
+that comes to. Some of the digressions, also, seem out of place, and do
+nothing but interrupt and irritate. But when all is said, the book
+remains of masterly conception and of masterly development, full of
+pathos, full of truth, full of a high eloquence.
+
+
+Superstition and social exigency having been thus dealt with in the
+first two members of the series, it remained for "Les Travailleurs de la
+Mer" to show man hand to hand with the elements, the last form of
+external force that is brought against him. And here once more the
+artistic effect and the moral lesson are worked out together, and are,
+indeed, one. Gilliat, alone upon the reef at his herculean task, offers
+a type of human industry in the midst of the vague "diffusion of forces
+into the illimitable," and the visionary development of "wasted labour"
+in the sea, and the winds, and the clouds. No character was ever thrown
+into such strange relief as Gilliat. The great circle of sea-birds that
+come wonderingly around him on the night of his arrival, strikes at once
+the note of his pre-eminence and isolation. He fills the whole reef with
+his indefatigable toil; this solitary spot in the ocean rings with the
+clamour of his anvil; we see him as he comes and goes, thrown out
+sharply against the clear background of the sea. And yet his isolation
+is not to be compared with the isolation of Robinson Crusoe, for
+example; indeed, no two books could be more instructive to set side by
+side than "Les Travailleurs" and this other of the old days before art
+had learnt to occupy itself with what lies outside of human will. Crusoe
+was one sole centre of interest in the midst of a nature utterly dead
+and utterly unrealised by the artist; but this is not how we feel with
+Gilliat; we feel that he is opposed by a "dark coalition of forces,"
+that an "immense animosity" surrounds him; we are the witnesses of the
+terrible warfare that he wages with "the silent inclemency of phenomena
+going their own way, and the great general law, implacable and passive":
+"a conspiracy of the indifferency of things" is against him. There is
+not one interest on the reef, but two. Just as we recognise Gilliat for
+the hero, we recognise, as implied by this indifferency of things, this
+direction of forces to some purpose outside our purposes, yet another
+character who may almost take rank as the villain of the novel, and the
+two face up to one another blow for blow, feint for feint, until, in the
+storm, they fight it epically out, and Gilliat remains the victor;--a
+victor, however, who has still to encounter the octopus. I need say
+nothing of the gruesome, repulsive excellence of that famous scene; it
+will be enough to remind the reader that Gilliat is in pursuit of a crab
+when he is himself assaulted by the devil fish, and that this, in its
+way, is the last touch to the inner significance of the book; here,
+indeed, is the true position of man in the universe.
+
+But in "Les Travailleurs," with all its strength, with all its
+eloquence, with all the beauty and fitness of its main situations, we
+cannot conceal from ourselves that there is a thread of something that
+will not bear calm scrutiny. There is much that is disquieting about the
+storm, admirably as it begins. I am very doubtful whether it would be
+possible to keep the boat from foundering in such circumstances, by any
+amount of breakwater and broken rock. I do not understand the way in
+which the waves are spoken of, and prefer just to take it as a loose way
+of speaking, and pass on. And lastly, how does it happen that the sea
+was quite calm next day? Is this great hurricane a piece of
+scene-painting after all? And when we have forgiven Gilliat's prodigies
+of strength (although, in soberness, he reminds us more of Porthos in
+the "Vicomte de Bragelonne" than is quite desirable), what is to be said
+to his suicide, and how are we to condemn in adequate terms that
+unprincipled avidity after effect, which tells us that the sloop
+disappeared over the horizon, and the head under the water, at one and
+the same moment? Monsieur Hugo may say what he will, but we know better;
+we know very well that they did not; a thing like that raises up a
+despairing spirit of opposition in a man's readers; they give him the
+lie fiercely as they read. Lastly, we have here already some beginning
+of that curious series of English blunders, that makes us wonder if
+there are neither proof-sheets nor judicious friends in the whole of
+France, and affects us sometimes with a sickening uneasiness as to what
+may be our own exploits when we touch upon foreign countries and foreign
+tongues. It is here that we shall find the famous "first of the fourth,"
+and many English words that may be comprehensible perhaps in Paris. It
+is here that we learn that "laird" in Scotland is the same title as
+"lord" in England. Here, also, is an account of a Highland soldier's
+equipment, which we recommend to the lovers of genuine fun.
+
+
+In "L'Homme qui Rit," it was Hugo's object to "denounce" (as he would
+say himself) the aristocratic principle as it was exhibited in England;
+and this purpose, somewhat more unmitigatedly satiric than that of the
+two last, must answer for much that is unpleasant in the book. The
+repulsiveness of the scheme of the story, and the manner in which it is
+bound up with impossibilities and absurdities, discourage the reader at
+the outset, and it needs an effort to take it as seriously as it
+deserves. And yet when we judge it deliberately, it will be seen that,
+here again, the story is admirably adapted to the moral. The
+constructive ingenuity exhibited throughout is almost morbid. Nothing
+could be more happily imagined, as a _reductio ad absurdum_ of the
+aristocratic principle, than the adventures of Gwynplaine, the itinerant
+mountebank, snatched suddenly out of his little way of life, and
+installed without preparation as one of the hereditary legislators of a
+great country. It is with a very bitter irony that the paper, on which
+all this depends, is left to float for years at the will of wind and
+tide. What, again, can be finer in conception than that voice from the
+people heard suddenly in the House of Lords, in solemn arraignment of
+the pleasures and privileges of its splendid occupants? The horrible
+laughter, stamped for ever "by order of the king" upon the face of this
+strange spokesman of democracy, adds yet another feature of justice to
+the scene; in all time, travesty has been the argument of oppression;
+and, in all time, the oppressed might have made this answer: "If I am
+vile, is it not your system that has made me so?" This ghastly laughter
+gives occasion, moreover, for the one strain of tenderness running
+through the web of this unpleasant story: the love of the blind girl
+Dea, for the monster. It is a most benignant providence that thus
+harmoniously brings together these two misfortunes; it is one of those
+compensations, one of those after-thoughts of a relenting destiny, that
+reconcile us from time to time to the evil that is in the world; the
+atmosphere of the book is purified by the presence of this pathetic
+love; it seems to be above the story somehow, and not of it, as the full
+moon over the night of some foul and feverish city.
+
+There is here a quality in the narration more intimate and particular
+than is general with Hugo; but it must be owned, on the other hand, that
+the book is wordy, and even, now and then, a little wearisome. Ursus and
+his wolf are pleasant enough companions; but the former is nearly as
+much an abstract type as the latter. There is a beginning, also, of an
+abuse of conventional conversation, such as may be quite pardonable in
+the drama where needs must, but is without excuse in the romance.
+Lastly, I suppose one must say a word or two about the weak points of
+this not immaculate novel; and if so, it will be best to distinguish at
+once. The large family of English blunders, to which we have alluded
+already in speaking of "Les Travailleurs," are of a sort that is really
+indifferent in art. If Shakespeare makes his ships cast anchor by some
+seaport of Bohemia, if Hugo imagines Tom-Jim-Jack to be a likely
+nickname for an English sailor, or if either Shakespeare, or Hugo, or
+Scott, for that matter, be guilty of "figments enough to confuse the
+march of a whole history--anachronisms enough to overset all
+chronology,"[2] the life of their creations, the artistic truth and
+accuracy of their work, is not so much as compromised. But when we come
+upon a passage like the sinking of the _Ourque_ in this romance, we can
+do nothing but cover our face with our hands: the conscientious reader
+feels a sort of disgrace in the very reading. For such artistic
+falsehoods, springing from what I have called already an unprincipled
+avidity after effect, no amount of blame can be exaggerated; and above
+all, when the criminal is such a man as Victor Hugo. We cannot forgive
+in him what we might have passed over in a third-rate sensation
+novelist. Little as he seems to know of the sea and nautical affairs, he
+must have known very well that vessels do not go down as he makes the
+_Ourque_ go down; he must have known that such a liberty with fact was
+against the laws of the game, and incompatible with all appearance of
+sincerity in conception or workmanship.
+
+
+In each of these books, one after another, there has been some departure
+from the traditional canons of romance; but taking each separately, one
+would have feared to make too much of these departures, or to found any
+theory upon what was perhaps purely accidental. The appearance of
+"Quatrevingt-treize" has put us out of the region of such doubt. Like a
+doctor who has long been hesitating how to classify an epidemic malady,
+we have come at last upon a case so well marked that our uncertainty is
+at an end. It is a novel built upon "a sort of enigma," which was at
+that date laid before revolutionary France, and which is presented by
+Hugo to Tellmarch, to Lantenac, to Gauvain, and very terribly to
+Cimourdain, each of whom gives his own solution of the question, clement
+or stern, according to the temper of his spirit. That enigma was this:
+"Can a good action be a bad action? Does not he who spares the wolf kill
+the sheep?" This question, as I say, meets with one answer after another
+during the course of the book, and yet seems to remain undecided to the
+end. And something in the same way, although one character, or one set
+of characters, after another comes to the front and occupies our
+attention for the moment, we never identify our interest with any of
+these temporary heroes nor regret them after they are withdrawn. We soon
+come to regard them somewhat as special cases of a general law; what we
+really care for is something that they only imply and body forth to us.
+We know how history continues through century after century; how this
+king or that patriot disappears from its pages with his whole
+generation, and yet we do not cease to read, nor do we even feel as if
+we had reached any legitimate conclusion, because our interest is not in
+the men, but in the country that they loved or hated, benefited or
+injured. And so it is here: Gauvain and Cimourdain pass away, and we
+regard them no more than the lost armies of which we find the cold
+statistics in military annals; what we regard is what remains behind; it
+is the principle that put these men where they were, that filled them
+for a while with heroic inspiration, and has the power, now that they
+are fallen, to inspire others with the same courage. The interest of the
+novel centres about revolutionary France: just as the plot is an
+abstract judicial difficulty, the hero is an abstract historical force.
+And this has been done, not, as it would have been before, by the cold
+and cumbersome machinery of allegory, but with bold, straightforward
+realism, dealing only with the objective materials of art, and dealing
+with them so masterfully that the palest abstractions of thought come
+before us, and move our hopes and fears, as if they were the young men
+and maidens of customary romance.
+
+The episode of the mother and children in "Quatrevingt-treize" is equal
+to anything that Hugo has ever written. There is one chapter in the
+second volume, for instance, called "_Sein guéri, coeur saignant_,"
+that is full of the very stuff of true tragedy, and nothing could be
+more delightful than the humours of the three children on the day before
+the assault. The passage on La Vendée is really great, and the scenes in
+Paris have much of the same broad merit. The book is full, as usual, of
+pregnant and splendid sayings. But when thus much is conceded by way of
+praise, we come to the other scale of the balance, and find this, also,
+somewhat heavy. There is here a yet greater over-employment of
+conventional dialogue than in "L'Homme qui Rit"; and much that should
+have been said by the author himself, if it were to be said at all, he
+has most unwarrantably put into the mouths of one or other of his
+characters. We should like to know what becomes of the main body of the
+troop in the wood of La Saudraie during the thirty pages or so in which
+the foreguard lays aside all discipline, and stops to gossip over a
+woman and some children. We have an unpleasant idea forced upon us at
+one place, in spite of all the good-natured incredulity that we can
+summon up to resist it. Is it possible that Monsieur Hugo thinks they
+ceased to steer the corvette while the gun was loose? Of the chapter in
+which Lantenac and Halmalho are alone together in the boat, the less
+said the better; of course, if there were nothing else, they would have
+been swamped thirty times over during the course of Lantenac's harangue.
+Again, after Lantenac has landed, we have scenes of almost inimitable
+workmanship that suggest the epithet "statuesque" by their clear and
+trenchant outline; but the tocsin scene will not do, and the tocsin
+unfortunately pervades the whole passage, ringing continually in our
+ears with a taunting accusation of falsehood. And then, when we come to
+the place where Lantenac meets the royalists, under the idea that he is
+going to meet the republicans, it seems as if there were a hitch in the
+stage mechanism. I have tried it over in every way, and I cannot
+conceive any disposition that would make the scene possible as narrated.
+
+
+Such then, with their faults and their signal excellences, are the five
+great novels.
+
+Romance is a language in which many persons learn to speak with a
+certain appearance of fluency; but there are few who can ever bend it to
+any practical need, few who can ever be said to express themselves in
+it. It has become abundantly plain in the foregoing examination that
+Victor Hugo occupies a high place among those few. He has always a
+perfect command over his stories; and we see that they are constructed
+with a high regard to some ulterior purpose, and that every situation is
+informed with moral significance and grandeur. Of no other man can the
+same thing be said in the same degree. His romances are not to be
+confused with "the novel with a purpose" as familiar to the English
+reader: this is generally the model of incompetence; and we see the
+moral clumsily forced into every hole and corner of the story, or thrown
+externally over it like a carpet over a railing. Now the moral
+significance, with Hugo, is of the essence of the romance; it is the
+organising principle. If you could somehow despoil "Les Misérables" or
+"Les Travailleurs" of their distinctive lesson, you would find that the
+story had lost its interest and the book was dead.
+
+Having thus learned to subordinate his story to an idea, to make his art
+speak, he went on to teach it to say things heretofore unaccustomed. If
+you look back at the five books of which we have now so hastily spoken,
+you will be astonished at the freedom with which the original purposes
+of story-telling have been laid aside and passed by. Where are now the
+two lovers who descended the main watershed of all the Waverley Novels,
+and all the novels that have tried to follow in their wake? Sometimes
+they are almost lost sight of before the solemn isolation of a man
+against the sea and sky, as in "Les Travailleurs"; sometimes, as in "Les
+Misérables," they merely figure for awhile, as a beautiful episode in
+the epic of oppression; sometimes they are entirely absent, as in
+"Quatrevingt-treize." There is no hero in "Notre Dame": in "Les
+Misérables" it is an old man: in "L'Homme qui Rit" it is a monster: in
+"Quatrevingt-treize" it is the Revolution. Those elements that only
+began to show themselves timidly, as adjuncts, in the novels of Walter
+Scott, have usurped ever more and more of the canvas; until we find the
+whole interest of one of Hugo's romances centring around matter that
+Fielding would have banished from his altogether, as being out of the
+field of fiction. So we have elemental forces occupying nearly as large
+a place, playing (so to speak) nearly as important a _rôle_, as the man,
+Gilliat, who opposes and overcomes them. So we find the fortunes of a
+nation put upon the stage with as much vividness as ever before the
+fortunes of a village maiden or a lost heir; and the forces that oppose
+and corrupt a principle holding the attention quite as strongly as the
+wicked barons or dishonest attorneys of the past. Hence those individual
+interests that were supreme in Fielding, and even in Scott stood out
+over everything else, and formed as it were the spine of the story,
+figure here only as one set of interests among many sets, one force
+among many forces, one thing to be treated out of a whole world of
+things equally vivid and important. So that, for Hugo, man is no longer
+an isolated spirit without antecedent or relation here below, but a
+being involved in the action and reaction of natural forces, himself a
+centre of such action and reaction; or an unit in a great multitude,
+chased hither and thither by epidemic terrors and aspirations, and, in
+all seriousness, blown about by every wind of doctrine. This is a long
+way that we have travelled: between such work and the work of Fielding
+is there not, indeed, a great gulf of thought and sentiment?
+
+Art, thus conceived, realises for men a larger portion of life, and that
+portion one that it is more difficult for them to realise unaided; and,
+besides helping them to feel more intensely those restricted personal
+interests which are patent to all, it awakes in them some consciousness
+of those more general relations that are so strangely invisible to the
+average man in ordinary moods. It helps to keep man in his place in
+nature, and, above all, it helps him to understand more intelligently
+the responsibilities of his place in society. And in all this
+generalisation of interest, we never miss those small humanities that
+are at the opposite pole of excellence in art; and while we admire the
+intellect that could see life thus largely, we are touched with another
+sentiment for the tender heart that slipped the piece of gold into
+Cosette's sabot, that was virginally troubled at the fluttering of her
+dress in the spring wind, or put the blind girl beside the deformity of
+the laughing man. This, then, is the last praise that we can award to
+these romances. The author has shown a power of just subordination
+hitherto unequalled; and as, in reaching forward to one class of
+effects, he has not been forgetful or careless of the other, his work is
+more nearly complete work, and his art, with all its imperfections,
+deals more comprehensively with the materials of life, than that of any
+of his otherwise more sure and masterly predecessors.
+
+These five books would have made a very great fame for any writer, and
+yet they are but one façade of the monument that Victor Hugo has erected
+to his genius. Everywhere we find somewhat the same greatness, somewhat
+the same infirmities. In his poems and plays there are the same
+unaccountable protervities that have already astonished us in the
+romances. There, too, is the same feverish strength, welding the fiery
+iron of his idea under forge-hammer repetitions--an emphasis that is
+somehow akin to weakness--a strength that is a little epileptic. He
+stands so far above all his contemporaries, and so incomparably excels
+them in richness, breadth, variety, and moral earnestness, that we
+almost feel as if he had a sort of right to fall oftener and more
+heavily than others; but this does not reconcile us to seeing him profit
+by the privilege so freely. We like to have, in our great men, something
+that is above question; we like to place an implicit faith in them, and
+see them always on the platform of their greatness; and this, unhappily,
+cannot be with Hugo. As Heine said long ago, his is a genius somewhat
+deformed; but, deformed as it is, we accept it gladly; we shall have the
+wisdom to see where his foot slips, but we shall have the justice also
+to recognise in him one of the greatest artists of our generation, and,
+in many ways, one of the greatest artists of time. If we look back, yet
+once, upon these five romances, we see blemishes such as we can lay to
+the charge of no other man in the number of the famous; but to what
+other man can we attribute such sweeping innovations, such a new and
+significant presentment of the life of man, such an amount, if we merely
+think of the amount, of equally consummate performance?
+
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+  [2] Prefatory letter to "Peveril of the Peak."
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+SOME ASPECTS OF ROBERT BURNS
+
+
+To write with authority about another man we must have fellow-feeling
+and some common ground of experience with our subject. We may praise or
+blame according as we find him related to us by the best or worst in
+ourselves; but it is only in virtue of some relationship that we can be
+his judges, even to condemn. Feelings which we share and understand
+enter for us into the tissue of the man's character; those to which we
+are strangers in our own experience we are inclined to regard as blots,
+exceptions, inconsistencies, and excursions of the diabolic; we conceive
+them with repugnance, explain them with difficulty, and raise our hands
+to heaven in wonder when we find them in conjunction with talents that
+we respect or virtues that we admire. David, king of Israel, would pass
+a sounder judgment on a man than either Nathaniel or David Hume. Now,
+Principal Shairp's recent volume, although I believe no one will read it
+without respect and interest, has this one capital defect--that there is
+imperfect sympathy between the author and the subject, between the
+critic and the personality under criticism. Hence an inorganic, if not
+an incoherent, presentation of both the poems and the man. Of "Holy
+Willie's Prayer," Principal Shairp remarks that "those who have loved
+most what was best in Burns's poetry must have regretted that it was
+ever written." To the "Jolly Beggars," so far as my memory serves me, he
+refers but once; and then only to remark on the "strange, not to say
+painful," circumstance that the same hand which wrote the "Cottar's
+Saturday Night" should have stooped to write the "Jolly Beggars." The
+"Saturday Night" may or may not be an admirable poem; but its
+significance is trebled, and the power and range of the poet first
+appears, when it is set beside the "Jolly Beggars." To take a man's work
+piecemeal, except with the design of elegant extracts, is the way to
+avoid, and not to perform, the critic's duty. The same defect is
+displayed in the treatment of Burns as a man, which is broken,
+apologetical, and confused. The man here presented to us is not that
+Burns, _teres atque rotundus_--a burly figure in literature, as, from
+our present vantage of time, we have begun to see him. This, on the
+other hand, is Burns as he may have appeared to a contemporary
+clergyman, whom we shall conceive to have been a kind and indulgent but
+orderly and orthodox person, anxious to be pleased, but too often hurt
+and disappointed by the behaviour of his red-hot _protégé_, and solacing
+himself with the explanation that the poet was "the most inconsistent of
+men." If you are so sensibly pained by the misconduct of your subject,
+and so paternally delighted with his virtues, you will always be an
+excellent gentleman, but a somewhat questionable biographer. Indeed, we
+can only be sorry and surprised that Principal Shairp should have chosen
+a theme so uncongenial. When we find a man writing on Burns, who likes
+neither "Holy Willie," nor the "Beggars," nor the "Ordination," nothing
+is adequate to the situation but the old cry of Geronte: "Que diable
+allait-il faire dans cette galère?" And every merit we find in the book,
+which is sober and candid in a degree unusual with biographies of Burns,
+only leads us to regret more heartily that good work should be so
+greatly thrown away.
+
+It is far from my intention to tell over again a story that has been so
+often told; but there are certainly some points in the character of
+Burns that will bear to be brought out, and some chapters in his life
+that demand a brief rehearsal. The unity of the man's nature, for all
+its richness, has fallen somewhat out of sight in the pressure of new
+information and the apologetical ceremony of biographers. Mr. Carlyle
+made an inimitable bust of the poet's head of gold; may I not be
+forgiven if my business should have more to do with the feet, which were
+of clay?
+
+
+  YOUTH
+
+Any view of Burns would be misleading which passed over in silence the
+influences of his home and his father. That father, William Burnes,
+after having been for many years a gardener, took a farm, married, and,
+like an emigrant in a new country, built himself a house with his own
+hands. Poverty of the most distressing sort, with sometimes the near
+prospect of a gaol, embittered the remainder of his life. Chill,
+backward, and austere with strangers, grave and imperious in his family,
+he was yet a man of very unusual parts and of an affectionate nature. On
+his way through life he had remarked much upon other men, with more
+result in theory than practice; and he had reflected upon many subjects
+as he delved the garden. His great delight was in solid conversation; he
+would leave his work to talk with the schoolmaster Murdoch; and Robert,
+when he came home late at night, not only turned aside rebuke but kept
+his father two hours beside the fire by the charm of his merry and
+vigorous talk. Nothing is more characteristic of the class in general,
+and William Burnes in particular, than the pains he took to get proper
+schooling for his boys, and, when that was no longer possible, the sense
+and resolution with which he set himself to supply the deficiency by his
+own influence. For many years he was their chief companion; he spoke
+with them seriously on all subjects as if they had been grown men; at
+night, when work was over, he taught them arithmetic; he borrowed books
+for them on history, science, and theology; and he felt it his duty to
+supplement this last--the trait is laughably Scottish--by a dialogue of
+his own composition, where his own private shade of orthodoxy was
+exactly represented. He would go to his daughter as she stayed afield
+herding cattle, to teach her the names of grasses and wild flowers, or
+to sit by her side when it thundered. Distance to strangers, deep family
+tenderness, love of knowledge, a narrow, precise, and formal reading of
+theology--everything we learn of him hangs well together, and builds up
+a popular Scottish type. If I mention the name of Andrew Fairservice, it
+is only as I might couple for an instant Dugald Dalgetty with old
+Marshal Loudon, to help out the reader's comprehension by a popular but
+unworthy instance of a class. Such was the influence of this good and
+wise man that his household became a school to itself, and neighbours
+who came into the farm at meal-time would find the whole family, father,
+brothers, and sisters, helping themselves with one hand, and holding a
+book in the other. We are surprised at the prose style of Robert; that
+of Gilbert need surprise us no less; even William writes a remarkable
+letter for a young man of such slender opportunities. One anecdote marks
+the taste of the family. Murdoch brought "Titus Andronicus," and, with
+such dominie elocution as we may suppose, began to read it aloud before
+this rustic audience; but when he had reached the passage where Tamora
+insults Lavinia, with one voice and "in an agony of distress" they
+refused to hear it to an end. In such a father, and with such a home,
+Robert had already the making of an excellent education; and what
+Murdoch added, although it may not have been much in amount, was in
+character the very essence of a literary training. Schools and colleges,
+for one great man whom they complete, perhaps unmake a dozen; the strong
+spirit can do well upon more scanty fare.
+
+Robert steps before us, almost from the first, in his complete
+character--a proud, headstrong, impetuous lad, greedy of pleasure,
+greedy of notice; in his own phrase "panting after distinction," and in
+his brother's "cherishing a particular jealousy of people who were
+richer or of more consequence than himself"; with all this, he was
+emphatically of the artist nature. Already he made a conspicuous figure
+in Tarbolton church, with the only tied hair in the parish, "and his
+plaid, which was of a particular colour, wrapped in a particular manner
+round his shoulders." Ten years later, when a married man, the father of
+a family, a farmer, and an officer of Excise, we shall find him out
+fishing in masquerade, with fox-skin cap, belted great-coat, and great
+Highland broadsword. He liked dressing up, in fact, for its own sake.
+This is the spirit which leads to the extravagant array of Latin Quarter
+students, and the proverbial velveteen of the English landscape-painter;
+and, though the pleasure derived is in itself merely personal, it shows
+a man who is, to say the least of it, not pained by general attention
+and remark. His father wrote the family name _Burnes_; Robert early
+adopted the orthography _Burness_ from his cousin in the Mearns; and in
+his twenty-eighth year changed it once more to _Burns_. It is plain that
+the last transformation was not made without some qualm; for in
+addressing his cousin he adheres, in at least one more letter, to
+spelling number two. And this, again, shows a man preoccupied about the
+manner of his appearance even down to the name, and little willing to
+follow custom. Again, he was proud, and justly proud, of his powers in
+conversation. To no other man's have we the same conclusive testimony
+from different sources and from every rank of life. It is almost a
+commonplace that the best of his works was what he said in talk.
+Robertson the historian "scarcely ever met any man whose conversation
+displayed greater vigour"; the Duchess of Gordon declared that he
+"carried her off her feet"; and, when he came late to an inn, the
+servants would get out of bed to hear him talk. But, in these early days
+at least, he was determined to shine by any means. He made himself
+feared in the village for his tongue. He would crush weaker men to their
+faces, or even perhaps--for the statement of Sillar is not absolute--say
+cutting things of his acquaintances behind their back. At the church
+door, between sermons, he would parade his religious views amid hisses.
+These details stamp the man. He had no genteel timidities in the conduct
+of his life. He loved to force his personality upon the world. He would
+please himself, and shine. Had he lived in the Paris of 1830, and joined
+his lot with the Romantics, we can conceive him writing _Jehan_ for
+_Jean_, swaggering in Gautier's red waistcoat, and horrifying Bourgeois
+in a public café with paradox and gasconnade.
+
+A leading trait throughout his whole career was his desire to be in
+love. _Ne fait pas ce tour qui veut._ His affections were often enough
+touched, but perhaps never engaged. He was all his life on a voyage of
+discovery, but it does not appear conclusively that he ever touched the
+happy isle. A man brings to love a deal of ready-made sentiment, and
+even from childhood obscurely prognosticates the symptoms of this vital
+malady. Burns was formed for love; he had passion, tenderness, and a
+singular bent in the direction; he could foresee, with the intuition of
+an artist, what love ought to be; and he could not conceive a worthy
+life without it. But he had ill-fortune, and was besides so greedy after
+every shadow of the true divinity, and so much the slave of a strong
+temperament, that perhaps his nerve was relaxed and his heart had lost
+the power of self-devotion before an opportunity occurred. The
+circumstances of his youth doubtless counted for something in the
+result. For the lads of Ayrshire, as soon as the day's work was over and
+the beasts were stabled, would take the road, it might be in a winter
+tempest, and travel perhaps miles by moss and moorland to spend an hour
+or two in courtship. Rule 10 of the Bachelors' Club at Tarbolton
+provides that "every man proper for a member of this Society must be a
+professed lover of _one or more_ of the female sex." The rich, as Burns
+himself points out, may have a choice of pleasurable occupations, but
+these lads had nothing but their "cannie hour at e'en." It was upon love
+and flirtation that this rustic society was built; gallantry was the
+essence of life among the Ayrshire hills as well as in the Court of
+Versailles; and the days were distinguished from each other by
+love-letters, meetings, tiffs, reconciliations, and expansions to the
+chosen confidant, as in a comedy of Marivaux. Here was a field for a man
+of Burns's indiscriminate personal ambition, where he might pursue his
+voyage of discovery in quest of true love, and enjoy temporary triumphs
+by the way. He was "constantly the victim of some fair enslaver"--at
+least, when it was not the other way about; and there were often
+underplots and secondary fair enslavers in the background. Many--or may
+we not say most?--of these affairs were entirely artificial. One, he
+tells us, he began out of "a vanity of showing his parts in courtship,"
+for he piqued himself on his ability at a love-letter. But, however they
+began, these flames of his were fanned into a passion ere the end; and
+he stands unsurpassed in his power of self-deception, and positively
+without a competitor in the art, to use his own words, of "battering
+himself into a warm affection,"--a debilitating and futile exercise.
+Once he had worked himself into the vein, "the agitations of his mind
+and body" were an astonishment to all who knew him. Such a course as
+this, however pleasant to a thirsty vanity, was lowering to his nature.
+He sank more and more towards the professional Don Juan. With a leer of
+what the French call fatuity, he bids the belles of Mauchline beware of
+his seductions; and the same cheap self-satisfaction finds a yet uglier
+vent when he plumes himself on the scandal at the birth of his first
+bastard. We can well believe what we hear of his facility in striking up
+an acquaintance with women: he would have conquering manners; he would
+bear down upon his rustic game with the grace that comes of absolute
+assurance--the Richelieu of Lochlea or Mossgiel. In yet another manner
+did these quaint ways of courtship help him into fame. If he were great
+as principal, he was unrivalled as confidant. He could enter into a
+passion; he could counsel wary moves, being, in his own phrase, so old
+a hawk; nay, he could turn a letter for some unlucky swain, or even
+string a few lines of verse that should clinch the business and fetch
+the hesitating fair one to the ground. Nor, perhaps, was it only his
+"curiosity, zeal, and intrepid dexterity" that recommended him for a
+second in such affairs; it must have been a distinction to have the
+assistance and advice of "Rab the Ranter"; and one who was in no way
+formidable by himself might grow dangerous and attractive through the
+fame of his associate.
+
+I think we can conceive him, in these early years, in that rough
+moorland country, poor among the poor with his seven pounds a year,
+looked upon with doubt by respectable elders, but for all that the best
+talker, the best letter-writer, the most famous lover and confidant, the
+laureate poet, and the only man who wore his hair tied in the parish. He
+says he had then as high a notion of himself as ever after; and I can
+well believe it. Among the youth he walked _facile princeps_, an
+apparent god; and even if, from time to time, the Reverend Mr. Auld
+should swoop upon him with the thunders of the Church, and, in company
+with seven others, Rab the Ranter must figure some fine Sunday on the
+stool of repentance, would there not be a sort of glory, an infernal
+apotheosis in so conspicuous a shame? Was not Richelieu in disgrace more
+idolised than ever by the dames of Paris? and when was the highwayman
+most acclaimed but on his way to Tyburn? Or, to take a simile from
+nearer home, and still more exactly to the point, what could even
+corporal punishment avail, administered by a cold, abstract, unearthly
+schoolmaster, against the influence and fame of the school's hero?
+
+And now we come to the culminating point of Burns's early period. He
+began to be received into the unknown upper world. His fame soon spread
+from among his fellow-rebels on the benches, and began to reach the
+ushers and monitors of this great Ayrshire academy. This arose in part
+from his lax views about religion; for at this time that old war of the
+creeds and confessors, which is always grumbling from end to end of our
+poor Scotland, brisked up in these parts into a hot and virulent
+skirmish; and Burns found himself identified with the opposition
+party,--a clique of roaring lawyers and half-heretical divines, with wit
+enough to appreciate the value of the poet's help, and not sufficient
+taste to moderate his grossness and personality. We may judge of their
+surprise when "Holy Willie" was put into their hand; like the amorous
+lads of Tarbolton, they recognised in him the best of seconds. His
+satires began to go the round in manuscript; Mr. Aiken, one of the
+lawyers, "read him into fame"; he himself was soon welcome in many
+houses of a better sort, where his admirable talk, and his manners,
+which he had direct from his Maker, except for a brush he gave them at a
+country dancing school, completed what his poems had begun. We have a
+sight of him at his first visit to Adamhill, in his ploughman's shoes,
+coasting around the carpet as though that were sacred ground. But he
+soon grew used to carpets and their owners; and he was still the
+superior of all whom he encountered, and ruled the roost in
+conversation. Such was the impression made, that a young clergyman,
+himself a man of ability, trembled and became confused when he saw
+Robert enter the church in which he was to preach. It is not surprising
+that the poet determined to publish: he had now stood the test of some
+publicity, and under this hopeful impulse he composed in six winter
+months the bulk of his more important poems. Here was a young man who,
+from a very humble place, was mounting rapidly; from the cynosure of a
+parish, he had become the talk of a county; once the bard of rural
+courtships, he was now about to appear as a bound and printed poet in
+the world's bookshops.
+
+A few more intimate strokes are necessary to complete the sketch. This
+strong young ploughman, who feared no competitor with the flail,
+suffered like a fine lady from sleeplessness and vapours; he would fall
+into the blackest melancholies, and be filled with remorse for the past
+and terror for the future. He was still not perhaps devoted to religion,
+but haunted by it; and at a touch of sickness prostrated himself before
+God in what I can only call unmanly penitence. As he had aspirations
+beyond his place in the world, so he had tastes, thoughts, and
+weaknesses to match. He loved to walk under a wood to the sound of a
+winter tempest; he had a singular tenderness for animals; he carried a
+book with him in his pocket when he went abroad, and wore out in this
+service two copies of the "Man of Feeling." With young people in the
+field at work he was very long-suffering; and when his brother Gilbert
+spoke sharply to them--"O man, ye are no' for young folk," he would say,
+and give the defaulter a helping hand and a smile. In the hearts of the
+men whom he met, he read as in a book; and, what is yet more rare, his
+knowledge of himself equalled his knowledge of others. There are no
+truer things said of Burns than what is to be found in his own letters.
+Country Don Juan as he was, he had none of that blind vanity which
+values itself on what it is not; he knew his own strength and weakness
+to a hair: he took himself boldly for what he was, and, except in
+moments of hypochondria, declared himself content.
+
+
+  THE LOVE-STORIES
+
+On the night of Mauchline races, 1785, the young men and women of the
+place joined in a penny ball, according to their custom. In the same set
+danced Jean Armour, the master-mason's daughter, and our dark-eyed Don
+Juan. His dog (not the immortal Luath, but a successor unknown to fame,
+_caret quia vote sacro_), apparently sensible of some neglect, followed
+his master to and fro, to the confusion of the dancers. Some mirthful
+comments followed; and Jean heard the poet say to his partner--or, as I
+should imagine, laughingly launch the remark to the company at
+large--that "he wished he could get any of the lasses to like him as
+well as his dog." Some time after, as the girl was bleaching clothes on
+Mauchline green, Robert chanced to go by, still accompanied by his dog;
+and the dog, "scouring in long excursion," scampered with four black
+paws across the linen. This brought the two into conversation; when
+Jean, with a somewhat hoydenish advance, inquired if "he had yet got any
+of the lasses to like him as well as his dog?" It is one of the
+misfortunes of the professional Don Juan that his honour forbids him to
+refuse battle; he is in life like the Roman soldier upon duty, or like
+the sworn physician who must attend on all diseases. Burns accepted the
+provocation; hungry hope reawakened in his heart; here was a
+girl--pretty, simple at least, if not honestly stupid, and plainly not
+averse to his attentions: it seemed to him once more as if love might
+here be waiting him. Had he but known the truth! for this facile and
+empty-headed girl had nothing more in view than a flirtation; and her
+heart, from the first and on to the end of her story, was engaged by
+another man. Burns once more commenced the celebrated process of
+"battering himself into a warm affection"; and the proofs of his success
+are to be found in many verses of the period. Nor did he succeed with
+himself only; Jean, with her heart still elsewhere, succumbed to his
+fascination, and early in the next year the natural consequence became
+manifest. It was a heavy stroke for this unfortunate couple. They had
+trifled with life, and were now rudely reminded of life's serious
+issues. Jean awoke to the ruin of her hopes; the best she had now to
+expect was marriage with a man who was a stranger to her dearest
+thoughts; she might now be glad if she could get what she would never
+have chosen. As for Burns, at the stroke of the calamity he recognised
+that his voyage of discovery had led him into a wrong hemisphere--that
+he was not, and never had been, really in love with Jean. Hear him in
+the pressure of the hour. "Against two things," he writes, "I am as
+fixed as fate--staying at home, and owning her conjugally. The first,
+by heaven, I will not do!--the last, by hell, I will never do!" And then
+he adds, perhaps already in a more relenting temper: "If you see Jean,
+tell her I will meet her, so God hold me in my hour of need." They met
+accordingly; and Burns, touched with her misery, came down from these
+heights of independence, and gave her a written acknowledgment of
+marriage. It is the punishment of Don Juanism to create continually
+false positions--relations of life which are wrong in themselves, and
+which it is equally wrong to break or to perpetuate. This was such a
+case. Worldly Wiseman would have laughed and gone his way; let us be
+glad that Burns was better counselled by his heart. When we discover
+that we can no longer be true, the next best is to be kind. I daresay he
+came away from that interview not very content, but with a glorious
+conscience; and as he went homeward, he would sing his favourite, "How
+are Thy servants blest, O Lord!" Jean, on the other hand, armed with her
+"lines," confided her position to the master-mason, her father, and his
+wife. Burns and his brother were then in a fair way to ruin themselves
+in their farm; the poet was an execrable match for any well-to-do
+country lass; and perhaps old Armour had an inkling of a previous
+attachment on his daughter's part. At least, he was not so much incensed
+by her slip from virtue as by the marriage which had been designed to
+cover it. Of this he would not hear a word. Jean, who had besought the
+acknowledgment only to appease her parents, and not at all from any
+violent inclination to the poet, readily gave up the paper for
+destruction; and all parties imagined, although wrongly, that the
+marriage was thus dissolved. To a proud man like Burns here was a
+crushing blow. The concession which had been wrung from his pity was now
+publicly thrown back in his teeth. The Armour family preferred disgrace
+to his connection. Since the promise, besides, he had doubtless been
+busy "battering himself" back again into his affection for the girl;
+and the blow would not only take him in his vanity, but wound him at the
+heart.
+
+He relieved himself in verse; but for such a smarting affront manuscript
+poetry was insufficient to console him. He must find a more powerful
+remedy in good flesh and blood, and after this discomfiture, set forth
+again at once upon his voyage of discovery in quest of love. It is
+perhaps one of the most touching things in human nature, as it is a
+commonplace of psychology, that when a man has just lost hope or
+confidence in one love, he is then most eager to find and lean upon
+another. The universe could not be yet exhausted; there must be hope and
+love waiting for him somewhere; and so, with his head down, this poor,
+insulted poet ran once more upon his fate. There was an innocent and
+gentle Highland nursery-maid at service in a neighbouring family; and he
+had soon battered himself and her into a warm affection and a secret
+engagement. Jean's marriage lines had not been destroyed till March 13,
+1786; yet all was settled between Burns and Mary Campbell by Sunday, May
+14, when they met for the last time, and said farewell with rustic
+solemnities upon the banks of Ayr. They each wet their hands in a
+stream, and, standing one on either bank, held a Bible between them as
+they vowed eternal faith. Then they exchanged Bibles, on one of which
+Burns, for greater security, had inscribed texts as to the binding
+nature of an oath; and surely, if ceremony can do aught to fix the
+wandering affections, here were two people united for life. Mary came of
+a superstitious family, so that she perhaps insisted on these rites; but
+they must have been eminently to the taste of Burns at this period; for
+nothing would seem superfluous, and no oath great enough, to stay his
+tottering constancy.
+
+Events of consequence now happened thickly in the poet's life. His book
+was announced; the Armours sought to summon him at law for the aliment
+of the child; he lay here and there in hiding to correct the sheets; he
+was under an engagement for Jamaica, where Mary was to join him as his
+wife; now he had "orders within three weeks at latest to repair aboard
+the _Nancy_, Captain Smith"; now his chest was already on the road to
+Greenock; and now, in the wild autumn weather on the moorland, he
+measures verses of farewell:--
+
+  "The bursting tears my heart declare;
+   Farewell the bonny banks of Ayr!"
+
+But the great Master Dramatist had secretly another intention for the
+piece; by the most violent and complicated solution, in which death and
+birth and sudden fame all play a part as interposing deities, the
+act-drop fell upon a scene of transformation. Jean was brought to bed of
+twins, and, by an amicable arrangement, the Burnses took the boy to
+bring up by hand, while the girl remained with her mother. The success
+of the book was immediate and emphatic; it put £20 at once into the
+author's purse; and he was encouraged upon all hands to go to Edinburgh
+and push his success in a second and larger edition. Third and last in
+these series of interpositions, a letter came one day to Mossgiel Farm
+for Robert. He went to the window to read it; a sudden change came over
+his face, and he left the room without a word. Years afterwards, when
+the story began to leak out, his family understood that he had then
+learned the death of Highland Mary. Except in a few poems and a few dry
+indications purposely misleading as to date, Burns himself made no
+reference to this passage of his life; it was an adventure of which, for
+I think sufficient reasons, he desired to bury the details. Of one thing
+we may be glad: in after years he visited the poor girl's mother, and
+left her with the impression that he was "a real warm-hearted chield."
+
+Perhaps a month after he received this intelligence, he set out for
+Edinburgh on a pony he had borrowed from a friend. The town that winter
+was "agog with the ploughman poet." Robertson, Dugald Stewart, Blair,
+"Duchess Gordon and all the gay world," were of his acquaintance. Such
+a revolution is not to be found in literary history. He was now, it must
+be remembered, twenty-seven years of age; he had fought since his early
+boyhood an obstinate battle against poor soil, bad seed, and inclement
+seasons, wading deep in Ayrshire mosses, guiding the plough in the
+furrow, wielding "the thresher's weary flingin'-tree"; and his
+education, his diet, and his pleasures, had been those of a Scots
+countryman. Now he stepped forth suddenly among the polite and learned.
+We can see him as he then was, in his boots and buckskins, his blue coat
+and waistcoat striped with buff and blue, like a farmer in his Sunday
+best; the heavy ploughman's figure firmly planted on its burly legs; his
+face full of sense and shrewdness, and with a somewhat melancholy air of
+thought, and his large dark eye "literally glowing" as he spoke. "I
+never saw such another eye in a human head," says Walter Scott, "though
+I have seen the most distinguished men of my time." With men, whether
+they were lords or omnipotent critics, his manner was plain, dignified,
+and free from bashfulness or affectation. If he made a slip, he had the
+social courage to pass on and refrain from explanation. He was not
+embarrassed in this society, because he read and judged the men; he
+could spy snobbery in a titled lord; and, as for the critics, he
+dismissed their system in an epigram. "These gentlemen," said he,
+"remind me of some spinsters in my country who spin their thread so fine
+that it is neither fit for weft nor woof." Ladies, on the other hand,
+surprised him; he was scarce commander of himself in their society; he
+was disqualified by his acquired nature as a Don Juan; and he, who had
+been so much at his ease with country lasses, treated the town dames to
+an extreme of deference. One lady, who met him at a ball, gave Chambers
+a speaking sketch of his demeanour. "His manners were not
+prepossessing--scarcely, she thinks, manly or natural. It seemed as if
+he affected a rusticity or _landertness_, so that when he said the music
+was 'bonnie, bonnie,' it was like the expression of a child." These
+would be company manners; and doubtless on a slight degree of intimacy
+the affectation would grow less. And his talk to women had always "a
+turn either to the pathetic or humorous, which engaged the attention
+particularly."
+
+The Edinburgh magnates (to conclude this episode at once) behaved well
+to Burns from first to last. Were heaven-born genius to revisit us in
+similar guise, I am not venturing too far when I say that he need expect
+neither so warm a welcome nor such solid help. Although Burns was only a
+peasant, and one of no very elegant reputation as to morals, he was made
+welcome to their homes. They gave him a great deal of good advice,
+helped him to some five hundred pounds of ready money, and got him, as
+soon as he asked it, a place in the Excise. Burns, on his part, bore the
+elevation with perfect dignity; and with perfect dignity returned, when
+the time had come, into a country privacy of life. His powerful sense
+never deserted him, and from the first he recognised that his Edinburgh
+popularity was but an ovation and the affair of a day. He wrote a few
+letters in a high-flown, bombastic vein of gratitude; but in practice he
+suffered no man to intrude upon his self-respect. On the other hand, he
+never turned his back, even for a moment, on his old associates; and he
+was always ready to sacrifice an acquaintance to a friend, although the
+acquaintance were a duke. He would be a bold man who should promise
+similar conduct in equally exacting circumstances. It was, in short, an
+admirable appearance on the stage of life--socially successful,
+intimately self-respecting, and like a gentleman from first to last.
+
+In the present study, this must only be taken by the way, while we
+return to Burns's love affairs. Even on the road to Edinburgh he had
+seized upon the opportunity of a flirtation, and had carried the
+"battering" so far that when next he moved from town, it was to steal
+two days with this anonymous fair one. The exact importance to Burns of
+this affair may be gathered from the song in which he commemorated its
+occurrence. "I love the dear lassie," he sings, "because she loves me";
+or, in the tongue of prose: "Finding an opportunity, I did not hesitate
+to profit by it; and even now, if it returned, I should not hesitate to
+profit by it again." A love thus founded has no interest for mortal man.
+Meantime, early in the winter, and only once, we find him regretting
+Jean in his correspondence. "Because"--such is his reason--"because he
+does not think he will ever meet so delicious an armful again"; and
+then, after a brief excursion into verse, he goes straight on to
+describe a new episode in the voyage of discovery with the daughter of a
+Lothian farmer for a heroine. I must ask the reader to follow all these
+references to his future wife; they are essential to the comprehension
+of Burns's character and fate. In June we find him back at Mauchline, a
+famous man. There, the Armour family greeted him with a "mean, servile
+compliance," which increased his former disgust. Jean was not less
+compliant; a second time the poor girl submitted to the fascination of
+the man whom she did not love, and whom she had so cruelly insulted
+little more than a year ago; and, though Burns took advantage of her
+weakness, it was in the ugliest and most cynical spirit, and with a
+heart absolutely indifferent. Judge of this by a letter written some
+twenty days after his return--a letter to my mind among the most
+degrading in the whole collection--a letter which seems to have been
+inspired by a boastful, libertine bagman. "I am afraid," it goes, "I
+have almost ruined one source, the principal one, indeed, of my former
+happiness--the eternal propensity I always had to fall in love. My heart
+no more glows with feverish rapture; I have no paradisiacal evening
+interviews." Even the process of "battering" has failed him, you
+perceive. Still he had some one in his eye--a lady, if you please, with
+a fine figure and elegant manners, and who had "seen the politest
+quarters in Europe." "I frequently visited her," he writes, "and after
+passing regularly the intermediate degrees between the distant formal
+bow and the familiar grasp round the waist, I ventured, in my careless
+way, to talk of friendship in rather ambiguous terms; and after her
+return to ----, I wrote her in the same terms. Miss, construing my
+remarks farther than even I intended, flew off in a tangent of female
+dignity and reserve, like a mounting lark in an April morning; and wrote
+me an answer which measured out very completely what an immense way I
+had to travel before I could reach the climate of her favours. But I am
+an old hawk at the sport, and wrote her such a cool, deliberate, prudent
+reply, as brought my bird from her aerial towerings, pop, down to my
+foot, like Corporal Trim's hat." I avow a carnal longing, after this
+transcription, to buffet the Old Hawk about the ears. There is little
+question that to this lady he must have repeated his addresses, and that
+he was by her (Miss Chalmers) eventually, though not at all unkindly,
+rejected. One more detail to characterise the period. Six months after
+the date of this letter, Burns, back to Edinburgh, is served with a writ
+_in meditatione fugæ_, on behalf of some Edinburgh fair one, probably of
+humble rank, who declared an intention of adding to his family.
+
+About the beginning of December (1787) a new period opens in the story
+of the poet's random affections. He met at a tea party one Mrs. Agnes
+M'Lehose, a married woman of about his own age, who, with her two
+children, had been deserted by an unworthy husband. She had wit, could
+use her pen, and had read "Werther" with attention. Sociable, and even
+somewhat frisky, there was a good, sound, human kernel in the woman; a
+warmth of love, strong dogmatic religious feeling, and a considerable,
+but not authoritative, sense of the proprieties. Of what biographers
+refer to daintily as "her somewhat voluptuous style of beauty," judging
+from the silhouette in Mr. Scott Douglas's invaluable edition, the
+reader will be fastidious if he does not approve. Take her for all in
+all, I believe she was the best woman Burns encountered. The pair took a
+fancy for each other on the spot; Mrs. M'Lehose, in her turn, invited
+him to tea; but the poet, in his character of the Old Hawk, preferred a
+_tête-à-tête_, excused himself at the last moment, and offered a visit
+instead. An accident confined him to his room for nearly a month, and
+this led to the famous Clarinda and Sylvander correspondence. It was
+begun in simple sport; they are already at their fifth or sixth
+exchange, when Clarinda writes: "It is really curious so much _fun_
+passing between two persons who saw each other only _once_"; but it is
+hardly safe for a man and woman in the flower of their years to write
+almost daily, and sometimes in terms too ambiguous, sometimes in terms
+too plain, and generally in terms too warm, for mere acquaintance. The
+exercise partakes a little of the nature of battering, and danger may be
+apprehended when next they meet. It is difficult to give any account of
+this remarkable correspondence; it is too far away from us, and perhaps
+not yet far enough, in point of time and manner; the imagination is
+baffled by these stilted literary utterances, warming, in bravura
+passages, into downright truculent nonsense. Clarinda has one famous
+sentence in which she bids Sylvander connect the thought of his mistress
+with the changing phases of the year; it was enthusiastically admired by
+the swain, but on the modern mind produces mild amazement and alarm.
+"Oh, Clarinda", writes Burns, "shall we not meet in a state--some yet
+unknown state--of being, where the lavish hand of plenty shall minister
+to the highest wish of Benevolence, and where the chill north wind of
+Prudence shall never blow over the flowery field of Enjoyment?" The
+design may be that of an Old Hawk, but the style is more suggestive of a
+Bird of Paradise. It is sometimes hard to fancy they are not gravely
+making fun of each other as they write. Religion, poetry, love, and
+charming sensibility, are the current topics. "I am delighted, charming
+Clarinda, with your honest enthusiasm for religion," writes Burns; and
+the pair entertained a fiction that this was their "favourite subject."
+"This is Sunday," writes the lady, "and not a word on our favourite
+subject. O fy! 'divine Clarinda!'" I suspect, although quite
+unconsciously on the part of the lady, who was bent on his redemption,
+they but used the favourite subject as a stalking-horse. In the
+meantime, the sportive acquaintance was ripening steadily into a genuine
+passion. Visits took place, and then became frequent. Clarinda's friends
+were hurt and suspicious; her clergyman interfered; she herself had
+smart attacks of conscience; but her heart had gone from her control; it
+was altogether his, and she "counted all things but loss--heaven
+excepted--that she might win and keep him." Burns himself was
+transported while in her neighbourhood, but his transports somewhat
+rapidly declined during an absence. I am tempted to imagine that,
+womanlike, he took on the colour of his mistress's feeling; that he
+could not but heat himself at the fire of her unaffected passion; but
+that, like one who should leave the hearth upon a winter's night, his
+temperature soon fell when he was out of sight, and in a word, though he
+could share the symptoms, that he had never shared the disease. At the
+same time, amid the fustian of the letters there are forcible and true
+expressions, and the love-verses that he wrote upon Clarinda are among
+the most moving in the language.
+
+We are approaching the solution. In mid-winter, Jean, once more in the
+family way, was turned out of doors by her family; and Burns had her
+received and cared for in the house of a friend. For he remained to the
+last imperfect in his character of Don Juan, and lacked the sinister
+courage to desert his victim. About the middle of February (1788), he
+had to tear himself from his Clarinda and make a journey into the
+south-west on business. Clarinda gave him two shirts for his little son.
+They were daily to meet in prayer at an appointed hour. Burns, too late
+for the post at Glasgow, sent her a letter by parcel that she might not
+have to wait. Clarinda on her part writes, this time with a beautiful
+simplicity: "I think the streets look deserted-like since Monday; and
+there's a certain insipidity in good kind folks I once enjoyed not a
+little. Miss Wardrobe supped here on Monday. She once named you, which
+kept me from falling asleep. I drank your health in a glass of ale--as
+the lasses do at Hallowe'en--'in to mysel'.'" Arrived at Mauchline,
+Burns installed Jean Armour in a lodging, and prevailed on Mrs. Armour
+to promise her help and countenance in the approaching confinement. This
+was kind at least; but hear his expressions: "I have taken her a room; I
+have taken her to my arms; I have given her a mahogany bed; I have given
+her a guinea.... I swore her privately and solemnly never to attempt any
+claim on me as a husband, even though anybody should persuade her she
+had such a claim--which she has not, neither during my life nor after my
+death. She did all this like a good girl." And then he took advantage of
+the situation. To Clarinda he wrote: "I this morning called for a
+certain woman. I am disgusted with her; I cannot endure her"; and he
+accused her of "tasteless insipidity, vulgarity of soul, and mercenary
+fawning." This was already in March; by the thirteenth of that month he
+was back in Edinburgh. On the 17th, he wrote to Clarinda: "Your hopes,
+your fears, your cares, my love, are mine; so don't mind them. I will
+take you in my hand through the dreary wilds of this world, and scare
+away the ravening bird or beast that would annoy you." Again, on the
+21st: "Will you open, with satisfaction and delight, a letter from a man
+who loves you, who has loved you, and who will love you, to death,
+through death, and for ever?... How rich am I to have such a treasure as
+you!... 'The Lord God knoweth,' and, perhaps, 'Israel he shall know,' my
+love and your merit. Adieu, Clarinda! I am going to remember you in my
+prayers." By the 7th of April, seventeen days later, he had already
+decided to make Jean Armour publicly his wife.
+
+A more astonishing stage-trick is not to be found. And yet his conduct
+is seen, upon a nearer examination, to be grounded both in reason and in
+kindness. He was now about to embark on a solid worldly career; he had
+taken a farm; the affair with Clarinda, however gratifying to his heart,
+was too contingent to offer any great consolation to a man like Burns,
+to whom marriage must have seemed the very dawn of hope and
+self-respect. This is to regard the question from its lowest aspect; but
+there is no doubt that he entered on this new period of his life with a
+sincere determination to do right. He had just helped his brother with a
+loan of a hundred and eighty pounds; should he do nothing for the poor
+girl whom he had ruined? It was true he could not do as he did without
+brutally wounding Clarinda; that was the punishment of his bygone fault;
+he was, as he truly says, "damned with a choice only of different
+species of error and misconduct." To be professional Don Juan, to accept
+the provocation of any lively lass upon the village green, may thus lead
+a man through a series of detestable words and actions, and land him at
+last in an undesired and most unsuitable union for life. If he had been
+strong enough to refrain or bad enough to persevere in evil; if he had
+only not been Don Juan at all, or been Don Juan altogether, there had
+been some possible road for him throughout this troublesome world; but a
+man, alas! who is equally at the call of his worse and better instincts,
+stands among changing events without foundation or resource.[3]
+
+
+  DOWNWARD COURSE
+
+It may be questionable whether any marriage could have tamed Burns; but
+it is at least certain that there was no hope for him in the marriage he
+contracted. He did right, but then he had done wrong before; it was, as
+I said, one of those relations in life which it seems equally wrong to
+break or to perpetuate. He neither loved nor respected his wife. "God
+knows," he writes, "my choice was as random as blind man's buff." He
+consoles himself by the thought that he has acted kindly to her; that
+she "has the most sacred enthusiasm of attachment to him"; that she has
+a good figure; that she has a "wood-note wild," "her voice rising with
+ease to B natural," no less. The effect on the reader is one of
+unmingled pity for both parties concerned. This was not the wife who (in
+his own words) could "enter into his favourite studies or relish his
+favourite authors"; this was not even a wife, after the affair of the
+marriage lines, in whom a husband could joy to place his trust. Let her
+manage a farm with sense, let her voice rise to B natural all day long,
+she would still be a peasant to her lettered lord, and an object of pity
+rather than of equal affection. She could now be faithful, she could now
+be forgiving, she could now be generous even to a pathetic and touching
+degree; but coming from one who was unloved, and who had scarce shown
+herself worthy of the sentiment, these were all virtues thrown away,
+which could neither change her husband's heart nor affect the inherent
+destiny of their relation. From the outset, it was a marriage that had
+no root in nature; and we find him, ere long, lyrically regretting
+Highland Mary, renewing correspondence with Clarinda in the warmest
+language, on doubtful terms with Mrs. Riddel, and on terms unfortunately
+beyond any question with Anne Park.
+
+Alas! this was not the only ill circumstance in his future. He had been
+idle for some eighteen months, superintending his new edition, hanging
+on to settle with the publisher, travelling in the Highlands with Willie
+Nichol, or philandering with Mrs. M'Lehose; and in this period the
+radical part of the man had suffered irremediable hurt. He had lost his
+habits of industry, and formed the habit of pleasure. Apologetical
+biographers assure us of the contrary; but from the first he saw and
+recognised the danger for himself; his mind, he writes, is "enervated to
+an alarming degree," by idleness and dissipation; and again, "my mind
+has been vitiated with idleness." It never fairly recovered. To business
+he could bring the required diligence and attention without difficulty;
+but he was thenceforward incapable, except in rare instances, of that
+superior effort of concentration which is required for serious literary
+work. He may be said, indeed, to have worked no more, and only amused
+himself with letters. The man who had written a volume of masterpieces
+in six months, during the remainder of his life rarely found courage for
+any more sustained effort than a song. And the nature of the songs is
+itself characteristic of these idle later years; for they are often as
+polished and elaborate as his earlier works were frank, and headlong,
+and colloquial; and this sort of verbal elaboration in short flights is,
+for a man of literary turn, simply the most agreeable of pastimes. The
+change in manner coincides exactly with the Edinburgh visit. In 1786 he
+had written the "Address to a Louse," which may be taken as an extreme
+instance of the first manner; and already, in 1787, we come upon the
+rosebud pieces to Miss Cruikshank, which are extreme examples of the
+second. The change was, therefore, the direct and very natural
+consequence of his great change in life; but it is not the less typical
+of his loss of moral courage that he should have given up all larger
+ventures, nor the less melancholy that a man who first attacked
+literature with a hand that seemed capable of moving mountains, should
+have spent his later years in whittling cherry-stones.
+
+Meanwhile, the farm did not prosper; he had to join to it the salary of
+an exciseman; at last he had to give it up, and rely altogether on the
+latter resource. He was an active officer; and, though he sometimes
+tempered severity with mercy, we have local testimony, oddly
+representing the public feeling of the period, that, while "in
+everything else he was a perfect gentleman, when he met with anything
+seizable he was no better than any other gauger."
+
+There is but one manifestation of the man in these last years which
+need delay us: and that was the sudden interest in politics which arose
+from his sympathy with the great French Revolution. His only political
+feeling had been hitherto a sentimental Jacobitism, not more or less
+respectable than that of Scott, Aytoun, and the rest of what George
+Borrow has nicknamed the "Charlie over the water" Scotsmen. It was a
+sentiment almost entirely literary and picturesque in its origin, built
+on ballads and the adventures of the Young Chevalier; and in Burns it is
+the more excusable, because he lay out of the way of active politics in
+his youth. With the great French Revolution, something living,
+practical, and feasible appeared to him for the first time in this realm
+of human action. The young ploughman who had desired so earnestly to
+rise, now reached out his sympathies to a whole nation animated with the
+same desire. Already in 1788 we find the old Jacobitism hand in hand
+with the new popular doctrine, when, in a letter of indignation against
+the zeal of a Whig clergyman, he writes: "I daresay the American
+Congress in 1776 will be allowed to be as able and as enlightened as the
+English Convention was in 1688; and that their posterity will celebrate
+the centenary of their deliverance from us, as duly and sincerely as we
+do ours from the oppressive measures of the wrong-headed house of
+Stuart." As time wore on, his sentiments grew more pronounced and even
+violent; but there was a basis of sense and generous feeling to his
+hottest excess. What he asked was a fair chance for the individual in
+life; an open road to success and distinction for all classes of men. It
+was in the same spirit that he had helped to found a public library in
+the parish where his farm was situated, and that he sang his fervent
+snatches against tyranny and tyrants. Witness, were it alone, this
+verse:
+
+  "Here's freedom to him that wad read,
+   Here's freedom to him that wad write;
+   There's nane ever feared that the truth should be heard
+   But them wham the truth wad indite."
+
+Yet his enthusiasm for the cause was scarce guided by wisdom. Many
+stories are preserved of the bitter and unwise words he used in country
+coteries; how he proposed Washington's health as an amendment to Pitt's,
+gave as a toast "the last verse of the last chapter of Kings," and
+celebrated Dumouriez in a doggerel impromptu full of ridicule and hate.
+Now his sympathies would inspire him with "Scots wha hae"; now involve
+him in a drunken broil with a loyal officer, and consequent apologies
+and explanations, hard to offer for a man of Burns's stomach. Nor was
+this the front of his offending. On February 27, 1792, he took part in
+the capture of an armed smuggler, bought at the subsequent sale four
+carronades, and despatched them with a letter to the French Assembly.
+Letter and guns were stopped at Dover by the English officials; there
+was trouble for Burns with his superiors; he was reminded firmly,
+however delicately, that, as a paid official, it was his duty to obey
+and to be silent; and all the blood of this poor, proud, and falling man
+must have rushed to his head at the humiliation. His letter to Mr.
+Erskine, subsequently Earl of Mar, testifies, in its turgid, turbulent
+phrases, to a perfect passion of alarmed self-respect and vanity. He had
+been muzzled, and muzzled, when all was said, by his paltry salary as an
+exciseman; alas! had he not a family to keep? Already, he wrote, he
+looked forward to some such judgment from a hackney scribbler as this:
+"Burns, notwithstanding the _fanfaronnade_ of independence to be found
+in his works, and after having been held forth to public view and to
+public estimation as a man of some genius, yet, quite destitute of
+resources within himself to support his borrowed dignity, he dwindled
+into a paltry exciseman, and slunk out the rest of his insignificant
+existence in the meanest of pursuits, and among the vilest of mankind."
+And then on he goes, in a style of rhodomontade, but filled with living
+indignation, to declare his right to a political opinion, and his
+willingness to shed his blood for the political birthright of his sons.
+Poor, perturbed spirit! he was indeed exercised in vain; those who
+share and those who differ from his sentiments about the Revolution,
+alike understand and sympathise with him in this painful strait; for
+poetry and human manhood are lasting like the race, and politics, which
+are but a wrongful striving after right, pass and change from year to
+year and age to age. "The Twa Dogs" has already outlasted the
+constitution of Siéyès and the policy of the Whigs; and Burns is better
+known among English-speaking races than either Pitt or Fox.
+
+Meanwhile, whether as a man, a husband, or a poet, his steps led
+downward. He knew, knew bitterly, that the best was out of him: he
+refused to make another volume, for he felt it would be a
+disappointment; he grew petulantly alive to criticism, unless he was
+sure it reached him from a friend. For his songs, he would take nothing;
+they were all that he could do; the proposed Scots play, the proposed
+series of Scots tales in verse, all had gone to water; and in a fling of
+pain and disappointment, which is surely noble with the nobility of a
+viking, he would rather stoop to borrow than to accept money for these
+last and inadequate efforts of his muse. And this desperate abnegation
+rises at times near to the height of madness; as when he pretended that
+he had not written, but only found and published, his immortal "Auld
+Lang Syne." In the same spirit he became more scrupulous as an artist;
+he was doing so little, he would fain do that little well; and about two
+months before his death, he asked Thomson to send back all his
+manuscripts for revisal, saying that he would rather write five songs to
+his taste than twice that number otherwise. The battle of his life was
+lost; in forlorn efforts to do well, in desperate submissions to evil,
+the last years flew by. His temper is dark and explosive, launching
+epigrams, quarrelling with his friends, jealous of young puppy officers.
+He tries to be a good father; he boasts himself a libertine. Sick, sad,
+and jaded, he can refuse no occasion of temporary pleasure, no
+opportunity to shine; and he who had once refused the invitations of
+lords and ladies is now whistled to the inn by any curious stranger. His
+death (July 21, 1796), in his thirty-seventh year, was indeed a kindly
+dispensation. It is the fashion to say he died of drink; many a man has
+drunk more and yet lived with reputation, and reached a good age. That
+drink and debauchery helped to destroy his constitution, and were the
+means of his unconscious suicide, is doubtless true; but he had failed
+in life, had lost his power of work, and was already married to the
+poor, unworthy, patient Jean, before he had shown his inclination to
+convivial nights, or at least before that inclination had become
+dangerous either to his health or his self-respect. He had trifled with
+life, and must pay the penalty. He had chosen to be Don Juan, he had
+grasped at temporary pleasures, and substantial happiness and solid
+industry had passed him by. He died of being Robert Burns, and there is
+no levity in such a statement of the case; for shall we not, one and
+all, deserve a similar epitaph?
+
+
+  WORKS
+
+The somewhat cruel necessity which has lain upon me throughout this
+paper only to touch upon those points in the life of Burns where
+correction or amplification seemed desirable, leaves me little
+opportunity to speak of the works which have made his name so famous.
+Yet, even here, a few observations seem necessary.
+
+At the time when the poet made his appearance and great first success,
+his work was remarkable in two ways. For, first, in an age when poetry
+had become abstract and conventional, instead of continuing to deal with
+shepherds, thunderstorms, and personifications, he dealt with the actual
+circumstances of his life, however matter-of-fact and sordid these might
+be. And, second, in a time when English versification was particularly
+stiff, lame, and feeble, and words were used with ultra-academical
+timidity, he wrote verses that were easy, racy, graphic, and forcible,
+and used language with absolute tact and courage as it seemed most fit
+to give a clear impression. If you take even those English authors whom
+we know Burns to have most admired and studied, you will see at once
+that he owed them nothing but a warning. Take Shenstone, for instance,
+and watch that elegant author as he tries to grapple with the facts of
+life. He has a description, I remember, of a gentleman engaged in
+sliding or walking on thin ice, which is a little miracle of
+incompetence. You see my memory fails me, and I positively cannot
+recollect whether his hero was sliding or walking; as though a writer
+should describe a skirmish, and the reader, at the end, be still
+uncertain whether it were a charge of cavalry or a slow and stubborn
+advance of foot. There could be no such ambiguity in Burns; his work is
+at the opposite pole from such indefinite and stammering performances;
+and a whole lifetime passed in the study of Shenstone would only lead a
+man further and further from writing the "Address to a Louse." Yet
+Burns, like most great artists, proceeded from a school and continued a
+tradition; only the school and tradition were Scottish, and not English.
+While the English language was becoming daily more pedantic and
+inflexible, and English letters more colourless and slack, there was
+another dialect in the sister country, and a different school of poetry,
+tracing its descent, through King James I., from Chaucer. The dialect
+alone accounts for much; for it was then written colloquially, which
+kept it fresh and supple; and, although not shaped for heroic flights,
+it was a direct and vivid medium for all that had to do with social
+life. Hence, whenever Scottish poets left their laborious imitations of
+bad English verses, and fell back on their own dialect, their style
+would kindle, and they would write of their convivial and somewhat gross
+existences with pith and point. In Ramsay, and far more in the poor lad
+Fergusson, there was mettle, humour, literary courage, and a power of
+saying what they wished to say definitely and brightly, which in the
+latter case should have justified great anticipations. Had Burns died at
+the same age as Fergusson, he would have left us literally nothing worth
+remark. To Ramsay and to Fergusson, then, he was indebted in a very
+uncommon degree, not only following their tradition and using their
+measures, but directly and avowedly imitating their pieces. The same
+tendency to borrow a hint, to work on some one else's foundation, is
+notable in Burns from first to last, in the period of song-writing as
+well as in that of the early poems; and strikes one oddly in a man of
+such deep originality, who left so strong a print on all he touched, and
+whose work is so greatly distinguished by that character of
+"inevitability" which Wordsworth denied to Goethe.
+
+When we remember Burns's obligations to his predecessors, we must never
+forget his immense advances on them. They had already "discovered"
+nature; but Burns discovered poetry--a higher and more intense way of
+thinking of the things that go to make up nature, a higher and more
+ideal key of words in which to speak of them. Ramsay and Fergusson
+excelled at making a popular--or shall we say vulgar?--sort of society
+verses, comical and prosaic, written, you would say, in taverns while a
+supper-party waited for its laureate's word; but on the appearance of
+Burns, this coarse and laughing literature was touched to finer issues,
+and learned gravity of thought and natural pathos.
+
+What he had gained from his predecessors was a direct, speaking style,
+and to walk on his own feet instead of on academical stilts. There was
+never a man of letters with more absolute command of his means; and we
+may say of him, without excess, that his style was his slave. Hence that
+energy of epithet, so concise and telling, that a foreigner is tempted
+to explain it by some special richness or aptitude in the dialect he
+wrote. Hence that Homeric justice and completeness of description which
+gives us the very physiognomy of nature, in body and detail, as nature
+is. Hence, too, the unbroken literary quality of his best pieces, which
+keeps him from any slip into the weariful trade of word-painting, and
+presents everything, as everything should be presented by the art of
+words, in a clear, continuous medium of thought. Principal Shairp, for
+instance, gives us a paraphrase of one tough verse of the original; and
+for those who know the Greek poets only by paraphrase, this has the very
+quality they are accustomed to look for and admire in Greek. The
+contemporaries of Burns were surprised that he should visit so many
+celebrated mountains and waterfalls, and not seize the opportunity to
+make a poem. Indeed, it is not for those who have a true command of the
+art of words, but for peddling, professional amateurs, that these
+pointed occasions are most useful and inspiring. As those who speak
+French imperfectly are glad to dwell on any topic they may have talked
+upon or heard others talk upon before, because they know appropriate
+words for it in French, so the dabbler in verse rejoices to behold a
+waterfall, because he has learned the sentiment and knows appropriate
+words for it in poetry. But the dialect of Burns was fitted to deal with
+any subject; and whether it was a stormy night, a shepherd's collie, a
+sheep struggling in the snow, the conduct of cowardly soldiers in the
+field, the gait and cogitations of a drunken man, or only a village
+cock-crow in the morning, he could find language to give it freshness,
+body, and relief. He was always ready to borrow the hint of a design, as
+though he had a difficulty in commencing--a difficulty, let us say, in
+choosing a subject out of a world which seemed all equally living and
+significant to him; but once he had the subject chosen, he could cope
+with nature single-handed, and make every stroke a triumph. Again, his
+absolute mastery in his art enabled him to express each and all of his
+different humours, and to pass smoothly and congruously from one to
+another. Many men invent a dialect for only one side of their
+nature--perhaps their pathos or their humour, or the delicacy of their
+senses--and, for lack of a medium, leave all the others unexpressed.
+You meet such an one, and find him in conversation full of thought,
+feeling, and experience, which he has lacked the art to employ in his
+writings. But Burns was not thus hampered in the practice of the
+literary art; he could throw the whole weight of his nature into his
+work, and impregnate it from end to end. If Doctor Johnson, that stilted
+and accomplished stylist, had lacked the sacred Boswell, what should we
+have known of him? and how should we have delighted in his acquaintance
+as we do? Those who spoke with Burns tell us how much we have lost who
+did not. But I think they exaggerate their privilege: I think we have
+the whole Burns in our possession set forth in his consummate verses.
+
+It was by his style, and not by his matter, that he affected Wordsworth
+and the world. There is, indeed, only one merit worth considering in a
+man of letters--that he should write well; and only one damning
+fault--that he should write ill. We are little the better for the
+reflections of the sailor's parrot in the story. And so, if Burns helped
+to change the course of literary history, it was by his frank, direct,
+and masterly utterance, and not by his homely choice of subjects. That
+was imposed upon him, not chosen upon a principle. He wrote from his own
+experience, because it was his nature so to do, and the tradition of the
+school from which he proceeded was fortunately not opposed to homely
+subjects. But to these homely subjects he communicated the rich
+commentary of his nature; they were all steeped in Burns; and they
+interest us not in themselves, but because they have been passed through
+the spirit of so genuine and vigorous a man. Such is the stamp of living
+literature; and there was never any more alive than that of Burns.
+
+What a gust of sympathy there is in him sometimes flowing out in byways
+hitherto unused, upon mice, and flowers, and the devil himself;
+sometimes speaking plainly between human hearts; sometimes ringing out
+in exultation like a peal of bells! When we compare the "Farmer's
+Salutation to his Auld Mare Maggie," with the clever and inhumane
+production of half a century earlier, "The Auld Man's Mare's dead," we
+see in a nut-shell the spirit of the change introduced by Burns. And as
+to its manner, who that has read it can forget how the collie, Luath, in
+the "Twa Dogs," describes and enters into the merry-making in the
+cottage?
+
+  "The luntin' pipe an' sneeshin' mill
+   Are handed round wi' richt guid will;
+   The canty auld folks crackin' crouse,
+   The young anes rantin' through the house--
+   My heart has been sae fain to see them,
+   That I for joy hae barkit wi' them."
+
+It was this ardent power of sympathy that was fatal to so many women,
+and, through Jean Armour, to himself at last. His humour comes from him
+in a stream so deep and easy that I will venture to call him the best of
+humorous poets. He turns about in the midst to utter a noble sentiment
+or a trenchant remark on human life, and the style changes and rises to
+the occasion. I think it is Principal Shairp who says, happily, that
+Burns would have been no Scotsman if he had not loved to moralise;
+neither, may we add, would he have been his father's son; but (what is
+worthy of note) his moralisings are to a large extent the moral of his
+own career. He was among the least impersonal of artists. Except in the
+"Jolly Beggars," he shows no gleam of dramatic instinct. Mr. Carlyle has
+complained that "Tam o' Shanter" is, from the absence of this quality,
+only a picturesque and external piece of work; and I may add that in the
+"Twa Dogs" it is precisely in the infringement of dramatic propriety
+that a great deal of the humour of the speeches depends for its
+existence and effect. Indeed, Burns was so full of his identity that it
+breaks forth on every page; and there is scarce an appropriate remark
+either in praise or blame of his own conduct but he has put it himself
+into verse. Alas for the tenor of these remarks! They are, indeed, his
+own pitiful apology for such a marred existence and talents so misused
+and stunted; and they seem to prove for ever how small a part is played
+by reason in the conduct of man's affairs. Here was one, at least, who
+with unfailing judgment predicted his own fate; yet his knowledge could
+not avail him, and with open eyes he must fulfil his tragic destiny. Ten
+years before the end he had written his epitaph; and neither subsequent
+events, nor the critical eyes of posterity, have shown us a word in it
+to alter. And, lastly, has he not put in for himself the last
+unanswerable plea?--
+
+  "Then gently scan your brother man,
+     Still gentler sister woman;
+   Though they may gang a kennin' wrang,
+     To step aside is human:
+   One point must still be greatly dark--"
+
+One? Alas! I fear every man and woman of us is "greatly dark" to all
+their neighbours, from the day of birth until death removes them, in
+their greatest virtues as well as in their saddest faults; and we, who
+have been trying to read the character of Burns, may take home the
+lesson and be gentle in our thoughts.
+
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+  [3] For the love-affairs see, in particular, Mr. Scott Douglas's
+    edition under the different dates.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+WALT WHITMAN
+
+
+Of late years the name of Walt Whitman has been a good deal bandied
+about in books and magazines. It has become familiar both in good and
+ill repute. His works have been largely bespattered with praise by his
+admirers, and cruelly mauled and mangled by irreverent enemies. Now,
+whether his poetry is good or bad as poetry, is a matter that may admit
+of a difference of opinion without alienating those who differ. We could
+not keep the peace with a man who should put forward claims to taste and
+yet depreciate the choruses in "Samson Agonistes"; but, I think, we may
+shake hands with one who sees no more in Walt Whitman's volume, from a
+literary point of view, than a farrago of incompetent essays in a wrong
+direction. That may not be at all our own opinion. We may think that,
+when a work contains many unforgettable phrases, it cannot be altogether
+devoid of literary merit. We may even see passages of a high poetry here
+and there among its eccentric contents. But when all is said, Walt
+Whitman is neither a Milton nor a Shakespeare; to appreciate his works
+is not a condition necessary to salvation; and I would not disinherit a
+son upon the question, nor even think much the worse of a critic, for I
+should always have an idea what he meant.
+
+What Whitman has to say is another affair from how he says it. It is not
+possible to acquit any one of defective intelligence, or else stiff
+prejudice, who is not interested by Whitman's matter and the spirit it
+represents. Not as a poet, but as what we must call (for lack of a more
+exact expression) a prophet, he occupies a curious and prominent
+position. Whether he may greatly influence the future or not, he is a
+notable symptom of the present. As a sign of the times, it would be hard
+to find his parallel. I should hazard a large wager, for instance, that
+he was not unacquainted with the works of Herbert Spencer; and yet
+where, in all the history books, shall we lay our hands on two more
+incongruous contemporaries? Mr. Spencer so decorous--I had almost said,
+so dandy--in dissent; and Whitman, like a large shaggy dog, just
+unchained, scouring the beaches of the world and baying at the moon. And
+when was an echo more curiously like a satire, than when Mr. Spencer
+found his Synthetic Philosophy reverberated from the other shores of the
+Atlantic in the "barbaric yawp" of Whitman?
+
+
+  I
+
+Whitman, it cannot be too soon explained, writes up to a system. He was
+a theoriser about society before he was a poet. He first perceived
+something wanting, and then sat down squarely to supply the want. The
+reader, running over his works, will find that he takes nearly as much
+pleasure in critically expounding his theory of poetry as in making
+poems. This is as far as it can be from the case of the spontaneous
+village minstrel dear to elegy, who has no theory whatever, although
+sometimes he may have fully as much poetry as Whitman. The whole of
+Whitman's work is deliberate and preconceived. A man born into a society
+comparatively new, full of conflicting elements and interests, could not
+fail, if he had any thoughts at all, to reflect upon the tendencies
+around him. He saw much good and evil on all sides, not yet settled down
+into some more or less unjust compromise as in older nations, but still
+in the act of settlement. And he could not but wonder what it would turn
+out; whether the compromise would be very just or very much the reverse,
+and give great or little scope for healthy human energies. From idle
+wonder to active speculation is but a step; and he seems to have been
+early struck with the inefficacy of literature and its extreme
+unsuitability to the conditions. What he calls "Feudal Literature" could
+have little living action on the tumult of American democracy; what he
+calls the "Literature of Woe," meaning the whole tribe of "Werther" and
+Byron, could have no action for good in any time or place. Both
+propositions, if art had none but a direct moral influence, would be
+true enough; and as this seems to be Whitman's view, they were true
+enough for him. He conceived the idea of a Literature which was to
+inhere in the life of the present; which was to be, first, human, and
+next, American; which was to be brave and cheerful as per contract; to
+give culture in a popular and poetical presentment; and, in so doing,
+catch and stereotype some democratic ideal of humanity which should be
+equally natural to all grades of wealth and education, and suited, in
+one of his favourite phrases, to "the average man." To the formation of
+some such literature as this his poems are to be regarded as so many
+contributions, one sometimes explaining, sometimes superseding, the
+other: and the whole together not so much a finished work as a body of
+suggestive hints. He does not profess to have built the castle, but he
+pretends he has traced the lines of the foundation. He has not made the
+poetry, but he flatters himself he has done something towards making the
+poets.
+
+His notion of the poetic function is ambitious, and coincides roughly
+with what Schopenhauer has laid down as the province of the
+metaphysician. The poet is to gather together for men, and set in order,
+the materials of their existence. He is "The Answerer"; he is to find
+some way of speaking about life that shall satisfy, if only for the
+moment, man's enduring astonishment at his own position. And besides
+having an answer ready, it is he who shall provoke the question. He must
+shake people out of their indifference, and force them to make some
+election in this world, instead of sliding dully forward in a dream.
+Life is a business we are all apt to mismanage; either living recklessly
+from day to day, or suffering ourselves to be gulled out of our moments
+by the inanities of custom. We should despise a man who gave as little
+activity and forethought to the conduct of any other business. But in
+this, which is the one thing of all others, since it contains them all,
+we cannot see the forest for the trees. One brief impression obliterates
+another. There is something stupefying in the recurrence of unimportant
+things. And it is only on rare provocations that we can rise to take an
+outlook beyond daily concerns, and comprehend the narrow limits and
+great possibilities of our existence. It is the duty of the poet to
+induce such moments of clear sight. He is the declared enemy of all
+living by reflex action, of all that is done betwixt sleep and waking,
+of all the pleasureless pleasurings and imaginary duties in which we
+coin away our hearts and fritter invaluable years. He has to electrify
+his readers into an instant unflagging activity, founded on a wide and
+eager observation of the world, and make them direct their ways by a
+superior prudence, which has little or nothing in common with the maxims
+of the copy-book. That many of us lead such lives as they would heartily
+disown after two hours' serious reflection on the subject is, I am
+afraid, a true, and, I am sure, a very galling thought. The Enchanted
+Ground of dead-alive respectability is next, upon the map, to the Beulah
+of considerate virtue. But there they all slumber and take their rest in
+the middle of God's beautiful and wonderful universe; the drowsy heads
+have nodded together in the same position since first their fathers fell
+asleep; and not even the sound of the last trumpet can wake them to a
+single active thought. The poet has a hard task before him to stir up
+such fellows to a sense of their own and other people's principles in
+life.
+
+And it happens that literature is, in some ways, but an indifferent
+means to such an end. Language is but a poor bull's-eye lantern
+wherewith to show off the vast cathedral of the world; and yet a
+particular thing once said in words is so definite and memorable, that
+it makes us forget the absence of the many which remain unexpressed;
+like a bright window in a distant view, which dazzles and confuses our
+sight of its surroundings. There are not words enough in all Shakespeare
+to express the merest fraction of a man's experience in an hour. The
+speed of the eyesight and the hearing, and the continual industry of the
+mind, produce, in ten minutes, what it would require a laborious volume
+to shadow forth by comparisons and roundabout approaches. If verbal
+logic were sufficient, life would be as plain sailing as a piece of
+Euclid. But, as a matter of fact, we make a travesty of the simplest
+process of thought when we put it into words; for the words are all
+coloured and forsworn, apply inaccurately, and bring with them, from
+former uses, ideas of praise and blame that have nothing to do with the
+question in hand. So we must always see to it nearly, that we judge by
+the realities of life and not by the partial terms that represent them
+in man's speech; and at times of choice, we must leave words upon one
+side, and act upon those brute convictions, unexpressed and perhaps
+inexpressible, which cannot be flourished in an argument, but which are
+truly the sum and fruit of our experience. Words are for communication,
+not for judgment. This is what every thoughtful man knows for himself,
+for only fools and silly schoolmasters push definitions over far into
+the domain of conduct; and the majority of women, not learned in these
+scholastic refinements, live all-of-a-piece and unconsciously, as a tree
+grows, without caring to put a name upon their acts or motives. Hence, a
+new difficulty for Whitman's scrupulous and argumentative poet: he must
+do more than waken up the sleepers to his words; he must persuade them
+to look over the book and at life with their own eyes.
+
+This side of truth is very present to Whitman; it is this that he means
+when he tells us that "To glance with an eye confounds the learning of
+all times." But he is not unready. He is never weary of descanting on
+the undebatable conviction that is forced upon our minds by the presence
+of other men, of animals, or of inanimate things. To glance with an eye,
+were it only at a chair or a park railing, is by far a more persuasive
+process, and brings us to a far more exact conclusion than to read the
+works of all the logicians extant. If both, by a large allowance, may be
+said to end in certainty, the certainty in the one case transcends the
+other to an incalculable degree. If people see a lion, they run away; if
+they only apprehend a deduction, they keep wandering around in an
+experimental humour. Now, how is the poet to convince like nature, and
+not like books? Is there no actual piece of nature that he can show the
+man to his face, as he might show him a tree if they were walking
+together? Yes, there is one: the man's own thoughts. In fact, if the
+poet is to speak efficaciously, he must say what is already in his
+hearer's mind. That, alone, the hearer will believe; that, alone, he
+will be able to apply intelligently to the facts of life. Any
+conviction, even if it be a whole system or a whole religion, must pass
+into the condition of commonplace, or postulate, before it becomes fully
+operative. Strange excursions and high-flying theories may interest, but
+they cannot rule behaviour. Our faith is not the highest truth that we
+perceive, but the highest that we have been able to assimilate into the
+very texture and method of our thinking. It is not, therefore, by
+flashing before a man's eyes the weapons of dialectic; it is not by
+induction, deduction, or construction; it is not by forcing him on from
+one stage of reasoning to another, that the man will be effectually
+renewed. He cannot be made to believe anything; but he can be made to
+see that he has always believed it. And this is the practical canon. It
+is when the reader cries, "Oh, I know!" and is, perhaps, half irritated
+to see how nearly the author has forestalled his own thoughts, that he
+is on the way to what is called in theology a Saving Faith.
+
+Here we have the key to Whitman's attitude. To give a certain unity of
+ideal to the average population of America--to gather their activities
+about some conception of humanity that shall be central and normal, if
+only for the moment--the poet must portray that population as it is.
+Like human law, human poetry is simply declaratory. If any ideal is
+possible, it must be already in the thoughts of the people; and, by the
+same reason, in the thoughts of the poet, who is one of them. And hence
+Whitman's own formula: "The poet is individual--he is complete in
+himself: the others are as good as he; only he sees it, and they do
+not." To show them how good they are, the poet must study his
+fellow-countrymen and himself somewhat like a traveller on the hunt for
+his book of travels. There is a sense, of course, in which all true
+books are books of travel; and all genuine poets must run the risk of
+being charged with the traveller's exaggeration; for to whom are such
+books more surprising than to those whose own life is faithfully and
+smartly pictured? But this danger is all upon one side; and you may
+judiciously flatter the portrait without any likelihood of the sitter's
+disowning it for a faithful likeness. And so Whitman has reasoned: that
+by drawing at first-hand from himself and his neighbours, accepting
+without shame the inconsistencies and brutalities that go to make up
+man, and yet treating the whole in a high, magnanimous spirit, he would
+make sure of belief, and at the same time encourage people forward by
+the means of praise.
+
+
+  II
+
+We are accustomed nowadays to a great deal of puling over the
+circumstances in which we are placed. The great refinement of many
+poetical gentlemen has rendered them practically unfit for the jostling
+and ugliness of life, and they record their unfitness at considerable
+length. The bold and awful poetry of Job's complaint produces too many
+flimsy imitators; for there is always something consolatory in grandeur,
+but the symphony transposed for the piano becomes hysterically sad. This
+literature of woe, as Whitman calls it, this _Maladie de René_, as we
+like to call it in Europe, is in many ways a most humiliating and sickly
+phenomenon. Young gentlemen with three or four hundred a year of private
+means look down from a pinnacle of doleful experience on all the grown
+and hearty men who have dared to say a good word for life since the
+beginning of the world. There is no prophet but the melancholy Jacques,
+and the blue devils dance on all our literary wires.
+
+It would be a poor service to spread culture, if this be its result,
+among the comparatively innocent and cheerful ranks of men. When our
+little poets have to be sent to look at the ploughman and learn wisdom,
+we must be careful how we tamper with our ploughmen. Where a man in not
+the best of circumstances preserves composure of mind, and relishes ale
+and tobacco, and his wife and children, in the intervals of dull and
+unremunerative labour; where a man in this predicament can afford a
+lesson by the way to what are called his intellectual superiors, there
+is plainly something to be lost, as well as something to be gained, by
+teaching him to think differently. It is better to leave him as he is
+than to teach him whining. It is better that he should go without the
+cheerful lights of culture, if cheerless doubt and paralysing
+sentimentalism are to be the consequence. Let us, by all means, fight
+against that hidebound stolidity of sensation and sluggishness of mind
+which blurs and decolorises for poor natures the wonderful pageant of
+consciousness; let us teach people, as much as we can, to enjoy, and
+they will learn for themselves to sympathise; but let us see to it,
+above all, that we give these lessons in a brave, vivacious note, and
+build the man up in courage while we demolish its substitute,
+indifference.
+
+Whitman is alive to all this. He sees that, if the poet is to be of any
+help, he must testify to the livableness of life. His poems, he tells
+us, are to be "hymns of the praise of things." They are to make for a
+certain high joy in living, or what he calls himself "a brave delight
+fit for freedom's athletes." And he has had no difficulty in introducing
+his optimism: it fitted readily enough with his system; for the average
+man is truly a courageous person and truly fond of living. One of
+Whitman's remarks upon this head is worth quotation, as he is there
+perfectly successful, and does precisely what he designs to do
+throughout: Takes ordinary and even commonplace circumstances; throws
+them out, by a happy turn of thinking, into significance and something
+like beauty; and tacks a hopeful moral lesson to the end.
+
+   "The passionate tenacity of hunters, woodmen, early risers,
+   cultivators of gardens and orchards and fields, he says, the love of
+   healthy women for the manly form, seafaring persons, drivers of
+   horses, the passion for light and the open air,--all is an old
+   unvaried sign of the unfailing perception of beauty, and of a
+   residence of the poetic in outdoor people."
+
+There seems to me something truly original in this choice of trite
+examples. You will remark how adroitly Whitman begins, hunters and
+woodmen being confessedly romantic. And one thing more. If he had said
+"the love of healthy men for the female form," he would have said almost
+a silliness; for the thing has never been dissembled out of delicacy,
+and is so obvious as to be a public nuisance. But by reversing it, he
+tells us something not unlike news; something that sounds quite freshly
+in words; and, if the reader be a man, gives him a moment of great
+self-satisfaction and spiritual aggrandisement. In many different
+authors you may find passages more remarkable for grammar, but few of a
+more ingenious turn, and none that could be more to the point in our
+connection. The tenacity of many ordinary people in ordinary pursuits is
+a sort of standing challenge to everybody else. If one man can grow
+absorbed in delving his garden, others may grow absorbed and happy over
+something else. Not to be upsides in this with any groom or gardener is
+to be very meanly organised. A man should be ashamed to take his food if
+he has not alchemy enough in his stomach to turn some of it into intense
+and enjoyable occupation.
+
+Whitman tries to reinforce this cheerfulness by keeping up a sort of
+outdoor atmosphere of sentiment. His book, he tells us, should be read;
+"among the cooling influences of external nature"; and this
+recommendation, like that other famous one which Hawthorne prefixed to
+his collected tales, is in itself a character of the work. Every one who
+has been upon a walking or a boating tour, living in the open air, with
+the body in constant exercise and the mind in fallow, knows true ease
+and quiet. The irritating action of the brain is set at rest; we think
+in a plain, unfeverish temper; little things seem big enough, and great
+things no longer portentous; and the world is smilingly accepted as it
+is. This is the spirit that Whitman inculcates and parades. He thinks
+very ill of the atmosphere of parlours or libraries. Wisdom keeps school
+outdoors. And he has the art to recommend this attitude of mind by
+simply pluming himself upon it as a virtue; so that the reader, to keep
+the advantage over his author which most readers enjoy, is tricked into
+professing the same view. And this spirit, as it is his chief lesson, is
+the greatest charm of his work. Thence, in spite of an uneven and
+emphatic key of expression, something trenchant and straightforward,
+something simple and surprising, distinguishes his poems. He has sayings
+that come home to one like the Bible. We fall upon Whitman, after the
+works of so many men who write better, with a sense of relief from
+strain, with a sense of touching nature, as when one passes out of the
+flaring, noisy thoroughfares of a great city, into what he himself has
+called, with unexcelled imaginative justice of language, "the huge and
+thoughtful night." And his book in consequence, whatever may be the
+final judgment of its merit, whatever may be its influence on the
+future, should be in the hands of all parents and guardians as a
+specific for the distressing malady of being seventeen years old.
+Green-sickness yields to his treatment as to a charm of magic; and the
+youth, after a short course of reading, ceases to carry the universe
+upon his shoulders.
+
+
+  III
+
+Whitman is not one of those who can be deceived by familiarity. He
+considers it just as wonderful that there are myriads of stars as that
+one man should rise from the dead. He declares "a hair on the back of
+his hand just as curious as any special revelation." His whole life is
+to him what it was to Sir Thomas Browne,--one perpetual miracle.
+Everything is strange, everything unaccountable, everything beautiful;
+from a bug to the moon, from the sight of the eyes to the appetite for
+food. He makes it his business to see things as if he saw them for the
+first time, and professes astonishment on principle. But he has no
+leaning towards mythology; avows his contempt for what he calls
+"unregenerate poetry"; and does not mean by nature
+
+   "the smooth walks, trimmed edges, butterflies, posies, and
+   nightingales of the English poets, but the whole orb, with its
+   geologic history, the Kosmos, carrying fire and snow, that rolls
+   through the illimitable areas, light as a feather though weighing
+   billions of tons."
+
+Nor is this exhaustive; for in his character of idealist all
+impressions, all thoughts, trees and people, love and faith, astronomy,
+history, and religion, enter upon equal terms into his notion of the
+universe. He is not against religion; not, indeed, against any religion.
+He wishes to drag with a larger net, to make a more comprehensive
+synthesis, than any or than all of them put together. In feeling after
+the central type of man, he must embrace all eccentricities; his
+cosmology must subsume all cosmologies, and the feelings that gave birth
+to them; his statement of facts must include all religion and all
+irreligion, Christ and Boodha, God and the devil. The world as it is,
+and the whole world as it is, physical, and spiritual, and historical,
+with its good and bad, with its manifold inconsistencies, is what he
+wishes to set forth, in strong, picturesque, and popular lineaments, for
+the understanding of the average man. One of his favourite endeavours is
+to get the whole matter into a nutshell; to knock the four corners of
+the universe, one after another, about his readers' ears; to hurry him,
+in breathless phrases, hither and thither, back and forward, in time and
+space; to focus all this about his own momentary personality; and then,
+drawing the ground from under his feet, as if by some cataclysm of
+nature, to plunge him into the unfathomable abyss sown with enormous
+suns and systems, and among the inconceivable numbers and magnitudes and
+velocities of the heavenly bodies. So that he concludes by striking into
+us some sense of that disproportion of things which Shelley has
+illuminated by the ironical flash of these eight words: The desire of
+the moth for the star.
+
+The same truth, but to what a different purpose! Whitman's moth is
+mightily at his ease about all the planets in heaven, and cannot think
+too highly of our sublunary tapers. The universe is so large that
+imagination flags in the effort to conceive it; but here, in the
+meantime, is the world under our feet, a very warm and habitable corner.
+"The earth, that is sufficient; I do not want the constellations any
+nearer," he remarks. And again: "Let your soul stand cool and composed,"
+says he, "before a million universes." It is the language of a
+transcendental common sense, such as Thoreau held and sometimes uttered.
+But Whitman, who has a somewhat vulgar inclination for technical talk
+and the jargon of philosophy, is not content with a few pregnant hints;
+he must put the dots upon his i's; he must corroborate the songs of
+Apollo by some of the darkest talk of human metaphysic. He tells his
+disciples that they must be ready "to confront the growing arrogance of
+Realism." Each person is, for himself, the keystone and the occasion of
+this universal edifice. "Nothing, not God," he says, "is greater to one
+than oneself is"; a statement with an irreligious smack at the first
+sight; but like most startling sayings, a manifest truism on a second.
+He will give effect to his own character without apology; he sees "that
+the elementary laws never apologise." "I reckon," he adds, with quaint
+colloquial arrogance, "I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I
+plant my house by, after all." The level follows the law of its being;
+so, unrelentingly, will he; everything, every person, is good in his own
+place and way; God is the maker of all, and all are in one design. For
+he believes in God, and that with a sort of blasphemous security. "No
+array of terms," quoth he, "no array of terms can say how much at peace
+I am about God and about death." There certainly never was a prophet who
+carried things with a higher hand; he gives us less a body of dogmas
+than a series of proclamations by the grace of God; and language, you
+will observe, positively fails him to express how far he stands above
+the highest human doubts and trepidations.
+
+But next in order of truths to a person's sublime conviction of himself,
+comes the attraction of one person for another, and all that we mean by
+the word love:--
+
+  "The dear love of man for his comrade--the attraction of friend for
+       friend,
+   Of the-well-married husband and wife, of children and parents,
+   Of city for city and land for land."
+
+The solitude of the most sublime idealist is broken in upon by other
+people's faces; he sees a look in their eyes that corresponds to
+something in his own heart; there comes a tone in their voices which
+convicts him of a startling weakness for his fellow-creatures. While he
+is hymning the _ego_ and commercing with God and the universe, a woman
+goes below his window; and at the turn of her skirt, or the colour of
+her eyes, Icarus is recalled from heaven by the run. Love is so
+startlingly real that it takes rank upon an equal footing of reality
+with the consciousness of personal existence. We are as heartily
+persuaded of the identity of those we love as of our own identity. And
+so sympathy pairs with self-assertion, the two gerents of human life on
+earth; and Whitman's ideal man must not only be strong, free, and
+self-reliant in himself, but his freedom must be bounded and his
+strength perfected by the most intimate, eager, and long-suffering love
+for others. To some extent this is taking away with the left hand what
+has been so generously given with the right. Morality has been
+ceremoniously extruded from the door only to be brought in again by the
+window. We are told, on one page, to do as we please; and on the next we
+are sharply upbraided for not having done as the author pleases. We are
+first assured that we are the finest fellows in the world in our own
+right; and then it appears that we are only fine fellows in so far as we
+practise a most quixotic code of morals. The disciple who saw himself in
+clear ether a moment before is plunged down again among the fogs and
+complications of duty. And this is all the more overwhelming because
+Whitman insists not only on love between sex and sex, and between
+friends of the same sex, but in the field of the less intense political
+sympathies; and his ideal man must not only be a generous friend but a
+conscientious voter into the bargain.
+
+His method somewhat lessens the difficulty. He is not, the reader will
+remember, to tell us how good we ought to be, but to remind us how good
+we are. He is to encourage us to be free and kind by proving that we are
+free and kind already. He passes our corporate life under review, to
+show that it is upheld by the very virtues of which he makes himself the
+advocate. "There is no object so soft," he says somewhere in his big,
+plain way, "there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the
+wheel'd universe." Rightly understood, it is on the softest of all
+objects, the sympathetic heart, that the wheel of society turns easily
+and securely as on a perfect axle. There is no room, of course, for
+doubt or discussion, about conduct, where every one is to follow the
+law of his being with exact compliance. Whitman hates doubt, deprecates
+discussion, and discourages to his utmost the craving, carping
+sensibilities of the conscience. We are to imitate, to use one of his
+absurd and happy phrases, "the satisfaction and aplomb of animals." If
+he preaches a sort of ranting Christianity in morals, a fit consequent
+to the ranting optimism of his cosmology, it is because he declares it
+to be the original deliverance of the human heart; or at least, for he
+would be honestly historical in method, of the human heart as at present
+Christianised. His is a morality without a prohibition; his policy is
+one of encouragement all round. A man must be a born hero to come up to
+Whitman's standard in the practice of any of the positive virtues; but
+of a negative virtue, such as temperance or chastity, he has so little
+to say, that the reader need not be surprised if he drops a word or two
+upon the other side. He would lay down nothing that would be a clog; he
+would prescribe nothing that cannot be done ruddily, in a heat. The
+great point is to get people under way. To the faithful Whitmanite this
+would be justified by the belief that God made all, and that all was
+good; the prophet, in this doctrine, has only to cry "Tally-ho," and
+mankind will break into a gallop on the road to El Dorado. Perhaps, to
+another class of minds, it may look like the result of the somewhat
+cynical reflection that you will not make a kind man out of one who is
+unkind by any precepts under heaven; tempered by the belief that, in
+natural circumstances, the large majority is well disposed. Thence it
+would follow, that if you can only get every one to feel more warmly and
+act more courageously, the balance of results will be for good.
+
+So far, you see, the doctrine is pretty coherent as a doctrine; as a
+picture of man's life it is incomplete and misleading, although
+eminently cheerful. This he is himself the first to acknowledge; for if
+he is prophetic in anything, it is in his noble disregard of
+consistency. "Do I contradict myself?" he asks somewhere; and then pat
+comes the answer, the best answer ever given in print, worthy of a sage,
+or rather of a woman: "Very well, then, I contradict myself!" with this
+addition, not so feminine and perhaps not altogether so satisfactory: "I
+am large--I contain multitudes." Life, as a matter of fact, partakes
+largely of the nature of tragedy. The gospel according to Whitman, even
+if it be not so logical, has this advantage over the gospel according to
+Pangloss, that it does not utterly disregard the existence of temporal
+evil. Whitman accepts the fact of disease and wretchedness like an
+honest man; and instead of trying to qualify it in the interest of his
+optimism, sets himself to spur people up to be helpful. He expresses a
+conviction, indeed, that all will be made up to the victims in the end;
+that "what is untried and afterward" will fail no one, not even "the old
+man who has lived without purpose and feels it with bitterness worse
+than gall." But this is not to palliate our sense of what is hard or
+melancholy in the present. Pangloss, smarting under one of the worst
+things that ever was supposed to come from America, consoled himself
+with the reflection that it was the price we have to pay for cochineal.
+And with that murderous parody, logical optimism and the praises of the
+best of possible worlds went irrevocably out of season, and have been no
+more heard of in the mouths of reasonable men. Whitman spares us all
+allusions to the cochineal; he treats evil and sorrow in a spirit almost
+as of welcome; as an old sea-dog might have welcomed the sight of the
+enemy's topsails off the Spanish Main. There, at least, he seems to say,
+is something obvious to be done. I do not know many better things in
+literature than the brief pictures--brief and vivid like things seen by
+lightning,--with which he tries to stir up the world's heart upon the
+side of mercy. He braces us, on the one hand, with examples of heroic
+duty and helpfulness; on the other, he touches us with pitiful instances
+of people needing help. He knows how to make the heart beat at a brave
+story; to inflame us with just resentment over the hunted slave; to stop
+our mouths for shame when he tells of the drunken prostitute. For all
+the afflicted, all the weak, all the wicked, a good word is said in a
+spirit which I can only call one of ultra Christianity; and however
+wild, however contradictory, it may be in parts, this at least may be
+said for his book, as it may be said of the Christian Gospels, that no
+one will read it, however respectable, but he gets a knock upon his
+conscience; no one however fallen, but he finds a kindly and supporting
+welcome.
+
+
+  IV
+
+Nor has he been content with merely blowing the trumpet for the battle
+of well-doing; he has given to his precepts the authority of his own
+brave example. Naturally a grave, believing man, with little or no sense
+of humour, he has succeeded as well in life as in his printed
+performances. The spirit that was in him has come forth most eloquently
+in his actions. Many who have only read his poetry have been tempted to
+set him down as an ass, or even as a charlatan; but I never met any one
+who had known him personally who did not profess a solid affection and
+respect for the man's character. He practises as he professes; he feels
+deeply that Christian love for all men, that toleration, that cheerful
+delight in serving others, which he often celebrates in literature with
+a doubtful measure of success. And perhaps, out of all his writings, the
+best and the most human and convincing passages are to be found in
+"these soil'd and creased little livraisons, each composed of a sheet or
+two of paper, folded small to carry in the pocket, and fastened with a
+pin," which he scribbled during the war by the bedsides of the wounded
+or in the excitement of great events. They are hardly literature in the
+formal meaning of the word; he has left his jottings for the most part
+as he made them; a homely detail, a word from the lips of a dying
+soldier, a business memorandum, the copy of a letter--short,
+straightforward to the point, with none of the trappings of composition;
+but they breathe a profound sentiment, they give us a vivid look at one
+of the sides of life, and they make us acquainted with a man whom it is
+an honour to love.
+
+Whitman's intense Americanism, his unlimited belief in the future of
+These States (as, with reverential capitals, he loves to call them),
+made the war a period of great trial to his soul. The new virtue,
+Unionism, of which he is the sole inventor, seemed to have fallen into
+premature unpopularity. All that he loved, hoped, or hated, hung in the
+balance. And the game of war was not only momentous to him in its
+issues; it sublimated his spirit by its heroic displays, and tortured
+him intimately by the spectacle of its horrors. It was a theatre, it was
+a place of education it was like a season of religious revival. He
+watched Lincoln going daily to his work; he studied and fraternised with
+young soldiery passing to the front; above all, he walked the hospitals,
+reading the Bible, distributing clean clothes, or apples, or tobacco; a
+patient, helpful, reverend man, full of kind speeches.
+
+His memoranda of this period are almost bewildering to read. From one
+point of view they seem those of a district visitor; from another, they
+look like the formless jottings of an artist in the picturesque. More
+than one woman, on whom I tried the experiment, immediately claimed the
+writer for a fellow-woman. More than one literary purist might identify
+him as a shoddy newspaper correspondent without the necessary faculty of
+style. And yet the story touches home; and if you are of the weeping
+order of mankind, you will certainly find your eyes filled with tears,
+of which you have no reason to be ashamed. There is only one way to
+characterise a work of this order, and that is to quote. Here is a
+passage from a letter to a mother, unknown to Whitman, whose son died in
+hospital:--
+
+   "Frank, as far as I saw, had everything requisite in surgical
+   treatment, nursing, etc. He had watches much of the time. He was so
+   good and well-behaved, and affectionate, I myself liked him very
+   much. I was in the habit of coming in afternoons and sitting by him,
+   and he liked to have me--liked to put out his arm and lay his hand on
+   my knee--would keep it so a long while. Toward the last he was more
+   restless and flighty at night--often fancied himself with his
+   regiment--by his talk sometimes seem'd as if his feelings were hurt
+   by being blamed by his officers for something he was entirely
+   innocent of--said 'I never in my life was thought capable of such a
+   thing, and never was.' At other times he would fancy himself talking
+   as it seem'd to children or such like, his relatives, I suppose, and
+   giving them good advice; would talk to them a long while. All the
+   time he was out of his head not one single bad word, or thought, or
+   idea escaped him. It was remark'd that many a man's conversation in
+   his senses was not half so good as Frank's delirium.
+
+   "He was perfectly willing to die--he had become very weak, and had
+   suffer'd a good deal, and was perfectly resign'd, poor boy. I do not
+   know his past life, but I feel as if it must have been good. At any
+   rate what I saw of him here, under the most trying circumstances,
+   with a painful wound, and among strangers, I can say that he behaved
+   so brave, so composed, and so sweet and affectionate, it could not be
+   surpassed. And now, like many other noble and good men, after serving
+   his country as a soldier, he has yielded up his young life at the
+   very outset in her service. Such things are gloomy--yet there is a
+   text, 'God doeth all things well,' the meaning of which, after due
+   time, appears to the soul.
+
+   "I thought perhaps a few words, though from a stranger, about your
+   son, from one who was with him at the last, might be worth while, for
+   I loved the young man, though I but saw him immediately to lose him."
+
+It is easy enough to pick holes in the grammar of this letter, but what
+are we to say of its profound goodness and tenderness? It is written as
+though he had the mother's face before his eyes, and saw her wincing in
+the flesh at every word. And what, again, are we to say of its sober
+truthfulness, not exaggerating, not running to phrases, not seeking to
+make a hero out of what was only an ordinary but good and brave young
+man? Literary reticence is not Whitman's stronghold; and this reticence
+is not literary, but humane; it is not that of a good artist but that of
+a good man. He knew that what the mother wished to hear about was Frank;
+and he told her about her Frank as he was.
+
+
+  V
+
+Something should be said of Whitman's style, for style is of the essence
+of thinking. And where a man is so critically deliberate as our author,
+and goes solemnly about his poetry for an ulterior end, every indication
+is worth notice. He has chosen a rough, unrhymed, lyrical verse;
+sometimes instinct with a fine processional movement; often so rugged
+and careless that it can only be described by saying that he has not
+taken the trouble to write prose. I believe myself that it was selected
+principally because it was easy to write, although not without
+recollections of the marching measures of some of the prose in our
+English Old Testament. According to Whitman, on the other hand, "the
+time has arrived to essentially break down the barriers of form between
+Prose and Poetry ... for the most cogent purposes of those great inland
+states, and for Texas, and California, and Oregon";--a statement which
+is among the happiest achievements of American humour. He calls his
+verses "recitatives," in easily followed allusion to a musical form.
+"Easily written, loose-fingered chords," he cries, "I feel the thrum of
+your climax and close." Too often, I fear, he is the only one who can
+perceive the rhythm; and in spite of Mr. Swinburne, a great part of his
+work considered as verses is poor bald stuff. Considered, not as verse,
+but as speech, a great part of it is full of strange and admirable
+merits. The right detail is seized; the right word, bold and trenchant,
+is thrust into its place. Whitman has small regard to literary
+decencies, and is totally free from literary timidities. He is neither
+afraid of being slangy nor of being dull; nor, let me add, of being
+ridiculous. The result is a most surprising compound of plain grandeur,
+sentimental affectation, and downright nonsense. It would be useless to
+follow his detractors and give instances of how bad he can be at his
+worst; and perhaps it would be not much wiser to give extracted
+specimens of how happily he can write when he is at his best. These
+come in to most advantage in their own place; owing something, it may
+be, to the offset of their curious surroundings. And one thing is
+certain, that no one can appreciate Whitman's excellences until he has
+grown accustomed to his faults. Until you are content to pick poetry out
+of his pages almost as you must pick it out of a Greek play in Bohn's
+translation, your gravity will be continually upset, your ears
+perpetually disappointed, and the whole book will be no more to you than
+a particularly flagrant production by the Poet Close.
+
+A writer of this uncertain quality was, perhaps, unfortunate in taking
+for thesis the beauty of the world as it now is, not only on the
+hill-tops but in the factory; not only by the harbour full of stately
+ships, but in the magazine of the hopelessly prosaic hatter. To show
+beauty in common things is the work of the rarest tact. It is not to be
+done by the wishing. It is easy to posit as a theory, but to bring it
+home to men's minds is the problem of literature, and is only
+accomplished by rare talent, and in comparatively rare instances. To bid
+the whole world stand and deliver, with a dogma in one's right hand by
+way of pistol; to cover reams of paper in a galloping, headstrong vein;
+to cry louder and louder over everything as it comes up, and make no
+distinction in one's enthusiasm over the most incomparable matters; to
+prove one's entire want of sympathy for the jaded, literary palate, by
+calling, not a spade a spade, but a hatter a hatter, in a lyrical
+apostrophe;--this, in spite of all the airs of inspiration, is not the
+way to do it. It may be very wrong, and very wounding to a respectable
+branch of industry, but the word "hatter" cannot be used seriously in
+emotional verse; not to understand this is to have no literary tact; and
+I would, for his own sake, that this were the only inadmissible
+expression with which Whitman had bedecked his pages. The book teems
+with similar comicalities; and, to a reader who is determined to take it
+from that side only, presents a perfect carnival of fun.
+
+A good deal of this is the result of theory playing its usual vile trick
+upon the artist. It is because he is a Democrat that Whitman must have
+in the hatter. If you may say Admiral, he reasons, why may you not say
+Hatter? One man is as good as another, and it is the business of the
+"great poet" to show poetry in the life of the one as well as the other.
+A most incontrovertible sentiment, surely, and one which nobody would
+think of controverting, where--and here is the point--where any beauty
+has been shown. But how, where that is not the case? where the hatter is
+simply introduced, as God made him and as his fellow-men have miscalled
+him, at the crisis of a high-flown rhapsody? And what are we to say,
+where a man of Whitman's notable capacity for putting things in a
+bright, picturesque, and novel way, simply gives up the attempt, and
+indulges, with apparent exultation, in an inventory of trades or
+implements, with no more colour or coherence than so many index-words
+out of a dictionary? I do not know that we can say anything, but that it
+is a prodigiously amusing exhibition for a line or so. The worst of it
+is, that Whitman must have known better. The man is a great critic, and,
+so far as I can make out, a good one; and how much criticism does it
+require to know that capitulation is not description, or that fingering
+on a dumb keyboard, with whatever show of sentiment and execution, is
+not at all the same thing as discoursing music? I wish I could believe
+he was quite honest with us; but, indeed, who was ever quite honest who
+wrote a book for a purpose? It is a flight beyond the reach of human
+magnanimity.
+
+One other point, where his means failed him, must be touched upon,
+however shortly. In his desire to accept all facts loyally and simply,
+it fell within his programme to speak at some length and with some
+plainness on what is, for I really do not know what reason, the most
+delicate of subjects. Seeing in that one of the most serious and
+interesting parts of life, he was aggrieved that it should be looked
+upon as ridiculous or shameful. No one speaks of maternity with his
+tongue in his cheek; and Whitman made a bold push to set the sanctity of
+fatherhood beside the sanctity of motherhood, and introduce this also
+among the things that can be spoken of without either a blush or a wink.
+But the Philistines have been too strong; and, to say truth, Whitman had
+rather played the fool. We may be thoroughly conscious that his end is
+improving; that it would be a good thing if a window were opened on
+these close privacies of life; that on this subject, as on all others,
+he now and then lets fall a pregnant saying. But we are not satisfied.
+We feel that he was not the man for so difficult an enterprise. He loses
+our sympathy in the character of a poet by attracting too much of our
+attention in that of a Bull in a China Shop. And where, by a little more
+art, we might have been solemnised ourselves, it is too often Whitman
+alone who is solemn in the face of an audience somewhat indecorously
+amused.
+
+
+  VI
+
+Lastly, as most important, after all, to human beings in our disputable
+state, what is that higher prudence which was to be the aim and issue of
+these deliberate productions?
+
+Whitman is too clever to slip into a succinct formula. If he could have
+adequately said his say in a single proverb, it is to be presumed he
+would not have put himself to the trouble of writing several volumes. It
+was his programme to state as much as he could of the world with all its
+contradictions, and leave the upshot with God who planned it. What he
+has made of the world and the world's meanings is to be found at large
+in his poems. These altogether give his answers to the problems of
+belief and conduct; in many ways righteous and high-spirited, in some
+ways loose and contradictory. And yet there are two passages from the
+preface to the "Leaves of Grass" which do pretty well condense his
+teaching on all essential points, and yet preserve a measure of his
+spirit.
+
+   "This is what you shall do," he says in the one, "love the earth, and
+   sun, and animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks,
+   stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labour to
+   others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and
+   indulgence towards the people, take off your hat to nothing known or
+   unknown, or to any man or number of men; go freely with powerful
+   uneducated persons, and with the young, and mothers of families, read
+   these leaves (his own works) in the open air every season of every
+   year of your life; re-examine all you have been told at school or
+   church, or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul."
+
+   "The prudence of the greatest poet," he adds in the other--and the
+   greatest poet is, of course, himself--"knows that the young man who
+   composedly perilled his life and lost it, has done exceeding well for
+   himself; while the man who has not perilled his life, and retains it
+   to old age in riches and ease, has perhaps achieved nothing for
+   himself worth mentioning; and that only that person has no great
+   prudence to learn, who has learnt to prefer real long-lived things,
+   and favours body and soul the same, and perceives the indirect surely
+   following the direct, and what evil or good he does leaping onward
+   and waiting to meet him again, and who in his spirit, in any
+   emergency whatever, neither hurries nor avoids death."
+
+There is much that is Christian in these extracts, startlingly
+Christian. Any reader who bears in mind Whitman's own advice and
+"dismisses whatever insults his own soul" will find plenty that is
+bracing, brightening, and chastening to reward him for a little patience
+at first. It seems hardly possible that any being should get evil from
+so healthy a book as the "Leaves of Grass," which is simply comical
+whenever it falls short of nobility; but if there be any such, who
+cannot both take and leave, who cannot let a single opportunity pass by
+without some unworthy and unmanly thought, I should have as great
+difficulty, and neither more nor less, in recommending the works of
+Whitman as in lending them Shakespeare, or letting them go abroad
+outside of the grounds of a private asylum.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+HENRY DAVID THOREAU: HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS
+
+
+  I
+
+Thoreau's thin, penetrating, big-nosed face, even in a bad woodcut,
+conveys some hint of the limitations of his mind and character. With his
+almost acid sharpness of insight, with his almost animal dexterity in
+act, there went none of that large, unconscious geniality of the world's
+heroes. He was not easy, not ample, not urbane, not even kind; his
+enjoyment was hardly smiling, or the smile was not broad enough to be
+convincing; he had no waste lands nor kitchen-midden in his nature, but
+was all improved and sharpened to a point. "He was bred to no
+profession," says Emerson; "he never married; he lived alone; he never
+went to church; he never voted; he refused to pay a tax to the State; he
+ate no flesh, he drank no wine, he never knew the use of tobacco; and,
+though a naturalist, he used neither trap nor gun. When asked at dinner
+what dish he preferred, he answered, 'the nearest.'" So many negative
+superiorities begin to smack a little of the prig. From his later works
+he was in the habit of cutting out the humorous passages, under the
+impression that they were beneath the dignity of his moral muse; and
+there we see the prig stand public and confessed. It was "much easier,"
+says Emerson acutely, much easier for Thoreau to say _no_ than _yes_;
+and that is a characteristic which depicts the man. It is a useful
+accomplishment to be able to say _no_, but surely it is the essence of
+amiability to prefer to say _yes_ where it is possible. There is
+something wanting in the man who does not hate himself whenever he is
+constrained to say no. And there was a great deal wanting in this born
+dissenter. He was almost shockingly devoid of weaknesses; he had not
+enough of them to be truly polar with humanity; whether you call him
+demi-god or demi-man, he was at least not altogether one of us, for he
+was not touched with a feeling of our infirmities. The world's heroes
+have room for all positive qualities, even those which are disreputable,
+in the capacious theatre of their dispositions. Such can live many
+lives; while a Thoreau can live but one, and that only with perpetual
+foresight.
+
+He was no ascetic, rather an Epicurean of the nobler sort; and he had
+this one great merit, that he succeeded so far as to be happy. "I love
+my fate to the core and rind," he wrote once; and even while he lay
+dying, here is what he dictated (for it seems he was already too feeble
+to control the pen): "You ask particularly after my health. I _suppose_
+that I have not many months to live, but of course know nothing about
+it. I may say that I am enjoying existence as much as ever, and regret
+nothing." It is not given to all to bear so clear a testimony to the
+sweetness of their fate, nor to any without courage and wisdom; for this
+world in itself is but a painful and uneasy place of residence, and
+lasting happiness, at least to the self-conscious, comes only from
+within. Now Thoreau's content and ecstasy in living was, we may say,
+like a plant that he had watered and tended with womanish solicitude;
+for there is apt to be something unmanly, something almost dastardly, in
+a life that does not move with dash and freedom, and that fears the
+bracing contact of the world. In one word, Thoreau was a skulker. He did
+not wish virtue to go out of him among his fellow-men, but slunk into a
+corner to hoard it for himself. He left all for the sake of certain
+virtuous self-indulgences. It is true that his tastes were noble; that
+his ruling passion was to keep himself unspotted from the world; and
+that his luxuries were all of the same healthy order as cold tubs and
+early rising. But a man may be both coldly cruel in the pursuit of
+goodness, and morbid even in the pursuit of health. I cannot lay my
+hands on the passage in which he explains his abstinence from tea and
+coffee, but I am sure I have the meaning correctly. It is this: He
+thought it bad economy and worthy of no true virtuoso to spoil the
+natural rapture of the morning with such muddy stimulants; let him but
+see the sun rise, and he was already sufficiently inspirited for the
+labours of the day. That may be reason good enough to abstain from tea;
+but when we go on to find the same man, on the same or similar grounds,
+abstain from nearly everything that his neighbours innocently and
+pleasurably use, and from the rubs and trials of human society itself
+into the bargain, we recognise that valetudinarian healthfulness which
+is more delicate than sickness itself. We need have no respect for a
+state of artificial training. True health is to be able to do without
+it. Shakespeare, we can imagine, might begin the day upon a quart of
+ale, and yet enjoy the sunrise to the full as much as Thoreau, and
+commemorate his enjoyment in vastly better verses. A man who must
+separate himself from his neighbours' habits in order to be happy, is in
+much the same case with one who requires to take opium for the same
+purpose. What we want to see is one who can breast into the world, do a
+man's work, and still preserve his first and pure enjoyment of
+existence.
+
+Thoreau's faculties were of a piece with his moral shyness; for they
+were all delicacies. He could guide himself about the woods on the
+darkest night by the touch of his feet. He could pick up at once an
+exact dozen of pencils by the feeling, pace distances with accuracy, and
+gauge cubic contents by the eye. His smell was so dainty that he could
+perceive the foetor of dwelling-houses as he passed them by at night;
+his palate so unsophisticated that, like a child, he disliked the taste
+of wine--or perhaps, living in America, had never tasted any that was
+good; and his knowledge of nature was so complete and curious that he
+could have told the time of year, within a day or so, by the aspect of
+the plants. In his dealings with animals he was the original of
+Hawthorne's Donatello. He pulled the woodchuck out of its hole by the
+tail; the hunted fox came to him for protection; wild squirrels have
+been seen to nestle in his waistcoat; he would thrust his arm into a
+pool and bring forth a bright, panting fish, lying undismayed in the
+palm of his hand. There were few things that he could not do. He could
+make a house, a boat, a pencil, or a book. He was a surveyor, a scholar,
+a natural historian. He could run, walk, climb, skate, swim, and manage
+a boat. The smallest occasion served to display his physical
+accomplishment; and a manufacturer, from merely observing his dexterity
+with the window of a railway carriage, offered him a situation on the
+spot. "The only fruit of much living," he observes, "is the ability to
+do some slight thing better." But such was the exactitude of his senses,
+so alive was he in every fibre, that it seems as if the maxim should be
+changed in his case, for he could do most things with unusual
+perfection. And perhaps he had an approving eye to himself when he
+wrote: "Though the youth at last grows indifferent, the laws of the
+universe are not indifferent, _but are for ever on the side of the most
+sensitive_."
+
+
+  II
+
+Thoreau had decided, it would seem, from the very first to lead a life
+of self-improvement: the needle did not tremble as with richer natures,
+but pointed steadily north; and as he saw duty and inclination in one,
+he turned all his strength in that direction. He was met upon the
+threshold by a common difficulty. In this world, in spite of its many
+agreeable features, even the most sensitive must undergo some drudgery
+to live. It is not possible to devote your time to study and meditation
+without what are quaintly but happily denominated private means; these
+absent, a man must contrive to earn his bread by some service to the
+public such as the public cares to pay him for; or, as Thoreau loved to
+put it, Apollo must serve Admetus. This was to Thoreau even a sourer
+necessity than it is to most; there was a love of freedom, a strain of
+the wild man, in his nature, that rebelled with violence against the
+yoke of custom; and he was so eager to cultivate himself and to be happy
+in his own society, that he could consent with difficulty even to the
+interruptions of friendship. "_Such are my engagements to myself_ that I
+dare not promise," he once wrote in answer to an invitation; and the
+italics are his own. Marcus Aurelius found time to study virtue, and
+between whiles to conduct the imperial affairs of Rome; but Thoreau is
+so busy improving himself that he must think twice about a morning call.
+And now imagine him condemned for eight hours a day to some uncongenial
+and unmeaning business! He shrank from the very look of the mechanical
+in life; all should, if possible, be sweetly spontaneous and swimmingly
+progressive. Thus he learned to make lead-pencils, and, when he had
+gained the best certificate, and his friends began to congratulate him
+on his establishment in life, calmly announced that he should never make
+another. "Why should I?" said he; "I would not do again what I have done
+once." For when a thing has once been done as well as it wants to be, it
+is of no further interest to the self-improver. Yet in after years, and
+when it became needful to support his family, he returned patiently to
+this mechanical art--a step more than worthy of himself.
+
+The pencils seem to have been Apollo's first experiment in the service
+of Admetus; but others followed. "I have thoroughly tried
+school-keeping," he writes, "and found that my expenses were in
+proportion, or rather out of proportion, to my income; for I was obliged
+to dress and train, not to say, think and believe, accordingly, and I
+lost my time into the bargain. As I did not teach for the benefit of my
+fellow-men, but simply for a livelihood, this was a failure. I have
+tried trade, but I found that it would take ten years to get under way
+in that, and that then I should probably be on my way to the devil."
+Nothing, indeed, can surpass his scorn for all so-called business. Upon
+that subject gall squirts from him at a touch. "The whole enterprise of
+this nation is not illustrated by a thought," he writes; "it is not
+warmed by a sentiment; there is nothing in it for which a man should lay
+down his life, nor even his gloves." And again: "If our merchants did
+not most of them fail, and the banks too, my faith in the old laws of
+this world would be staggered. The statement that ninety-six in a
+hundred doing such business surely break down is perhaps the sweetest
+fact that statistics have revealed." The wish was probably father to the
+figures; but there is something enlivening in a hatred of so genuine a
+brand, hot as Corsican revenge, and sneering like Voltaire.
+
+Pencils, school-keeping, and trade being thus discarded one after
+another, Thoreau, with a stroke of strategy, turned the position. He saw
+his way to get his board and lodging for practically nothing; and
+Admetus never got less work out of any servant since the world began. It
+was his ambition to be an Oriental philosopher; but he was always a very
+Yankee sort of Oriental. Even in the peculiar attitude in which he stood
+to money, his system of personal economics, as we may call it, he
+displayed a vast amount of truly down-East calculation, and he adopted
+poverty like a piece of business. Yet his system is based on one or two
+ideas which, I believe, come naturally to all thoughtful youths, and are
+only pounded out of them by city uncles. Indeed, something essentially
+youthful distinguishes all Thoreau's knock-down blows at current
+opinion. Like the posers of a child, they leave the orthodox in a kind
+of speechless agony. These know the thing is nonsense. They are sure
+there must be an answer, yet somehow cannot find it. So it is with his
+system of economy. He cuts through the subject on so new a plane that
+the accepted arguments apply no longer; he attacks it in a new dialect
+where there are no catch-words ready made for the defender; after you
+have been boxing for years on a polite, gladiatorial convention, here is
+an assailant who does not scruple to hit below the belt.
+
+"The cost of a thing," says he, "is _the amount of what I will call
+life_ which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the
+long run." I have been accustomed to put it to myself, perhaps more
+clearly, that the price we have to pay for money is paid in liberty.
+Between these two ways of it, at least, the reader will probably not
+fail to find a third definition of his own; and it follows, on one or
+other, that a man may pay too dearly for his livelihood, by giving, in
+Thoreau's terms, his whole life for it, or, in mine, bartering for it
+the whole of his available liberty, and becoming a slave till death.
+There are two questions to be considered--the quality of what we buy,
+and the price we have to pay for it. Do you want a thousand a year, a
+two thousand a year, or a ten thousand a year livelihood? and can you
+afford the one you want? It is a matter of taste; it is not in the least
+degree a question of duty, though commonly supposed so. But there is no
+authority for that view anywhere. It is nowhere in the Bible. It is true
+that we might do a vast amount of good if we were wealthy, but it is
+also highly improbable; not many do; and the art of growing rich is not
+only quite distinct from that of doing good, but the practice of the one
+does not at all train a man for practising the other. "Money might be of
+great service to me," writes Thoreau; "but the difficulty now is that I
+do not improve my opportunities, and therefore I am not prepared to have
+my opportunities increased." It is a mere illusion that, above a certain
+income, the personal desires will be satisfied and leave a wider margin
+for the generous impulse. It is as difficult to be generous, or anything
+else except perhaps a member of Parliament, on thirty thousand as on
+two hundred a year.
+
+Now Thoreau's tastes were well defined. He loved to be free, to be
+master of his times and seasons, to indulge the mind rather than the
+body; he preferred long rambles to rich dinners, his own reflections to
+the consideration of society, and an easy, calm, unfettered, active life
+among green trees to dull toiling at the counter of a bank. And such
+being his inclination he determined to gratify it. A poor man must save
+off something; he determined to save off his livelihood. "When a man has
+attained those things which are necessary to life," he writes, "there is
+another alternative than to obtain the superfluities; _he may adventure
+on life now_, his vacation from humbler toil having commenced." Thoreau
+would get shelter, some kind of covering for his body, and necessary
+daily bread; even these he should get as cheaply as possible; and then,
+his vacation from humbler toil having commenced, devote himself to
+Oriental philosophers, the study of nature, and the work of
+self-improvement.
+
+Prudence, which bids us all go to the ant for wisdom and hoard against
+the day of sickness, was not a favourite with Thoreau. He preferred that
+other, whose name is so much misappropriated: Faith. When he had secured
+the necessaries of the moment, he would not reckon up possible accidents
+or torment himself with trouble for the future. He had no toleration for
+the man "who ventures to live only by the aid of the mutual insurance
+company, which has promised to bury him decently." He would trust
+himself a little to the world. "We may safely trust a good deal more
+than we do," says he. "How much is not done by us! or what if we had
+been taken sick?" And then, with a stab of satire, he describes
+contemporary mankind in a phrase: "All the day long on the alert, at
+night we unwillingly say our prayers and commit ourselves to
+uncertainties." It is not likely that the public will be much affected
+by Thoreau, when they blink the direct injunctions of the religion they
+profess; and yet, whether we will or no, we make the same hazardous
+ventures; we back our own health and the honesty of our neighbours for
+all that we are worth; and it is chilling to think how many must lose
+their wager.
+
+In 1845, twenty-eight years old, an age by which the liveliest have
+usually declined into some conformity with the world, Thoreau, with a
+capital of something less than five pounds and a borrowed axe, walked
+forth into the woods by Walden Pond, and began his new experiment in
+life. He built himself a dwelling, and returned the axe, he says with
+characteristic and workmanlike pride, sharper than when he borrowed it;
+he reclaimed a patch, where he cultivated beans, peas, potatoes, and
+sweet corn; he had his bread to bake, his farm to dig, and for the
+matter of six weeks in the summer he worked at surveying, carpentry, or
+some other of his numerous dexterities, for hire. For more than five
+years this was all that he required to do for his support, and he had
+the winter and most of the summer at his entire disposal. For six weeks
+of occupation, a little cooking and a little gentle hygienic gardening,
+the man, you may say, had as good as stolen his livelihood. Or we must
+rather allow that he had done far better; for the thief himself is
+continually and busily occupied; and even one born to inherit a million
+will have more calls upon his time than Thoreau. Well might he say,
+"What old people tell you you cannot do, you try and find you can." And
+how surprising is his conclusion: "I am convinced that _to maintain
+oneself on this earth is not a hardship, but a pastime_, if we will live
+simply and wisely; _as the pursuits of simpler nations are still the
+sports of the more artificial_."
+
+When he had enough of that kind of life, he showed the same simplicity
+in giving it up as in beginning it. There are some who could have done
+the one, but, vanity forbidding, not the other; and that is perhaps the
+story of the hermits; but Thoreau made no fetich of his own example, and
+did what he wanted squarely. And five years is long enough for an
+experiment, and to prove the success of transcendental Yankeeism. It is
+not his frugality which is worthy of note; for, to begin with, that was
+inborn, and therefore inimitable by others who are differently
+constituted; and again, it was no new thing, but has often been equalled
+by poor Scotch students at the universities. The point is the sanity of
+his view of life, and the insight with which he recognised the position
+of money, and thought out for himself the problem of riches and a
+livelihood. Apart from his eccentricities, he had perceived, and was
+acting on, a truth of universal application. For money enters in two
+different characters into the scheme of life. A certain amount, varying
+with the number and empire of our desires, is a true necessary to each
+one of us in the present order of society; but beyond that amount, money
+is a commodity to be bought or not to be bought, a luxury in which we
+may either indulge or stint ourselves, like any other. And there are
+many luxuries that we may legitimately prefer to it, such as a grateful
+conscience, a country life, or the woman of our inclination. Trite,
+flat, and obvious as this conclusion may appear, we have only to look
+round us in society to see how scantily it has been recognised; and
+perhaps even ourselves, after a little reflection, may decide to spend a
+trifle less for money, and indulge ourselves a trifle more in the
+article of freedom.
+
+
+  III
+
+"To have done anything by which you earned money merely," says Thoreau,
+"is to be" (have been, he means) "idle and worse." There are two
+passages in his letters, both, oddly enough, relating to firewood, which
+must be brought together to be rightly understood. So taken, they
+contain between them the marrow of all good sense on the subject of work
+in its relation to something broader than mere livelihood. Here is the
+first: "I suppose I have burned up a good-sized tree to-night--and for
+what? I settled with Mr. Tarbell for it the other day; but that wasn't
+the final settlement. I got off cheaply from him. At last one will say:
+'Let us see, how much wood did you burn, sir?' And I shall shudder to
+think that the next question will be, 'What did you do while you were
+warm?'" Even after we have settled with Admetus in the person of Mr.
+Tarbell, there comes, you see, a further question. It is not enough to
+have earned our livelihood. Either the earning itself should have been
+serviceable to mankind, or something else must follow. To live is
+sometimes very difficult, but it is never meritorious in itself; and we
+must have a reason to allege to our own conscience why we should
+continue to exist upon this crowded earth. If Thoreau had simply dwelt
+in his house at Walden, a lover of trees, birds, and fishes, and the
+open air and virtue, a reader of wise books, an idle, selfish
+self-improver, he would have managed to cheat Admetus, but, to cling to
+metaphor, the devil would have had him in the end. Those who can avoid
+toil altogether and dwell in the Arcadia of private means, and even
+those who can, by abstinence, reduce the necessary amount of it to some
+six weeks a year, having the more liberty, have only the higher moral
+obligation to be up and doing in the interest of man.
+
+The second passage is this: "There is a far more important and warming
+heat, commonly lost, which precedes the burning of the wood. It is the
+smoke of industry, which is incense. I had been so thoroughly warmed in
+body and spirit, that when at length my fuel was housed, I came near
+selling it to the ashman, as if I had extracted all its heat." Industry
+is, in itself and when properly chosen, delightful and profitable to the
+worker; and when your toil has been a pleasure, you have not, as Thoreau
+says, "earned money merely," but money, health, delight, and moral
+profit, all in one. "We must heap up a great pile of doing for a small
+diameter of being," he says in another place; and then exclaims, "How
+admirably the artist is made to accomplish his self-culture by devotion
+to his art!" We may escape uncongenial toil, only to devote ourselves to
+that which is congenial. It is only to transact some higher business
+that even Apollo dare play the truant from Admetus. We must all work for
+the sake of work; we must all work, as Thoreau says again, in any
+"absorbing pursuit--it does not much matter what, so it be honest"; but
+the most profitable work is that which combines into one continued
+effort the largest proportion of the powers and desires of a man's
+nature; that into which he will plunge with ardour, and from which he
+will desist with reluctance; in which he will know the weariness of
+fatigue, but not that of satiety; and which will be ever fresh,
+pleasing, and stimulating to his taste. Such work holds a man together,
+braced at all points; it does not suffer him to doze or wander; it keeps
+him actively conscious of himself, yet raised among superior interests;
+it gives him the profit of industry with the pleasures of a pastime.
+This is what his art should be to the true artist, and that to a degree
+unknown in other and less intimate pursuits. For other professions stand
+apart from the human business of life; but an art has its seat at the
+centre of the artist's doings and sufferings, deals directly with his
+experiences, teaches him the lessons of his own fortunes and mishaps,
+and becomes a part of his biography. So says Goethe:
+
+  "Spät erklingt was früh erklang;
+   Glück und Unglück wird Gesang."
+
+Now Thoreau's art was literature; and it was one of which he had
+conceived most ambitiously. He loved and believed in good books. He said
+well, "Life is not habitually seen from any common platform so truly and
+unexaggerated as in the light of literature." But the literature he
+loved was of the heroic order. "Books, not which afford us a cowering
+enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an
+idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which
+even make us dangerous to existing institutions--such I call good
+books." He did not think them easy to be read. "The heroic books," he
+says, "even if printed in the character of our mother-tongue, will
+always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must
+laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a
+larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valour and
+generosity we have." Nor does he suppose that such books are easily
+written. "Great prose, of equal elevation, commands our respect more
+than great verse," says he, "since it implies a more permanent and level
+height, a life more pervaded with the grandeur of the thought. The poet
+often only makes an irruption, like the Parthian, and is off again,
+shooting while he retreats; but the prose writer has conquered like a
+Roman and settled colonies." We may ask ourselves, almost with dismay,
+whether such works exist at all but in the imagination of the student.
+For the bulk of the best of books is apt to be made up with ballast; and
+those in which energy of thought is combined with any stateliness of
+utterance may be almost counted on the fingers. Looking round in English
+for a book that should answer Thoreau's two demands of a style like
+poetry and sense that shall be both original and inspiriting, I come to
+Milton's "Areopagitica," and can name no other instance for the moment.
+Two things at least are plain: that if a man will condescend to nothing
+more commonplace in the way of reading, he must not look to have a large
+library; and that if he proposes himself to write in a similar vein, he
+will find his work cut out for him.
+
+Thoreau composed seemingly while he walked, or at least exercise and
+composition were with him intimately connected; for we are told that
+"the length of his walk uniformly made the length of his writing." He
+speaks in one place of "plainness and vigour, the ornaments of style,"
+which is rather too paradoxical to be comprehensively true. In another
+he remarks: "As for style of writing, if one has anything to say it
+drops from him simply as a stone falls to the ground." We must
+conjecture a very large sense indeed for the phrase "if one has anything
+to say." When truth flows from a man, fittingly clothed in style and
+without conscious effort, it is because the effort has been made and the
+work practically completed before he sat down to write. It is only out
+of fulness of thinking that expression drops perfect like a ripe fruit;
+and when Thoreau wrote so nonchalantly at his desk, it was because he
+had been vigorously active during his walk. For neither clearness,
+compression, nor beauty of language, come to any living creature till
+after a busy and prolonged acquaintance with the subject on hand. Easy
+writers are those who, like Walter Scott, choose to remain contented
+with a less degree of perfection than is legitimately within the compass
+of their powers. We hear of Shakespeare and his clean manuscript; but in
+face of the evidence of the style itself and of the various editions of
+_Hamlet_, this merely proves that Messrs. Hemming and Condell were
+unacquainted with the common enough phenomenon called a fair copy. He
+who would recast a tragedy already given to the world must frequently
+and earnestly have revised details in the study. Thoreau himself, and in
+spite of his protestations, is an instance of even extreme research in
+one direction; and his effort after heroic utterance is proved not only
+by the occasional finish, but by the determined exaggeration of his
+style. "I trust you realise what an exaggerator I am--that I lay myself
+out to exaggerate," he writes. And again, hinting at the explanation:
+"Who that has heard a strain of music feared lest he should speak
+extravagantly any more for ever?" And yet once more, in his essay on
+Carlyle, and this time with his meaning well in hand: "No truth, we
+think, was ever expressed but with this sort of emphasis, that for the
+time there seemed to be no other." Thus Thoreau was an exaggerative and
+a parabolical writer, not because he loved the literature of the East,
+but from a desire that people should understand and realise what he was
+writing. He was near the truth upon the general question; but in his own
+particular method, it appears to me, he wandered. Literature is not less
+a conventional art than painting or sculpture; and it is the least
+striking, as it is the most comprehensive of the three. To hear a strain
+of music, to see a beautiful woman, a river, a great city, or a starry
+night, is to make a man despair of his Lilliputian arts in language.
+Now, to gain that emphasis which seems denied to us by the very nature
+of the medium, the proper method of literature is by selection, which is
+a kind of negative exaggeration. It is the right of the literary artist,
+as Thoreau was on the point of seeing, to leave out whatever does not
+suit his purpose. Thus we extract the pure gold; and thus the
+well-written story of a noble life becomes, by its very omissions, more
+thrilling to the reader. But to go beyond this, like Thoreau, and to
+exaggerate directly, is to leave the saner classical tradition, and to
+put the reader on his guard. And when you write the whole for the half,
+you do not express your thought more forcibly, but only express a
+different thought which is not yours.
+
+Thoreau's true subject was the pursuit of self-improvement combined with
+an unfriendly criticism of life as it goes on in our societies; it is
+there that he best displays the freshness and surprising trenchancy of
+his intellect; it is there that his style becomes plain and vigorous,
+and therefore, according to his own formula, ornamental. Yet he did not
+care to follow this vein singly, but must drop into it by the way in
+books of a different purport. "Walden, or Life in the Woods"; "A Week on
+the Concord and Merrimack Rivers"; "The Maine Woods,"--such are the
+titles he affects. He was probably reminded by his delicate critical
+perception that the true business of literature is with narrative; in
+reasoned narrative, and there alone, that art enjoys all its advantages,
+and suffers least from its defects. Dry precept and disembodied
+disquisition, as they can only be read with an effort of abstraction,
+can never convey a perfectly complete or a perfectly natural
+impression. Truth, even in literature, must be clothed with flesh and
+blood, or it cannot tell its whole story to the reader. Hence the effect
+of anecdote on simple minds; and hence good biographies and works of
+high, imaginative art, are not only far more entertaining, but far more
+edifying, than books of theory or precept. Now Thoreau could not clothe
+his opinions in the garment of art, for that was not his talent; but he
+sought to gain the same elbow-room for himself, and to afford a similar
+relief to his readers, by mingling his thoughts with a record of
+experience.
+
+Again, he was a lover of nature. The quality which we should call
+mystery in a painting, and which belongs so particularly to the aspect
+of the external world and to its influence upon our feelings, was one
+which he was never weary of attempting to reproduce in his books. The
+seeming significance of nature's appearances, their unchanging
+strangeness to the senses, and the thrilling response which they waken
+in the mind of man, continued to surprise and stimulate his spirits. It
+appeared to him, I think, that if we could only write near enough to the
+facts, and yet with no pedestrian calm, but ardently, we might transfer
+the glamour of reality direct upon our pages; and that, if it were once
+thus captured and expressed, a new and instructive relation might appear
+between men's thoughts and the phenomena of nature. This was the eagle
+that he pursued all his life long, like a schoolboy with a butterfly
+net. Hear him to a friend: "Let me suggest a theme for you--to state to
+yourself precisely and completely what that walk over the mountains
+amounted to for you, returning to this essay again and again until you
+are satisfied that all that was important in your experience is in it.
+Don't suppose that you can tell it precisely the first dozen times you
+try, but at 'em again; especially when, after a sufficient pause, you
+suspect that you are touching the heart or summit of the matter,
+reiterate your blows there, and account for the mountain to yourself.
+Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make
+it short." Such was the method, not consistent for a man whose meanings
+were to "drop from him as a stone falls to the ground." Perhaps the most
+successful work that Thoreau ever accomplished in this direction is to
+be found in the passages relating to fish in the "Week." These are
+remarkable for a vivid truth of impression and a happy suitability of
+language, not frequently surpassed.
+
+Whatever Thoreau tried to do was tried in fair, square prose, with
+sentences solidly built, and no help from bastard rhythms. Moreover,
+there is a progression--I cannot call it a progress--in his work towards
+a more and more strictly prosaic level, until at last he sinks into the
+bathos of the prosy. Emerson mentions having once remarked to Thoreau:
+"Who would not like to write something which all can read, like
+'Robinson Crusoe'? and who does not see with regret that his page is not
+solid with a right materialistic treatment which delights everybody?" I
+must say in passing, that it is not the right materialistic treatment
+which delights the world in "Robinson," but the romantic and philosophic
+interest of the fable. The same treatment does quite the reverse of
+delighting us when it is applied, in "Colonel Jack," to the management
+of a plantation. But I cannot help suspecting Thoreau to have been
+influenced either by this identical remark or by some other closely
+similar in meaning. He began to fall more and more into a detailed
+materialistic treatment; he went into the business doggedly, as one who
+should make a guide-book; he not only chronicled what had been important
+in his own experience, but whatever might have been important in the
+experience of anybody else; not only what had affected him, but all that
+he saw or heard. His ardour had grown less, or perhaps it was
+inconsistent with a right materialistic treatment to display such
+emotions as he felt; and, to complete the eventful change, he chose,
+from a sense of moral dignity, to gut these later works of the saving
+quality of humour. He was not one of those authors who have learned, in
+his own words, "to leave out their dulness." He inflicts his full
+quantity upon the reader in such books as "Cape Cod," or "The Yankee in
+Canada." Of the latter he confessed that he had not managed to get much
+of himself into it. Heaven knows he had not, nor yet much of Canada, we
+may hope. "Nothing," he says somewhere, "can shock a brave man but
+dulness." Well, there are few spots more shocking to the brave than the
+pages of "The Yankee in Canada."
+
+There are but three books of his that will be read with much pleasure:
+the "Week," "Walden," and the collected letters. As to his poetry,
+Emerson's word shall suffice for us, it is so accurate and so prettily
+said: "The thyme and marjoram are not yet honey." In this, as in his
+prose, he relied greatly on the goodwill of the reader, and wrote
+throughout in faith. It was an exercise of faith to suppose that many
+would understand the sense of his best work, or that any could be
+exhilarated by the dreary chronicling of his worst. "But," as he says,
+"the gods do not hear any rude or discordant sound, as we learn from the
+echo; and I know that the nature towards which I launch these sounds is
+so rich that it will modulate anew and wonderfully improve my rudest
+strain."
+
+
+  IV
+
+"What means the fact," he cries, "that a soul which has lost all hope
+for itself can inspire in another listening soul such an infinite
+confidence in it, even while it is expressing its despair?" The question
+is an echo and an illustration of the words last quoted; and it forms
+the key-note of his thoughts on friendship. No one else, to my
+knowledge, has spoken in so high and just a spirit of the kindly
+relations; and I doubt whether it be a drawback that these lessons
+should come from one in many ways so unfitted to be a teacher in this
+branch. The very coldness and egoism of his own intercourse gave him a
+clearer insight into the intellectual basis of our warm, mutual
+tolerations; and testimony to their worth comes with added force from
+one who was solitary and disobliging, and of whom a friend remarked,
+with equal wit and wisdom, "I love Henry, but I cannot like him."
+
+He can hardly be persuaded to make any distinction between love and
+friendship; in such rarefied and freezing air, upon the mountain-tops of
+meditation, had he taught himself to breathe. He was, indeed, too
+accurate an observer not to have remarked that "there exists already a
+natural disinterestedness and liberality" between men and women; yet, he
+thought, "friendship is no respecter of sex." Perhaps there is a sense
+in which the words are true; but they were spoken in ignorance; and
+perhaps we shall have put the matter most correctly, if we call love a
+foundation for a nearer and freer degree of friendship than can be
+possible without it. For there are delicacies, eternal between persons
+of the same sex, which are melted and disappear in the warmth of love.
+
+To both, if they are to be right, he attributes the same nature and
+condition. "We are not what we are," says he, "nor do we treat or esteem
+each other for such, but for what we are capable of being." "A friend is
+one who incessantly pays us the compliment of expecting all the virtues
+from us, and who can appreciate them in us." "The friend asks no return
+but that his friend will religiously accept and wear and not disgrace
+his apotheosis of him." "It is the merit and preservation of friendship
+that it takes place on a level higher than the actual characters of the
+parties would seem to warrant." This is to put friendship on a pedestal
+indeed; and yet the root of the matter is there; and the last sentence,
+in particular, is like a light in a dark place, and makes many mysteries
+plain. We are different with different friends; yet if we look closely
+we shall find that every such relation reposes on some particular
+apotheosis of oneself; with each friend, although we could not
+distinguish it in words from any other, we have at least one special
+reputation to preserve: and it is thus that we run, when mortified, to
+our friend or the woman that we love, not to hear ourselves called
+better, but to be better men in point of fact. We seek this society to
+flatter ourselves with our own good conduct. And hence any falsehood in
+the relation, any incomplete or perverted understanding, will spoil even
+the pleasure of these visits. Thus says Thoreau again: "Only lovers know
+the value of truth." And yet again: "They ask for words and deeds, when
+a true relation is word and deed."
+
+But it follows that since they are neither of them so good as the other
+hopes, and each is, in a very honest manner, playing a part above his
+powers, such an intercourse must often be disappointing to both. "We may
+bid farewell sooner than complain," says Thoreau, "for our complaint is
+too well grounded to be uttered." "We have not so good a right to hate
+any as our friend."
+
+  "It were treason to our love
+   And a sin to God above,
+   One iota to abate
+   Of a pure, impartial hate."
+
+Love is not blind, nor yet forgiving. "O yes, believe me," as the song
+says, "Love has eyes!" The nearer the intimacy, the more cuttingly do we
+feel the unworthiness of those we love; and because you love one, and
+would die for that love to-morrow, you have not forgiven, and you never
+will forgive, that friend's misconduct. If you want a person's faults,
+go to those who love him. They will not tell you, but they know. And
+herein lies the magnanimous courage of love, that it endures this
+knowledge without change.
+
+It required a cold, distant personality like that of Thoreau, perhaps,
+to recognise and certainly to utter this truth; for a more human love
+makes it a point of honour not to acknowledge those faults of which it
+is most conscious. But his point of view is both high and dry. He has
+no illusions; he does not give way to love any more than to hatred, but
+preserves them both with care like valuable curiosities. A more
+bald-headed picture of life, if I may so express myself, has seldom been
+presented. He is an egoist; he does not remember, or does not think it
+worth while to remark, that, in these near intimacies, we are
+ninety-nine times disappointed in our beggarly selves for once that we
+are disappointed in our friend; that it is we who seem most frequently
+undeserving of the love that unites us; and that it is by our friend's
+conduct that we are continually rebuked and yet strengthened for a fresh
+endeavour. Thoreau is dry, priggish, and selfish. It is profit he is
+after in these intimacies; moral profit, certainly; but still profit to
+himself. If you will be the sort of friend I want, he remarks naively,
+"my education cannot dispense with your society." His education! as
+though a friend were a dictionary. And with all this, not one word about
+pleasure, or laughter, or kisses, or any quality of flesh and blood. It
+was not inappropriate, surely, that he had such close relations with the
+fish. We can understand the friend already quoted, when he cried: "As
+for taking his arm, I would as soon think of taking the arm of an
+elm-tree!"
+
+As a matter of fact he experienced but a broken enjoyment in his
+intimacies. He says he has been perpetually on the brink of the sort of
+intercourse he wanted, and yet never completely attained it. And what
+else had he to expect when he would not, in a happy phrase of Carlyle's,
+"nestle down into it"? Truly, so it will be always if you only stroll in
+upon your friends as you might stroll in to see a cricket match; and
+even then not simply for the pleasure of the thing, but with some
+afterthought of self-improvement, as though you had come to the cricket
+match to bet. It was his theory that people saw each other too
+frequently, so that their curiosity was not properly whetted, nor had
+they anything fresh to communicate; but friendship must be something
+else than a society for mutual improvement--indeed, it must only be
+that by the way, and to some extent unconsciously; and if Thoreau had
+been a man instead of a manner of elm-tree, he would have felt that he
+saw his friends too seldom, and have reaped benefits unknown to his
+philosophy from a more sustained and easy intercourse. We might remind
+him of his own words about love: "We should have no reserve; we should
+give the whole of ourselves to that business. But commonly men have not
+imagination enough to be thus employed about a human being, but must be
+coopering a barrel, forsooth." Ay, or reading Oriental philosophers. It
+is not the nature of the rival occupation, it is the fact that you
+suffer it to be a rival, that renders loving intimacy impossible.
+Nothing is given for nothing in this world; there can be no true love
+even on your own side, without devotion; devotion is the exercise of
+love, by which it grows; but if you will give enough of that, if you
+will pay the price in a sufficient "amount of what you call life," why
+then, indeed, whether with wife or comrade, you may have months and even
+years of such easy, natural, pleasurable, and yet improving intercourse
+as shall make time a moment and kindness a delight.
+
+The secret of his retirement lies not in misanthropy, of which he had no
+tincture, but part in his engrossing design of self-improvement and part
+in the real deficiencies of social intercourse. He was not so much
+difficult about his fellow human beings as he could not tolerate the
+terms of their association. He could take to a man for any genuine
+qualities, as we see by his admirable sketch of the Canadian woodcutter
+in "Walden"; but he would not consent, in his own words, to "feebly
+tabulate and paddle in the social slush." It seemed to him, I think,
+that society is precisely the reverse of friendship, in that it takes
+place on a lower level than the characters of any of the parties would
+warrant us to expect. The society talk of even the most brilliant man is
+of greatly less account than what you will get from him in (as the
+French say) a little committee. And Thoreau wanted geniality; he had not
+enough of the superficial, even at command; he could not swoop into a
+parlour and, in the naval phrase, "cut out" a human being from that
+dreary port; nor had he inclination for the task. I suspect he loved
+books and nature as well and near as warmly as he loved his
+fellow-creatures,--a melancholy, lean degeneration of the human
+character.
+
+"As for the dispute about solitude and society," he thus sums up: "Any
+comparison is impertinent. It is an idling down on the plain at the base
+of the mountain instead of climbing steadily to its top. Of course you
+will be glad of all the society you can get to go up with. Will you go
+to glory with me? is the burden of the song. It is not that we love to
+be alone, but that we love to soar, and when we do soar the company
+grows thinner and thinner till there is none at all. It is either the
+tribune on the plain, a sermon on the mount, or a very private ecstasy
+still higher up. Use all the society that will abet you." But surely it
+is no very extravagant opinion that it is better to give than to
+receive, to serve than to use our companions; and above all, where there
+is no question of service upon either side, that it is good to enjoy
+their company like a natural man. It is curious and in some ways
+dispiriting that a writer may be always best corrected out of his own
+mouth; and so, to conclude, here is another passage from Thoreau which
+seems aimed directly at himself: "Do not be too moral; you may cheat
+yourself out of much life so.... _All fables, indeed, have their morals;
+but the innocent enjoy the story._"
+
+
+  V
+
+"The only obligation," says he, "which I have a right to assume is to do
+at any time what I think right." "Why should we ever go abroad, even
+across the way, to ask a neighbour's advice?" "There is a nearer
+neighbour within, who is incessantly telling us how we should behave.
+_But we wait for the neighbour without to tell us of some false, easier
+way._" "The greater part of what my neighbours call good I believe in my
+soul to be bad." To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of
+becoming, is the only end of life. It is "when we fall behind ourselves"
+that "we are cursed with duties and the neglect of duties." "I love the
+wild," he says, "not less than the good." And again: "The life of a good
+man will hardly improve us more than the life of a freebooter, for the
+inevitable laws appear as plainly in the infringement as in the
+observance, and" (mark this) "_our lives are sustained by a nearly equal
+expense of virtue of some kind_." Even although he were a prig, it will
+be owned he could announce a startling doctrine. "As for doing good," he
+writes elsewhere, "that is one of the professions that are full.
+Moreover, I have tried it fairly, and, strange as it may seem, am
+satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution. Probably I should
+not conscientiously and deliberately forsake my particular calling to do
+the good which society demands of me, to save the universe from
+annihilation; and I believe that a like but infinitely greater
+steadfastness elsewhere is all that now preserves it. If you should ever
+be betrayed into any of these philanthropies, do not let your left hand
+know what your right hand does, for it is not worth knowing." Elsewhere
+he returns upon the subject, and explains his meaning thus: "If I ever
+_did_ a man any good in their sense, of course it was something
+exceptional and insignificant compared with the good or evil I am
+constantly doing by being what I am."
+
+There is a rude nobility, like that of a barbarian king, in this
+unshaken confidence in himself and indifference to the wants, thoughts,
+or sufferings of others. In his whole works I find no trace of pity.
+This was partly the result of theory, for he held the world too
+mysterious to be criticised, and asks conclusively: "What right have I
+to grieve who have not ceased to wonder?" But it sprang still more from
+constitutional indifference and superiority; and he grew up healthy,
+composed, and unconscious from among life's horrors, like a green
+bay-tree from a field of battle. It was from this lack in himself that
+he failed to do justice to the spirit of Christ; for while he could
+glean more meaning from individual precepts than any score of
+Christians, yet he conceived life in such a different hope, and viewed
+it with such contrary emotions, that the sense and purport of the
+doctrine as a whole seems to have passed him by or left him unimpressed.
+He could understand the idealism of the Christian view, but he was
+himself so unaffectedly unhuman that he did not recognise the human
+intention and essence of that teaching. Hence he complained that Christ
+did not leave us a rule that was proper and sufficient for this world,
+not having conceived the nature of the rule that was laid down; for
+things of that character that are sufficiently unacceptable become
+positively non-existent to the mind. But perhaps we shall best
+appreciate the defect in Thoreau by seeing it supplied in the case of
+Whitman. For the one, I feel confident, is the disciple of the other; it
+is what Thoreau clearly whispered that Whitman so uproariously bawls; it
+is the same doctrine, but with how immense a difference! the same
+argument, but used to what a new conclusion! Thoreau had plenty of
+humour until he tutored himself out of it, and so forfeited that best
+birthright of a sensible man; Whitman, in that respect, seems to have
+been sent into the world naked and unashamed; and yet by a strange
+consummation, it is the theory of the former that is arid, abstract, and
+claustral. Of these two philosophies, so nearly identical at bottom, the
+one pursues Self-improvement--a churlish, mangy dog; the other is up
+with the morning, in the best of health, and following the nymph
+Happiness, buxom, blithe, and debonair. Happiness, at least, is not
+solitary; it joys to communicate; it loves others, for it depends on
+them for its existence; it sanctions and encourages to all delights that
+are not unkind in themselves; if it lived to a thousand, it would not
+make excision of a single humorous passage; and while the self-improver
+dwindles towards the prig, and, if he be not of an excellent
+constitution, may even grow deformed into an Obermann, the very name and
+appearance of a happy man breathe of good-nature, and help the rest of
+us to live.
+
+In the case of Thoreau, so great a show of doctrine demands some outcome
+in the field of action. If nothing were to be done but build a shanty
+beside Walden Pond, we have heard altogether too much of these
+declarations of independence. That the man wrote some books is nothing
+to the purpose, for the same has been done in a suburban villa. That he
+kept himself happy is perhaps a sufficient excuse, but it is
+disappointing to the reader. We may be unjust, but when a man despises
+commerce and philanthropy alike, and has views of good so soaring that
+he must take himself apart from mankind for their cultivation, we will
+not be content without some striking act. It was not Thoreau's fault if
+he were not martyred; had the occasion come, he would have made a noble
+ending. As it is, he did once seek to interfere in the world's course;
+he made one practical appearance on the stage of affairs; and a strange
+one it was, and strangely characteristic of the nobility and the
+eccentricity of the man. It was forced on him by his calm but radical
+opposition to negro slavery. "Voting for the right is doing nothing for
+it," he saw; "it is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it
+should prevail." For his part, he would not "for an instant recognise
+that political organisation for _his_ government which is the _slave's_
+government also." "I do not hesitate to say," he adds, "that those who
+call themselves Abolitionists should at once effectually withdraw their
+support, both in person and property, from the government of
+Massachusetts." That is what he did: in 1843 he ceased to pay the
+poll-tax. The highway-tax he paid, for he said he was as desirous to be
+a good neighbour as to be a bad subject; but no more poll-tax to the
+State of Massachusetts. Thoreau had now seceded, and was a polity unto
+himself; or, as he explains it with admirable sense, "In fact, I
+quietly declare war with the State after my fashion, though I will still
+make what use and get what advantage of her I can, as is usual in such
+cases." He was put in prison; but that was a part of his design. "Under
+a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man
+is also a prison. I know this well, that if one thousand, if one
+hundred, if ten men whom I could name--ay, if _one_ HONEST man, in this
+State of Massachusetts, _ceasing to hold slaves_, were actually to
+withdraw from this copartnership, and be locked up in the county gaol
+therefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in America. For it
+matters not how small the beginning may seem to be; what is once well
+done is done for ever." Such was his theory of civil disobedience.
+
+And the upshot? A friend paid the tax for him; continued year by year to
+pay it in the sequel; and Thoreau was free to walk the woods unmolested.
+It was a _fiasco_, but to me it does not seem laughable; even those who
+joined in the laughter at the moment would be insensibly affected by
+this quaint instance of a good man's horror for injustice. We may
+compute the worth of that one night's imprisonment as outweighing half a
+hundred voters at some subsequent election; and if Thoreau had possessed
+as great a power of persuasion as (let us say) Falstaff, if he had
+counted a party however small, if his example had been followed by a
+hundred or by thirty of his fellows, I cannot but believe it would have
+greatly precipitated the era of freedom and justice. We feel the
+misdeeds of our country with so little fervour, for we are not witnesses
+to the suffering they cause; but when we see them wake an active horror
+in our fellow-man, when we see a neighbour prefer to lie in prison
+rather than be so much as passively implicated in their perpetration,
+even the dullest of us will begin to realise them with a quicker pulse.
+
+Not far from twenty years later, when Captain John Brown was taken at
+Harper's Ferry, Thoreau was the first to come forward in his defence.
+The committees wrote to him unanimously that his action was premature.
+"I did not send to you for advice," said he, "but to announce that I was
+to speak." I have used the word "defence"; in truth he did not seek to
+defend him, even declared it would be better for the good cause that he
+should die; but he praised his action as I think Brown would have liked
+to hear it praised.
+
+Thus this singularly eccentric and independent mind, wedded to a
+character of so much strength, singleness, and purity, pursued its own
+path of self-improvement for more than half a century, part
+gymnosophist, part backwoodsman; and thus did it come twice, though in a
+subaltern attitude, into the field of political history.
+
+
+   NOTE.--For many facts in the above essay, among which I may mention
+   the incident of the squirrel, I am indebted to "Thoreau: His Life and
+   Aims," by H. A. Page, _i.e._, as is well known, Dr Japp.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+YOSHIDA-TORAJIRO
+
+
+The name at the head of this page is probably unknown to the English
+reader, and yet I think it should become a household word like that of
+Garibaldi or John Brown. Some day soon, we may expect to hear more fully
+the details of Yoshida's history, and the degree of his influence in the
+transformation of Japan; even now there must be Englishmen acquainted
+with the subject, and perhaps the appearance of this sketch may elicit
+something more complete and exact. I wish to say that I am not, rightly
+speaking, the author of the present paper: I tell the story on the
+authority of an intelligent Japanese gentleman, Mr. Taiso Masaki, who
+told it me with an emotion that does honour to his heart; and though I
+have taken some pains, and sent my notes to him to be corrected, this
+can be no more than an imperfect outline.
+
+Yoshida-Torajiro was son to the hereditary military instructor of the
+house of Choshu. The name you are to pronounce with an equality of
+accent on the different syllables, almost as in French, the vowels as in
+Italian, but the consonants in the English manner--except the _j_, which
+has the French sound, or, as it has been cleverly proposed to write it,
+the sound of _zh_. Yoshida was very learned in Chinese letters, or, as
+we might say, in the classics, and in his father's subject;
+fortification was among his favourite studies, and he was a poet from
+his boyhood. He was born to a lively and intelligent patriotism; the
+condition of Japan was his great concern; and while he projected a
+better future, he lost no opportunity of improving his knowledge of her
+present state. With this end he was continually travelling in his youth,
+going on foot and sometimes with three days' provisions on his back, in
+the brave, self-helpful manner of all heroes. He kept a full diary while
+he was thus upon his journeys, but it is feared that these notes have
+been destroyed. If their value were in any respect such as we have
+reason to expect from the man's character, this would be a loss not easy
+to exaggerate. It is still wonderful to the Japanese how far he
+contrived to push these explorations; a cultured gentleman of that land
+and period would leave a complimentary poem where-ever he had been
+hospitably entertained; and a friend of Mr. Masaki, who was likewise a
+great wanderer, has found such traces of Yoshida's passage in very
+remote regions of Japan.
+
+Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is
+thought necessary; but Yoshida considered otherwise, and he studied the
+miseries of his fellow-countrymen with as much attention and research as
+though he had been going to write a book, instead of merely to propose a
+remedy. To a man of his intensity and singleness, there is no question
+but that this survey was melancholy in the extreme. His dissatisfaction
+is proved by the eagerness with which he threw himself into the cause of
+reform; and what would have discouraged another braced Yoshida for his
+task. As he professed the theory of arms, it was firstly the defences of
+Japan that occupied his mind. The external feebleness of that country
+was then illustrated by the manners of overriding barbarians, and the
+visits of big barbarian warships: she was a country beleaguered. Thus
+the patriotism of Yoshida took a form which may be said to have defeated
+itself: he had it upon him to keep out these all-powerful foreigners,
+whom it is now one of his chief merits to have helped to introduce; but
+a man who follows his own virtuous heart will be always found in the end
+to have been fighting for the best. One thing leads naturally to another
+in an awakened mind, and that with an upward progress from effect to
+cause. The power and knowledge of these foreigners were things
+inseparable; by envying them their military strength, Yoshida came to
+envy them their culture; from the desire to equal them in the first,
+sprang his desire to share with them in the second; and thus he is found
+treating in the same book of a new scheme to strengthen the defences of
+Kioto and of the establishment, in the same city, of a university of
+foreign teachers. He hoped, perhaps, to get the good of other lands
+without their evil; to enable Japan to profit by the knowledge of the
+barbarians, and still keep her inviolate with her own arts and virtues.
+But whatever was the precise nature of his hope, the means by which it
+was to be accomplished were both difficult and obvious. Some one with
+eyes and understanding must break through the official cordon, escape
+into the new world, and study this other civilisation on the spot. And
+who could be better suited for the business? It was not without danger,
+but he was without fear. It needed preparation and insight; and what had
+he done since he was a child but prepare himself with the best culture
+of Japan, and acquire in his excursions the power and habit of
+observing?
+
+He was but twenty-two, and already all this was clear in his mind, when
+news reached Choshu that Commodore Perry was lying near to Yeddo. Here,
+then, was the patriot's opportunity. Among the Samurai of Choshu, and in
+particular among the councillors of the Daimio, his general culture, his
+views, which the enlightened were eager to accept, and, above all, the
+prophetic charm, the radiant persuasion of the man, had gained him many
+and sincere disciples. He had thus a strong influence at the provincial
+Court; and so he obtained leave to quit the district, and, by way of a
+pretext, a privilege to follow his profession in Yeddo. Thither he
+hurried, and arrived in time to be too late: Perry had weighed anchor,
+and his sails had vanished from the waters of Japan. But Yoshida, having
+put his hand to the plough, was not the man to go back; he had entered
+upon this business, and, please God, he would carry it through; and so
+he gave up his professional career and remained in Yeddo to be at hand
+against the next opportunity. By this behaviour he put himself into an
+attitude towards his superior, the Daimio of Choshu, which I cannot
+thoroughly explain. Certainly, he became a _Ronyin_, a broken man, a
+feudal outlaw; certainly he was liable to be arrested if he set foot
+upon his native province; yet I am cautioned that "he did not really
+break his allegiance," but only so far separated himself as that the
+prince could no longer be held accountable for his late vassal's
+conduct. There is some nicety of feudal custom here that escapes my
+comprehension.
+
+In Yeddo, with this nondescript political status, and cut off from any
+means of livelihood, he was joyfully supported by those who sympathised
+with his design. One was Sákuma-Shozan, hereditary retainer of one of
+the Shogun's councillors, and from him he got more than money or than
+money's worth. A steady, respectable man, with an eye to the world's
+opinion, Sákuma was one of those who, if they cannot do great deeds in
+their own person, have yet an ardour of admiration for those who can,
+that recommends them to the gratitude of history. They aid and abet
+greatness more, perhaps, than we imagine. One thinks of them in
+connection with Nicodemus, who visited our Lord by night. And Sákuma was
+in a position to help Yoshida more practically than by simple
+countenance; for he could read Dutch, and was eager to communicate what
+he knew.
+
+While the young Ronyin thus lay studying in Yeddo, news came of a
+Russian ship at Nangasaki. No time was to be lost. Sákuma contributed "a
+long copy of encouraging verses"; and off set Yoshida on foot for
+Nangasaki. His way lay through his own province of Choshu; but, as the
+high-road to the south lay apart from the capital, he was able to avoid
+arrest. He supported himself, like a _trouvère_, by his proficiency in
+verse. He carried his works along with him, to serve as an
+introduction. When he reached a town he would inquire for the house of
+any one celebrated for swordsmanship, or poetry, or some of the other
+acknowledged forms of culture; and there, on giving a taste of his
+skill, he would be received and entertained, and leave behind him, when
+he went away, a compliment in verse. Thus he travelled through the
+Middle Ages on his voyage of discovery into the nineteenth century. When
+he reached Nangasaki he was once more too late. The Russians were gone.
+But he made a profit on his journey in spite of fate, and stayed awhile
+to pick up scraps of knowledge from the Dutch interpreters--a low class
+of men--but one that had opportunities; and then, still full of purpose,
+returned to Yeddo on foot, as he had come.
+
+It was not only his youth and courage that supported him under these
+successive disappointments, but the continual affluence of new
+disciples. The man had the tenacity of a Bruce or a Columbus, with a
+pliability that was all his own. He did not fight for what the world
+would call success; but for "the wages of going on." Check him off in a
+dozen directions, he would find another outlet and break forth. He
+missed one vessel after another, and the main work still halted; but so
+long as he had a single Japanese to enlighten and prepare for the better
+future, he could still feel that he was working for Japan. Now, he had
+scarce returned from Nangasaki, when he was sought out by a new
+inquirer, the most promising of all. This was a common soldier, of the
+Hemming class, a dyer by birth, who had heard vaguely[4] of Yoshida's
+movements, and had become filled with wonder as to their design. This
+was a far different inquirer from Sákuma-Shozan, or the councillors of
+the Daimio of Choshu. This was no two-sworded gentleman, but the common
+stuff of the country, born in low traditions and unimproved by books;
+and yet that influence, that radiant persuasion that never failed
+Yoshida in any circumstance of his short life, enchanted, enthralled,
+and converted the common soldier, as it had done already with the
+elegant and learned. The man instantly burned up into a true enthusiasm;
+his mind had been only waiting for a teacher; he grasped in a moment the
+profit of these new ideas; he, too, would go to foreign, outlandish
+parts, and bring back the knowledge that was to strengthen and renew
+Japan; and in the meantime, that he might be the better prepared,
+Yoshida set himself to teach, and he to learn, the Chinese literature.
+It is an episode most honourable to Yoshida, and yet more honourable
+still to the soldier, and to the capacity and virtue of the common
+people of Japan.
+
+And now, at length, Commodore Perry returned to Simoda. Friends crowded
+round Yoshida with help, counsels, and encouragement. One presented him
+with a great sword, three feet long and very heavy, which, in the
+exultation of the hour, he swore to carry throughout all his wanderings,
+and to bring back--a far-travelled weapon--to Japan. A long letter was
+prepared in Chinese for the American officers; it was revised and
+corrected by Sákuma, and signed by Yoshida, under the name of
+Urinaki-Manji, and by the soldier under that of Ichigi-Koda. Yoshida had
+supplied himself with a profusion of materials for writing; his dress
+was literally stuffed with paper which was to come back again enriched
+with his observations, and make a great and happy kingdom of Japan. Thus
+equipped, this pair of emigrants set forward on foot from Yeddo, and
+reached Simoda about nightfall. At no period within history can travel
+have presented to any European creature the same face of awe and terror
+as to these courageous Japanese. The descent of Ulysses into hell is a
+parallel more near the case than the boldest expedition in the Polar
+circles. For their act was unprecedented; it was criminal; and it was to
+take them beyond the pale of humanity into a land of devils. It is not
+to be wondered at if they were thrilled by the thought of their unusual
+situation; and perhaps the soldier gave utterance to the sentiment of
+both when he sang, "in Chinese singing" (so that we see he had already
+profited by his lessons), these two appropriate verses:
+
+  "We do not know where we are to sleep to-night,
+   In a thousand miles of desert where we can see no human smoke."
+
+In a little temple, hard by the sea-shore, they lay down to repose;
+sleep overtook them as they lay; and when they awoke, "the east was
+already white" for their last morning in Japan. They seized a
+fisherman's boat and rowed out--Perry lying far to sea because of the
+two tides. Their very manner of boarding was significant of
+determination; for they had no sooner caught hold upon the ship than
+they kicked away their boat to make return impossible. And now you would
+have thought that all was over. But the Commodore was already in treaty
+with the Shogun's Government; it was one of the stipulations that no
+Japanese was to be aided in escaping from Japan; and Yoshida and his
+followers were handed over as prisoners to the authorities at Simoda.
+That night he who had been to explore the secrets of the barbarian,
+slept, if he might sleep at all, in a cell too short for lying down at
+full length, and too low for standing upright. There are some
+disappointments too great for commentary.
+
+Sákuma, implicated by his handwriting, was sent into his own province in
+confinement, from which he was soon released. Yoshida and the soldier
+suffered a long and miserable period of captivity, and the latter,
+indeed, died, while yet in prison, of a skin disease. But such a spirit
+as that of Yoshida-Torajiro is not easily made or kept a captive; and
+that which cannot be broken by misfortune you shall seek in vain to
+confine in a bastille. He was indefatigably active, writing reports to
+Government and treatises for dissemination. These latter were
+contraband; and yet he found no difficulty in their distribution, for he
+always had the jailer on his side. It was in vain that they kept
+changing him from one prison to another; Government by that plan only
+hastened the spread of new ideas; for Yoshida had only to arrive to make
+a convert. Thus, though he himself was laid by the heels, he confirmed
+and extended his party in the State.
+
+At last, after many lesser transferences, he was given over from the
+prisons of the Shogun to those of his own superior, the Daimio of
+Choshu. I conceive it possible that he may then have served out his time
+for the attempt to leave Japan, and was now resigned to the provincial
+Government on a lesser count, as a Ronyin or feudal rebel. But, however
+that may be, the change was of great importance to Yoshida; for by the
+influence of his admirers in the Daimio's council, he was allowed the
+privilege, underhand, of dwelling in his own house. And there, as well
+to keep up communication with his fellow-reformers as to pursue his work
+of education, he received boys to teach. It must not be supposed that he
+was free; he was too marked a man for that; he was probably assigned to
+some small circle, and lived, as we should say, under police
+surveillance; but to him, who had done so much from under lock and key,
+this would seem a large and profitable liberty.
+
+It was at this period that Mr. Masaki was brought into personal contact
+with Yoshida; and hence, through the eyes of a boy of thirteen, we get
+one good look at the character and habits of the hero. He was ugly and
+laughably disfigured with the small-pox; and while nature had been so
+niggardly with him from the first, his personal habits were even
+sluttish. His clothes were wretched; when he ate or washed he wiped his
+hands upon his sleeves; and as his hair was not tied more than once in
+the two months it was often disgusting to behold. With such a picture,
+it is easy to believe that he never married. A good teacher, gentle in
+act, although violent and abusive in speech, his lessons were apt to go
+over the heads of his scholars, and to leave them gaping, or more often
+laughing. Such was his passion for study that he even grudged himself
+natural repose; and when he grew drowsy over his books he would, if it
+was summer, put mosquitoes up his sleeve; and, if it was winter, take
+off his shoes and run barefoot on the snow. His handwriting was
+exceptionally villainous; poet though he was, he had no taste for what
+was elegant; and in a country where to write beautifully was not the
+mark of a scrivener but an admired accomplishment for gentlemen, he
+suffered his letters to be jolted out of him by the press of matter and
+the heat of his convictions. He would not tolerate even the appearance
+of a bribe; for bribery lay at the root of much that was evil in Japan,
+as well as in countries nearer home; and once when a merchant brought
+him his son to educate, and added, as was customary[5], a little private
+sweetener, Yoshida dashed the money in the giver's face, and launched
+into such an outbreak of indignation as made the matter public in the
+school. He was still, when Masaki knew him, much weakened by his
+hardships in prison; and the presentation-sword, three feet long, was
+too heavy for him to wear without distress; yet he would always gird it
+on when he went to dig in his garden. That is a touch which qualifies
+the man. A weaker nature would have shrunk from the sight of what only
+commemorated a failure. But he was of Thoreau's mind, that if you can
+"make your failure tragical by courage, it will not differ from
+success." He could look back without confusion to his enthusiastic
+promise. If events had been contrary, and he found himself unable to
+carry out that purpose--well, there was but the more reason to be brave
+and constant in another; if he could not carry the sword into barbarian
+lands, it should at least be witness to a life spent entirely for Japan.
+
+This is the sight we have of him as he appeared to schoolboys, but not
+related in the schoolboy spirit. A man so careless of the graces must be
+out of court with boys and women. And, indeed, as we have all been more
+or less to school, it will astonish no one that Yoshida was regarded by
+his scholars as a laughing-stock. The schoolboy has a keen sense of
+humour. Heroes he learns to understand and to admire in books; but he is
+not forward to recognise the heroic under the traits of any contemporary
+man, and least of all in a brawling, dirty, and eccentric teacher. But
+as the years went by, and the scholars of Yoshida continued in vain to
+look around them for the abstractly perfect, and began more and more to
+understand the drift of his instructions, they learned to look back upon
+their comic schoolmaster as upon the noblest of mankind.
+
+The last act of this brief and full existence was already near at hand.
+Some of his work was done; for already there had been Dutch teachers
+admitted into Nangasaki, and the country at large was keen for the new
+learning. But though the renaissance had begun, it was impeded and
+dangerously threatened by the power of the Shogun. His minister--the
+same who was afterwards assassinated in the snow in the very midst of
+his bodyguard--not only held back pupils from going to the Dutchmen, but
+by spies and detectives, by imprisonment and death, kept thinning out of
+Japan the most intelligent and active spirits. It is the old story of a
+power upon its last legs--learning to the bastille, and courage to the
+block; when there are none left but sheep and donkeys, the State will
+have been saved. But a man must not think to cope with a revolution; nor
+a minister, however fortified with guards, to hold in check a country
+that had given birth to such men as Yoshida and his soldier-follower.
+The violence of the ministerial Tarquin only served to direct attention
+to the illegality of his master's rule; and people began to turn their
+allegiance from Yeddo and the Shogun to the long-forgotten Mikado in his
+seclusion at Kioto. At this juncture, whether in consequence or not, the
+relations between these two rulers became strained; and the Shogun's
+minister set forth for Kioto to put another affront upon the rightful
+sovereign. The circumstance was well fitted to precipitate events. It
+was a piece of religion to defend the Mikado; it was a plain piece of
+political righteousness to oppose a tyrannical and bloody usurpation. To
+Yoshida the moment for action seemed to have arrived. He was himself
+still confined in Choshu. Nothing was free but his intelligence; but
+with that he sharpened a sword for the Shogun's minister. A party of his
+followers were to waylay the tyrant at a village on the Yeddo and Kioto
+road, present him with a petition, and put him to the sword. But Yoshida
+and his friends were closely observed; and the too great expedition of
+two of the conspirators, a boy of eighteen and his brother, wakened the
+suspicion of the authorities, and led to a full discovery of the plot
+and the arrest of all who were concerned.
+
+In Yeddo, to which he was taken, Yoshida was thrown again into a strict
+confinement. But he was not left destitute of sympathy in this last hour
+of trial. In the next cell lay one Kusákabé, a reformer from the
+southern highlands of Satsuma. They were in prison for different plots,
+indeed, but for the same intention; they shared the same beliefs and the
+same aspirations for Japan; many and long were the conversations they
+held through the prison wall, and dear was the sympathy that soon united
+them. It fell first to the lot of Kusákabé to pass before the judges;
+and when sentence had been pronounced he was led towards the place of
+death below Yoshida's window. To turn the head would have been to
+implicate his fellow-prisoner; but he threw him a look from his eye, and
+bade him farewell in a loud voice, with these two Chinese verses:--
+
+  "It is better to be a crystal and be broken,
+   Than to remain perfect like a tile upon the housetop."
+
+So Kusákabé, from the highlands of Satsuma, passed out of the theatre of
+this world. His death was like an antique worthy's.
+
+A little after, and Yoshida too must appear before the Court. His last
+scene was of a piece with his career, and fitly crowned it. He seized on
+the opportunity of a public audience, confessed and gloried in his
+design, and, reading his auditors a lesson in the history of their
+country, told at length the illegality of the Shogun's power and the
+crimes by which its exercise was sullied. So, having said his say for
+once, he was led forth and executed, thirty-one years old.
+
+A military engineer, a bold traveller (at least in wish), a poet, a
+patriot, a schoolmaster, a friend to learning, a martyr to
+reform,--there are not many men, dying at seventy, who have served their
+country in such various characters. He was not only wise and provident
+in thought, but surely one of the fieriest of heroes in execution. It is
+hard to say which is the most remarkable--his capacity for command,
+which subdued his very jailers; his hot, unflagging zeal; or his
+stubborn superiority to defeat. He failed in each particular enterprise
+that he attempted; and yet we have only to look at his country to see
+how complete has been his general success. His friends and pupils made
+the majority of leaders in that final Revolution, now some twelve years
+old; and many of them are, or were until the other day, high placed
+among the rulers of Japan. And when we see all round us these brisk
+intelligent students, with their strange foreign air, we should never
+forget how Yoshida marched afoot from Choshu to Yeddo, and from Yeddo to
+Nangasaki, and from Nangasaki back again to Yeddo; how he boarded the
+American ship, his dress stuffed with writing material; nor how he
+languished in prison, and finally gave his death, as he had formerly
+given all his life and strength and leisure, to gain for his native
+land that very benefit which she now enjoys so largely. It is better to
+be Yoshida and perish, than to be only Sákuma and yet save the hide.
+Kusákabé, of Satsuma, has said the word: it is better to be a crystal
+and be broken.
+
+I must add a word; for I hope the reader will not fail to perceive that
+this is as much the story of a heroic people as that of a heroic man. It
+is not enough to remember Yoshida; we must not forget the common
+soldier, nor Kusákabé, nor the boy of eighteen, Nomura, of Choshu, whose
+eagerness betrayed the plot. It is exhilarating to have lived in the
+same days with these great-hearted gentlemen. Only a few miles from us,
+to speak by the proportion of the universe, while I was droning over my
+lessons, Yoshida was goading himself to be wakeful with the stings of
+the mosquito; and while you were grudging a penny income-tax, Kusákabé
+was stepping to death with a noble sentence on his lips.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [4] Yoshida, when on his way to Nangasaki, met the soldier and
+    talked with him by the roadside; they then parted, but the soldier
+    was so much struck by the words he heard, that on Yoshida's return
+    he sought him out and declared his intention of devoting his life to
+    the good cause. I venture, in the absence of the writer, to insert
+    this correction, having been present when the story was told by Mr.
+    Masaki.--F. J. [Fleeming Jenkin.] And I, there being none to settle
+    the difference, must reproduce both versions.--R. L. S.
+
+  [5] I understood that the merchant was endeavouring surreptitiously to
+    obtain for his son instruction to which he was not entitled.--F. J.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+FRANÇOIS VILLON, STUDENT, POET, AND HOUSEBREAKER
+
+
+Perhaps one of the most curious revolutions in literary history is the
+sudden bull's-eye light cast by M. Longnon on the obscure existence of
+François Villon[6]. His book is not remarkable merely as a chapter of
+biography exhumed after four centuries. To readers of the poet it will
+recall, with a flavour of satire, that characteristic passage in which
+he bequeaths his spectacles--with a humorous reservation of the case--to
+the hospital for blind paupers known as the Fifteen-Score. Thus
+equipped, let the blind paupers go and separate the good from the bad in
+the cemetery of the Innocents! For his own part, the poet can see no
+distinction. Much have the dead people made of their advantages. What
+does it matter now that they have lain in state beds and nourished
+portly bodies upon cakes and cream! Here they all lie, to be trodden in
+the mud; the large estate and the small, sounding virtue and adroit or
+powerful vice, in very much the same condition; and a bishop not to be
+distinguished from a lamplighter with even the strongest spectacles.
+
+Such was Villon's cynical philosophy. Four hundred years after his
+death, when surely all danger might be considered at an end, a pair of
+critical spectacles have been applied to his own remains; and though he
+left behind him a sufficiently ragged reputation from the first, it is
+only after these four hundred years that his delinquencies have been
+finally tracked home, and we can assign him to his proper place among
+the good or wicked. It is a staggering thought, and one that affords a
+fine figure of the imperishability of men's acts, that the stealth of
+the private inquiry office can be carried so far back into the dead and
+dusty past. We are not so soon quit of our concerns as Villon fancied.
+In the extreme of dissolution, when not so much as a man's name is
+remembered, when his dust is scattered to the four winds, and perhaps
+the very grave and the very graveyard where he was laid to rest have
+been forgotten, desecrated, and buried under populous towns,--even in
+this extreme let an antiquary fall across a sheet of manuscript, and the
+name will be recalled, the old infamy will pop out into daylight like a
+toad out of a fissure in the rock, and the shadow of the shade of what
+was once a man will be heartily pilloried by his descendants. A little
+while ago and Villon was almost totally forgotten; then he was revived
+for the sake of his verses; and now he is being revived with a vengeance
+in the detection of his misdemeanours. How unsubstantial is this
+projection of a man's existence, which can lie in abeyance for centuries
+and then be brushed up again and set forth for the consideration of
+posterity by a few dips in an antiquary's inkpot! This precarious tenure
+of fame goes a long way to justify those (and they are not few) who
+prefer cakes and cream in the immediate present.
+
+
+  A WILD YOUTH
+
+François de Montcorbier, _alias_ François des Loges, _alias_ François
+Villon, _alias_ Michel Mouton, Master of Arts in the University of
+Paris, was born in that city in the summer of 1431. It was a memorable
+year for France on other and higher considerations. A great-hearted girl
+and a poor-hearted boy made, the one her last, the other his first
+appearance on the public stage of that unhappy country. On the 30th of
+May the ashes of Joan of Arc were thrown into the Seine, and on the 2nd
+of December our Henry Sixth made his Joyous Entry dismally enough into
+disaffected and depopulating Paris. Sword and fire still ravaged the
+open country. On a single April Saturday twelve hundred persons, besides
+children, made their escape out of the starving capital. The hangman, as
+is not uninteresting to note in connection with Master Francis, was kept
+hard at work in 1431; on the last of April and on the 4th of May alone,
+sixty-two bandits swung from Paris gibbets.[7] A more confused or
+troublous time it would have been difficult to select for a start in
+life. Not even a man's nationality was certain; for the people of Paris
+there was no such thing as a Frenchman. The English were the English
+indeed, but the French were only the Armagnacs, whom, with Joan of Arc
+at their head, they had beaten back from under their ramparts not two
+years before. Such public sentiment as they had centred about their dear
+Duke of Burgundy, and the dear Duke had no more urgent business than to
+keep out of their neighbourhood.... At least, and whether he liked it or
+not, our disreputable troubadour was tubbed and swaddled as a subject of
+the English crown.
+
+We hear nothing of Villon's father, except that he was poor and of mean
+extraction. His mother was given piously, which does not imply very much
+in an old Frenchwoman, and quite uneducated. He had an uncle, a monk in
+an abbey at Angers, who must have prospered beyond the family average,
+and was reported to be worth five or six hundred crowns. Of this uncle
+and his money-box the reader will hear once more. In 1448 Francis became
+a student of the University of Paris; in 1450 he took the degree of
+Bachelor, and in 1452 that of Master of Arts. His _bourse_, or the sum
+paid weekly for his board, was of the amount of two sous. Now two sous
+was about the price of a pound of salt butter in the bad times of about
+1417; it was the price of half a pound in the worse times of 1419; and
+in 1444, just four years before Villon joined the University, it seems
+to have been taken as the average wage for a day's manual labour.[8] In
+short, it cannot have been a very profuse allowance to keep a sharp-set
+lad in breakfast and supper for seven mortal days; and Villon's share of
+the cakes and pastry and general good cheer, to which he is never weary
+of referring, must have been slender from the first.
+
+The educational arrangements of the University of Paris were, to our way
+of thinking, somewhat incomplete. Worldly and monkish elements were
+presented in a curious confusion, which the youth might disentangle for
+himself. If he had an opportunity, on the one hand, of acquiring much
+hair-drawn divinity and a taste for formal disputation, he was put in
+the way of much gross and flaunting vice upon the other. The
+lecture-room of a scholastic doctor was sometimes under the same roof
+with establishments of a very different and peculiarly unedifying order.
+The students had extraordinary privileges, which by all accounts they
+abused extraordinarily. And while some condemned themselves to an almost
+sepulchral regularity and seclusion, others fled the schools, swaggered
+in the street "with their thumbs in their girdle," passed the night in
+riot, and behaved themselves as the worthy forerunners of Jehan Frollo
+in the romance of "Notre Dame de Paris." Villon tells us himself that he
+was among the truants, but we hardly needed his avowal. The burlesque
+erudition in which he sometimes indulged implies no more than the merest
+smattering of knowledge; whereas his acquaintance with blackguard haunts
+and industries could only have been acquired by early and consistent
+impiety and idleness. He passed his degrees, it is true; but some of us
+who have been to modern Universities will make their own reflections on
+the value of the test. As for his three pupils, Colin Laurent, Girard
+Gossouyn, and Jehan Marceau--if they were really his pupils in any
+serious sense--what can we say but God help them! And sure enough, by
+his own description, they turned out as ragged, rowdy, and ignorant as
+was to be looked for from the views and manners of their rare preceptor.
+
+At some time or other, before or during his University career, the poet
+was adopted by Master Guillaume de Villon, chaplain of Saint
+Benoît-le-Bétourné, near the Sorbonne. From him he borrowed the surname
+by which he is known to posterity. It was most likely from his house,
+called the "Porte Rouge," and situated in a garden in the cloister of
+St. Benoît, that Master Francis heard the bell of the Sorbonne ring out
+the Angelus while he was finishing his "Small Testament" at
+Christmastide in 1456. Towards this benefactor he usually gets credit
+for a respectable display of gratitude. But with his trap and pitfall
+style of writing, it is easy to make too sure. His sentiments are about
+as much to be relied on as those of a professional beggar; and in this,
+as in so many other matters, he comes towards us whining and piping the
+eye, and goes off again with a whoop and his finger to his nose. Thus,
+he calls Guillaume de Villon his "more than father," thanks him with a
+great show of sincerity for having helped him out of many scrapes, and
+bequeaths him his portion of renown. But the portion of renown which
+belonged to a young thief, distinguished (if, at the period when he
+wrote this legacy, he was distinguished at all) for having written some
+more or less obscene and scurrilous ballads, must have been little
+fitted to gratify the self-respect or increase the reputation of a
+benevolent ecclesiastic. The same remark applies to a subsequent legacy
+of the poet's library, with specification of one work which was plainly
+neither decent nor devout. We are thus left on the horns of a dilemma.
+If the chaplain was a godly, philanthropic personage, who had tried to
+graft good principles and good behaviour on this wild slip of an adopted
+son, these jesting legacies would obviously cut him to the heart. The
+position of an adopted son towards his adoptive father is one full of
+delicacy; where a man lends his name he looks for great consideration.
+And this legacy of Villon's portion of renown may be taken as the mere
+fling of an unregenerate scapegrace who has wit enough to recognise in
+his own shame the readiest weapon of offence against a prosy
+benefactor's feelings. The gratitude of Master Francis figures, on this
+reading, as a frightful _minus_ quantity. If, on the other hand, those
+jests were given and taken in good humour, the whole relation between
+the pair degenerates into the unedifying complicity of a debauched old
+chaplain and a witty and dissolute young scholar. At this rate the house
+with the red door may have rung with the most mundane minstrelsy; and it
+may have been below its roof that Villon, through a hole in the plaster,
+studied, as he tells us, the leisures of a rich ecclesiastic.
+
+It was, perhaps, of some moment in the poet's life that he should have
+inhabited the cloister of Saint Benoît. Three of the most remarkable
+among his early acquaintances are Catherine de Vausselles, for whom he
+entertained a short-lived affection and an enduring and most unmanly
+resentment; Regnier de Montigny, a young blackguard of good birth; and
+Colin de Cayeux, a fellow with a marked aptitude for picking locks. Now
+we are on a foundation of mere conjecture, but it is at least curious to
+find that two of the canons of Saint Benoît answered respectively to the
+names of Pierre de Vaucel and Etienne de Montigny, and that there was a
+householder called Nicolas de Cayeux in a street--the Rue des
+Poirées--in the immediate neighbourhood of the cloister. M. Longnon is
+almost ready to identify Catherine as the niece of Pierre; Regnier as
+the nephew of Etienne, and Colin as the son of Nicolas. Without going so
+far, it must be owned that the approximation of names is significant. As
+we go on to see the part played by each of these persons in the sordid
+melodrama of the poet's life, we shall come to regard it as even more
+notable. Is it not Clough who has remarked that, after all, everything
+lies in juxtaposition? Many a man's destiny has been settled by nothing
+apparently more grave than a pretty face on the opposite side of the
+street and a couple of bad companions round the corner.
+
+Catherine de Vausselles (or de Vaucel--the change is within the limits
+of Villon's licence) had plainly delighted in the poet's conversation;
+near neighbours or not, they were much together; and Villon made no
+secret of his court, and suffered himself to believe that his feeling
+was repaid in kind. This may have been an error from the first, or he
+may have estranged her by subsequent misconduct or temerity. One can
+easily imagine Villon an impatient wooer. One thing, at least, is sure:
+that the affair terminated in a manner bitterly humiliating to Master
+Francis. In presence of his lady-love, perhaps under her window, and
+certainly with her connivance, he was unmercifully thrashed by one Noë
+le Joly--beaten, as he says himself, like dirty linen on the
+washing-board. It is characteristic that his malice had notably
+increased between the time when he wrote the "Small Testament"
+immediately on the back of the occurrence, and the time when he wrote
+the "Large Testament" five years after. On the latter occasion nothing
+is too bad for his "damsel with the twisted nose," as he calls her. She
+is spared neither hint nor accusation, and he tells his messenger to
+accost her with the vilest insults. Villon, it is thought, was out of
+Paris when these amenities escaped his pen; or perhaps the strong arm of
+Noë le Joly would have been again in requisition. So ends the
+love-story, if love-story it may properly be called. Poets are not
+necessarily fortunate in love; but they usually fall among more romantic
+circumstances, and bear their disappointment with a better grace.
+
+The neighbourhood of Regnier de Montigny and Colin de Cayeux was
+probably more influential on his after life than the contempt of
+Catherine. For a man who is greedy of all pleasures, and provided with
+little money and less dignity of character, we may prophesy a safe and
+speedy voyage downward. Humble or even truckling virtue may walk
+unspotted in this life. But only those who despise the pleasures can
+afford to despise the opinion of the world. A man of a strong, heady
+temperament, like Villon, is very differently tempted. His eyes lay hold
+on all provocations greedily, and his heart flames up at a look into
+imperious desire; he is snared and broached-to by anything and
+everything, from a pretty face to a piece of pastry in a cookshop
+window; he will drink the rinsing of the wine-cup, stay the latest at
+the tavern party; tap at the lit windows, follow the sound of singing,
+and beat the whole neighbourhood for another reveller, as he goes
+reluctantly homeward; and grudge himself every hour of sleep as a black
+empty period in which he cannot follow after pleasure. Such a person is
+lost if he have not dignity, or, failing that, at least pride, which is
+its shadow and in many ways its substitute. Master Francis, I fancy,
+would follow his own eager instincts without much spiritual struggle.
+And we soon find him fallen among thieves in sober, literal earnest, and
+counting as acquaintances the most disreputable people he could lay his
+hands on; fellows who stole ducks in Paris Moat; sergeants of the
+criminal court, and archers of the watch; blackguards who slept at night
+under the butchers' stalls, and for whom the aforesaid archers peered
+about carefully with lanterns; Regnier de Montigny, Colin de Cayeux, and
+their crew, all bound on a favouring breeze towards the gallows; the
+disorderly abbess of Port Royal, who went about at fair-time with
+soldiers and thieves, and conducted her abbey on the queerest
+principles; and most likely Perette Mauger, the great Paris receiver of
+stolen goods, not yet dreaming, poor woman! of the last scene of her
+career when Henry Cousin, executor of the high justice, shall bury her,
+alive and most reluctant, in front of the new Montigny gibbet.[9] Nay,
+our friend soon began to take a foremost rank in this society. He could
+string off verses, which is always an agreeable talent; and he could
+make himself useful in many other ways. The whole ragged army of
+Bohemia, and whosoever loved good cheer without at all loving to work
+and pay for it, are addressed in contemporary verses as the "Subjects of
+François Villon." He was a good genius to all hungry and unscrupulous
+persons; and became the hero of a whole legendary cycle of tavern tricks
+and cheateries. At best, these were doubtful levities, rather too
+thievish for a schoolboy, rather too gamesome for a thief. But he would
+not linger long in this equivocal border-land. He must soon have
+complied with his surroundings. He was one who would go where the
+cannikin clinked, not caring who should pay; and from supping in the
+wolves' den, there is but a step to hunting with the pack. And here, as
+I am on the chapter of his degradation, I shall say all I mean to say
+about its darkest expression, and be done with it for good. Some
+charitable critics see no more than a _jeu d'esprit_, a graceful and
+trifling exercise of the imagination, in the grimy ballad of Fat Peg
+(_Grosse Margot_). I am not able to follow these gentlemen to this
+polite extreme. Out of all Villon's works that ballad stands forth in
+flaring reality, gross and ghastly, as a thing written in a contraction
+of disgust. M. Longnon shows us more and more clearly at every page that
+we are to read our poet literally, that his names are the names of real
+persons, and the events he chronicles were actual events. But even if
+the tendency of criticism had run the other way, this ballad would have
+gone far to prove itself. I can well understand the reluctance of worthy
+persons in this matter; for of course it is unpleasant to think of a man
+of genius as one who held, in the words of Marina to Boult--
+
+  "A place, for which the pained'st fiend
+   Of hell would not in reputation change."
+
+But beyond this natural unwillingness, the whole difficulty of the case
+springs from a highly virtuous ignorance of life. Paris now is not so
+different from the Paris of then; and the whole of the doings of
+Bohemia are not written in the sugar-candy pastorals of Mürger. It is
+really not at all surprising that a young man of the fifteenth century,
+with a knack of making verses, should accept his bread upon disgraceful
+terms. The race of those who do so is not extinct; and some of them to
+this day write the prettiest verses imaginable.... After this, it were
+impossible for Master Francis to fall lower: to go and steal for himself
+would be an admirable advance from every point of view, divine or human.
+
+And yet it is not as a thief, but as a homicide, that he makes his first
+appearance before angry justice. On June 5, 1455, when he was about
+twenty-four, and had been Master of Arts for a matter of three years, we
+behold him for the first time quite definitely. Angry justice had, as it
+were, photographed him in the act of his homicide; and M. Longnon,
+rummaging among old deeds, has turned up the negative and printed it off
+for our instruction. Villon had been supping--copiously we may
+believe--and sat on a stone bench in front of the Church of St. Benoît,
+in company with a priest called Gilles and a woman of the name of
+Isabeau. It was nine o'clock, a mighty late hour for the period, and
+evidently a fine summer's night. Master Francis carried a mantle, like a
+prudent man, to keep him from the dews (_serain_), and had a sword below
+it dangling from his girdle. So these three dallied in front of St.
+Benoît, taking their pleasure (_pour soy esbatre_). Suddenly there
+arrived upon the scene a priest, Philippe Chermoye or Sermaise, also
+with sword and cloak, and accompanied by one Master Jehan le Mardi.
+Sermaise, according to Villon's account, which is all we have to go
+upon, came up blustering and denying God; as Villon rose to make room
+for him upon the bench, thrust him rudely back into his place; and
+finally drew his sword and cut open his lower lip, by what I should
+imagine was a very clumsy stroke. Up to this point, Villon professes to
+have been a model of courtesy, even of feebleness: and the brawl, in his
+version, reads like the fable of the wolf and the lamb. But now the
+lamb was roused; he drew his sword, stabbed Sermaise in the groin,
+knocked him on the head with a big stone, and then, leaving him to his
+fate, went away to have his own lip doctored by a barber of the name of
+Fouquet. In one version he says that Gilles, Isabeau, and Le Mardi ran
+away at the first high words, and that he and Sermaise had it out alone;
+in another, Le Mardi is represented as returning and wresting Villon's
+sword from him: the reader may please himself. Sermaise was picked up,
+lay all that night in the prison of Saint Benoît, where he was examined
+by an official of the Châtelet and expressly pardoned Villon, and died
+on the following Saturday in the Hôtel Dieu.
+
+This, as I have said, was in June. Not before January of the next year
+could Villon extract a pardon from the King; but while his hand was in,
+he got two. One is for "François des Loges, alias (_autrement dit_) de
+Villon"; and the other runs in the name of François de Montcorbier. Nay,
+it appears there was a further complication; for in the narrative of the
+first of these documents it is mentioned that he passed himself off upon
+Fouquet, the barber-surgeon, as one Michel Mouton. M. Longnon has a
+theory that this unhappy accident with Sermaise was the cause of
+Villon's subsequent irregularities; and that up to that moment he had
+been the pink of good behaviour. But the matter has to my eyes a more
+dubious air. A pardon necessary for Des Loges and another for
+Montcorbier? and these two the same person? and one or both of them
+known by the _alias_ of Villon, however honestly come by? and lastly, in
+the heat of the moment, a fourth name thrown out with an assured
+countenance? A ship is not to be trusted that sails under so many
+colours. This is not the simple bearing of innocence. No--the young
+master was already treading crooked paths; already, he would start and
+blench at a hand upon his shoulder, with the look we know so well in the
+face of Hogarth's Idle Apprentice; already, in the blue devils, he would
+see Henry Cousin, the executor of high justice, going in dolorous
+procession towards Montfaucon, and hear the wind and the birds crying
+around Paris gibbet.
+
+
+  A GANG OF THIEVES
+
+In spite of the prodigious number of people who managed to get hanged,
+the fifteenth century was by no means a bad time for criminals. A great
+confusion of parties and great dust of fighting favoured the escape of
+private housebreakers and quiet fellows who stole ducks in Paris Moat.
+Prisons were leaky; and as we shall see, a man with a few crowns in his
+pocket, and perhaps some acquaintance among the officials, could easily
+slip out and become once more a free marauder. There was no want of a
+sanctuary where he might harbour until troubles blew by; and accomplices
+helped each other with more or less good faith. Clerks, above all, had
+remarkable facilities for a criminal way of life; for they were
+privileged, except in cases of notorious incorrigibility, to be plucked
+from the hands of rude secular justice and tried by a tribunal of their
+own. In 1402, a couple of thieves, both clerks of the University, were
+condemned to death by the Provost of Paris. As they were taken to
+Montfaucon, they kept crying "high and clearly" for their benefit of
+clergy, but were none the less pitilessly hanged and gibbeted. Indignant
+Alma Mater interfered before the King; and the Provost was deprived of
+all royal offices, and condemned to return the bodies and erect a great
+stone cross, on the road from Paris to the gibbet, graven with the
+effigies of these two holy martyrs.[10] We shall hear more of the
+benefit of clergy; for after this the reader will not be surprised to
+meet with thieves in the shape of tonsured clerks, or even priests and
+monks.
+
+To a knot of such learned pilferers our poet certainly belonged; and by
+turning over a few more of M. Longnon's negatives, we shall get a clear
+idea of their character and doings. Montigny and De Cayeux are names
+already known; Guy Tabary, Petit-Jehan, Dom Nicolas, little Thibault,
+who was both clerk and goldsmith, and who made picklocks and melted
+plate for himself and his companions--with these the reader has still to
+become acquainted. Petit-Jehan and De Cayeux were handy fellows and
+enjoyed a useful pre-eminence in honour of their doings with the
+picklock. "_Dictus des Cahyeus est fortis operator crochetorum_," says
+Tabary's interrogation, "_sed dictus Petit-Jehan, ejus socius, est
+forcius operator_." But the flower of the flock was little Thibault; it
+was reported that no lock could stand before him; he had a persuasive
+hand; let us salute capacity wherever we may find it. Perhaps the term
+_gang_ is not quite properly applied to the persons whose fortunes we
+are now about to follow; rather they were independent malefactors,
+socially intimate, and occasionally joining together for some serious
+operation, just as modern stockjobbers form a syndicate for an important
+loan. Nor were they at all particular to any branch of misdoing. They
+did not scrupulously confine themselves to a single sort of theft, as I
+hear is common among modern thieves. They were ready for anything, from
+pitch-and-toss to manslaughter. Montigny, for instance, had neglected
+neither of these extremes, and we find him accused of cheating at games
+of hazard on the one hand, and on the other of the murder of one
+Thevenin Pensete in a house by the Cemetery of St. John. If time had
+only spared us some particulars, might not this last have furnished us
+with the matter of a grisly winter's tale?
+
+At Christmas-time in 1456, readers of Villon will remember that he was
+engaged on the "Small Testament." About the same period, _circa festum
+nativitatis Domini_, he took part in a memorable supper at the Mule
+Tavern, in front of the Church of St. Mathurin. Tabary, who seems to
+have been very much Villon's creature, had ordered the supper in the
+course of the afternoon. He was a man who had had troubles in his time,
+and languished in the Bishop of Paris's prisons on a suspicion of
+picking locks; confiding, convivial, not very astute--who had copied out
+a whole improper romance with his own right hand. This supper-party was
+to be his first introduction to De Cayeux and Petit-Jehan, which was
+probably a matter of some concern to the poor man's muddy wits; in the
+sequel, at least, he speaks of both with an undisguised respect, based
+on professional inferiority in the matter of picklocks. Dom Nicolas, a
+Picardy monk, was the fifth and last at table. When supper had been
+despatched and fairly washed down, we may suppose, with white Baigneux
+or red Beaune, which were favourite wines among the fellowship, Tabary
+was solemnly sworn over to secrecy on the night's performances; and the
+party left the Mule and proceeded to an unoccupied house belonging to
+Robert de Saint-Simon. This, over a low wall, they entered without
+difficulty. All but Tabary took off their upper garments; a ladder was
+found and applied to the high wall which separated Saint-Simon's house
+from the court of the College of Navarre; the four fellows in their
+shirt-sleeves (as we might say) clambered over in a twinkling; and
+Master Guy Tabary remained alone beside the overcoats. From the court
+the burglars made their way into the vestry of the chapel, where they
+found a large chest, strengthened with iron bands and closed with four
+locks. One of these locks they picked, and then, by levering up the
+corner, forced the other three. Inside was a small coffer, of walnut
+wood, also barred with iron, but fastened with only three locks, which
+were all comfortably picked by way of the keyhole. In the walnut
+coffer--a joyous sight by our thieves' lantern--were five hundred crowns
+of gold. There was some talk of opening the aumries, where, if they had
+only known, a booty eight or nine times greater lay ready to their hand;
+but one of the party (I have a humorous suspicion it was Dom Nicolas,
+the Picardy monk) hurried them away. It was ten o'clock when they
+mounted the ladder; it was about midnight before Tabary beheld them
+coming back. To him they gave ten crowns, and promised a share of a
+two-crown dinner on the morrow; whereat we may suppose his mouth
+watered. In course of time, he got wind of the real amount of their
+booty and understood how scurvily he had been used; but he seems to have
+borne no malice. How could he, against such superb operators as
+Petit-Jehan and De Cayeux; or a person like Villon, who could have made
+a new improper romance out of his own head, instead of merely copying an
+old one with mechanical right hand?
+
+The rest of the winter was not uneventful for the gang. First they made
+a demonstration against the Church of St. Mathurin after chalices, and
+were ignominiously chased away by barking dogs. Then Tabary fell out
+with Casin Chollet, one of the fellows who stole ducks in Paris Moat,
+who subsequently became a sergeant of the Châtelet and distinguished
+himself by misconduct, followed by imprisonment and public castigation,
+during the wars of Louis Eleventh. The quarrel was not conducted with a
+proper regard to the King's peace, and the pair publicly belaboured each
+other until the police stepped in, and Master Tabary was cast once more
+into the prisons of the Bishop. While he still lay in durance, another
+job was cleverly executed by the band in broad daylight, at the
+Augustine Monastery. Brother Guillaume Coiffier was beguiled by an
+accomplice to St. Mathurin to say mass; and during his absence, his
+chamber was entered and five or six hundred crowns in money and some
+silver plate successfully abstracted. A melancholy man was Coiffier on
+his return! Eight crowns from this adventure were forwarded by little
+Thibault to the incarcerated Tabary; and with these he bribed the jailer
+and reappeared in Paris taverns. Some time before or shortly after this,
+Villon set out for Angers, as he had promised in the "Small Testament."
+The object of this excursion was not merely to avoid the presence of his
+cruel mistress or the strong arm of Noë le Joly, but to plan a
+deliberate robbery on his uncle the monk. As soon as he had properly
+studied the ground, the others were to go over in force from
+Paris--picklocks and all--and away with my uncle's strongbox! This
+throws a comical side-light on his own accusation against his relatives,
+that they had "forgotten natural duty" and disowned him because he was
+poor. A poor relation is a distasteful circumstance at the best, but a
+poor relation who plans deliberate robberies against those of his blood,
+and trudges hundreds of weary leagues to put them into execution, is
+surely a little on the wrong side of toleration. The uncle at Angers may
+have been monstrously undutiful; but the nephew from Paris was upsides
+with him.
+
+On the 23rd April, that venerable and discreet person, Master Pierre
+Marchand, Curate and Prior of Paray-le-Monial, in the diocese of
+Chartres, arrived in Paris and put up at the sign of the Three
+Chandeliers, in the Rue de la Huchette. Next day, or the day after, as
+he was breakfasting at the sign of the Armchair, he fell into talk with
+two customers, one of whom was a priest and the other our friend Tabary.
+The idiotic Tabary became mighty confidential as to his past life.
+Pierre Marchand, who was an acquaintance of Guillaume Coiffier's and had
+sympathised with him over his loss, pricked up his ears at the mention
+of picklocks, and led on the transcriber of improper romances from one
+thing to another, until they were fast friends. For picklocks the Prior
+of Paray professed a keen curiosity; but Tabary, upon some late alarm,
+had thrown all his into the Seine. Let that be no difficulty, however,
+for was there not little Thibault, who could make them of all shapes and
+sizes, and to whom Tabary, smelling an accomplice, would be only too
+glad to introduce his new acquaintance? On the morrow, accordingly, they
+met; and Tabary, after having first wet his whistle at the Prior's
+expense, led him to Notre Dame and presented him to four or five "young
+companions," who were keeping sanctuary in the church. They were all
+clerks, recently escaped, like Tabary himself, from the episcopal
+prisons. Among these we may notice Thibault, the operator, a little
+fellow of twenty-six, wearing long hair behind. The Prior expressed,
+through Tabary, his anxiety to become their accomplice and altogether
+such as they were (_de leur sorte et de leurs complices_). Mighty polite
+they showed themselves, and made him many fine speeches in return. But
+for all that, perhaps because they had longer heads than Tabary, perhaps
+because it is less easy to wheedle men in a body, they kept obstinately
+to generalities and gave him no information as to their exploits, past,
+present, or to come. I suppose Tabary groaned under this reserve; for no
+sooner were he and the Prior out of the church than he fairly emptied
+his heart to him, gave him full details of many hanging matters in the
+past, and explained the future intentions of the band. The scheme of the
+hour was to rob another Augustine monk, Robert de la Porte, and in this
+the Prior agreed to take a hand with simulated greed. Thus, in the
+course of two days, he had turned this wineskin of a Tabary inside out.
+For a while longer the farce was carried on; the Prior was introduced to
+Petit-Jehan, whom he describes as a little, very smart man of thirty,
+with a black beard and a short jacket; an appointment was made and
+broken in the de la Porte affair; Tabary had some breakfast at the
+Prior's charge and leaked out more secrets under the influence of wine
+and friendship; and then all of a sudden, on the 17th of May, an alarm
+sprang up, the Prior picked up his skirts and walked quietly over to the
+Châtelet to make a deposition, and the whole band took to their heels
+and vanished out of Paris and the sight of the police.
+
+Vanish as they like, they all go with a clog about their feet. Sooner or
+later, here or there, they will be caught in the fact, and ignominiously
+sent home. From our vantage of four centuries afterwards, it is odd and
+pitiful to watch the order in which the fugitives are captured and
+dragged in.
+
+Montigny was the first. In August of that same year he was laid by the
+heels on many grievous counts--sacrilegious robberies, frauds,
+incorrigibility, and that bad business about Thevenin Pensete in the
+house by the Cemetery of St. John. He was reclaimed by the
+ecclesiastical authorities as a clerk; but the claim was rebutted on the
+score of incorrigibility, and ultimately fell to the ground; and he was
+condemned to death by the Provost of Paris. It was a very rude hour for
+Montigny, but hope was not yet over. He was a fellow of some birth; his
+father had been king's pantler; his sister, probably married to some one
+about the Court, was in the family way, and her health would be
+endangered if the execution was proceeded with. So down comes Charles
+the Seventh with letters of mercy, commuting the penalty to a year in a
+dungeon on bread and water, and a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. James
+in Galicia. Alas! the document was incomplete; it did not contain the
+full tale of Montigny's enormities; it did not recite that he had been
+denied benefit of clergy, and it said nothing about Thevenin Pensete.
+Montigny's hour was at hand. Benefit of clergy, honourable descent from
+king's pantler, sister in the family way, royal letters of
+commutation--all were of no avail. He had been in prison in Rouen, in
+Tours, in Bordeaux, and four times already in Paris; and out of all
+these he had come scatheless; but now he must make a little excursion as
+far as Montfaucon with Henry Cousin, executor of high justice. There let
+him swing among the carrion crows.
+
+About a year later, in July 1458, the police laid hands on Tabary.
+Before the ecclesiastical commissary he was twice examined, and, on the
+latter occasion, put to the question ordinary and extraordinary. What a
+dismal change from pleasant suppers at the Mule, where he sat in triumph
+with expert operators and great wits! He is at the lees of life, poor
+rogue; and those fingers which once transcribed improper romances are
+now agonisingly stretched upon the rack. We have no sure knowledge, but
+we may have a shrewd guess of the conclusion. Tabary, the admirer, would
+go the same way as those whom he admired.
+
+The last we hear of is Colin de Gayeux. He was caught in autumn 1460, in
+the great Church of St. Leu d'Esserens, which makes so fine a figure in
+the pleasant Oise valley between Creil and Beaumont. He was reclaimed by
+no less than two bishops; but the Procureur for the Provost held fast by
+incorrigible Colin. 1460 was an ill-starred year: for justice was making
+a clean sweep of "poor and indigent persons, thieves, cheats, and
+lock-pickers," in the neighbourhood of Paris;[11] and Colin de Cayeux,
+with many others, was condemned to death and hanged.[12]
+
+
+  VILLON AND THE GALLOWS
+
+Villon was still absent on the Angers expedition when the Prior of Paray
+sent such a bombshell among his accomplices; and the dates of his return
+and arrest remain undiscoverable. M. Campaux plausibly enough opined for
+the autumn of 1457, which would make him closely follow on Montigny, and
+the first of those denounced by the Prior to fall into the toils. We may
+suppose, at least, that it was not long thereafter; we may suppose him
+competed for between lay and clerical Courts; and we may suppose him
+alternately pert and impudent, humble and fawning, in his defence. But
+at the end of all supposing, we come upon some nuggets of fact. For
+first, he was put to the question by water. He who had tossed off so
+many cups of White Baigneux or red Beaune, now drank water through linen
+folds, until his bowels were flooded and his heart stood still. After so
+much raising of the elbow, so much outcry of fictitious thirst, here at
+last was enough drinking for a lifetime. Truly, of our pleasant vices,
+the gods make whips to scourge us. And secondly he was condemned to be
+hanged. A man may have been expecting a catastrophe for years, and yet
+find himself unprepared when it arrives. Certainly, Villon found, in
+this legitimate issue of his career, a very staggering and grave
+consideration. Every beast, as he says, clings bitterly to a whole skin.
+If everything is lost, and even honour, life still remains; nay, and it
+becomes, like the ewe lamb in Nathan's parable, as dear as all the rest.
+"Do you fancy," he asks, in a lively ballad, "that I had not enough
+philosophy under my hood to cry out: 'I appeal'? If I had made any bones
+about the matter I should have been planted upright in the fields, by
+the St. Denis Road"--Montfaucon being on the way to St. Denis. An appeal
+to Parliament, as we saw in the case of Colin de Cayeux, did not
+necessarily lead to an acquittal or a commutation; and while the matter
+was pending, our poet had ample opportunity to reflect on his position.
+Hanging is a sharp argument, and to swing with many others on the gibbet
+adds a horrible corollary for the imagination. With the aspect of
+Montfaucon he was well acquainted; indeed, as the neighbourhood appears
+to have been sacred to junketing and nocturnal picnics of wild young men
+and women, he had probably studied it under all varieties of hour and
+weather. And now, as he lay in prison waiting the mortal push, these
+different aspects crowded back on his imagination with a new and
+startling significance; and he wrote a ballad, by way of epitaph for
+himself and his companions, which remains unique in the annals of
+mankind. It is, in the highest sense, a piece of his biography:--
+
+  "La pluye nous a debuez et lavez,
+   Et le soleil dessechez et noirciz;
+   Pies, corbeaulx, nous ont les yeux cavez,
+   Et arrachez la barbe et les sourcilz.
+   Jamais, nul temps, nous ne sommes rassis;
+   Puis çà, puis là, comme le vent varie,
+   A son plaisir sans cesser nous charie,
+   Plus becquetez d'oiseaulx que dez à couldre.
+   Ne soyez donc de nostre confrairie,
+   Mais priez Dieu que tous nous vueille absouldre."
+
+Here is some genuine thieves' literature after so much that was
+spurious; sharp as an etching, written with a shuddering soul. There is
+an intensity of consideration in the piece that shows it to be the
+transcript of familiar thoughts. It is the quintessence of many a
+doleful nightmare on the straw, when he felt himself swing helpless in
+the wind, and saw the birds turn about him, screaming and menacing his
+eyes.
+
+And, after all, the Parliament changed his sentence into one of
+banishment; and to Roussillon, in Dauphiny, our poet must carry his woes
+without delay. Travellers between Lyons and Marseilles may remember a
+station on the line, some way below Vienne, where the Rhone fleets
+seaward between vine-clad hills. This was Villon's Siberia. It would be
+a little warm in summer perhaps, and a little cold in winter in that
+draughty valley between two great mountain fields; but what with the
+hills, and the racing river, and the fiery Rhone wines, he was little to
+be pitied on the conditions of his exile. Villon, in a remarkably bad
+ballad, written in a breath, heartily thanked and fulsomely belauded the
+Parliament; the _envoi_, like the proverbial postscript of a lady's
+letter, containing the pith of his performance in a request for three
+days' delay to settle his affairs and bid his friends farewell. He was
+probably not followed out of Paris, like Antoine Fradin, the popular
+preacher, another exile of a few years later, by weeping multitudes;[13]
+but I daresay one or two rogues of his acquaintance would keep him
+company for a mile or so on the south road, and drink a bottle with him
+before they turned. For banished people, in those days, seem to have set
+out on their own responsibility, in their own guard, and at their own
+expense. It was no joke to make one's way from Paris to Roussillon
+alone and penniless in the fifteenth century. Villon says he left a rag
+of his tails on every bush. Indeed, he must have had many a weary tramp,
+many a slender meal, and many a to-do with blustering captains of the
+Ordonnance. But with one of his light fingers, we may fancy that he took
+as good as he gave; for every rag of his tail he would manage to
+indemnify himself upon the population in the shape of food, or wine, or
+ringing money; and his route would be traceable across France and
+Burgundy by housewives and inn-keepers lamenting over petty thefts, like
+the track of a single human locust. A strange figure he must have cut in
+the eyes of the good country people: this ragged, blackguard city poet,
+with a smack of the Paris student, and a smack of the Paris street arab,
+posting along the highways, in rain or sun, among the green fields and
+vineyards. For himself, he had no taste for rural loveliness; green
+fields and vineyards would be mighty indifferent to Master Francis; but
+he would often have his tongue in his cheek at the simplicity of rustic
+dupes, and often, at city gates, he might stop to contemplate the gibbet
+with its swinging bodies, and hug himself on his escape.
+
+How long he stayed at Roussillon, how far he became the _protégé_ of the
+Bourbons, to whom that town belonged, or when it was that he took part,
+under the auspices of Charles of Orleans, in a rhyming tournament to be
+referred to once again in the pages of the present volume, are matters
+that still remain in darkness, in spite of M. Longnon's diligent
+rummaging among archives. When we next find him, in summer 1461, alas!
+he is once more in durance: this time at Méun-sur-Loire, in the prisons
+of Thibault d'Aussigny, Bishop of Orleans. He had been lowered in a
+basket into a noisome pit, where he lay all summer, gnawing hard crusts
+and railing upon fate. His teeth, he says, were like the teeth of a
+rake: a touch of haggard portraiture all the more real for being
+excessive and burlesque, and all the more proper to the man for being a
+caricature of his own misery. His eyes were "bandaged with thick
+walls." It might blow hurricanes overhead; the lightning might leap in
+high heaven; but no word of all this reached him in his noisome pit.
+"_Il n'entre, ou gist, n'escler ni tourbillon._" Above all, he was
+levered with envy and anger at the freedom of others; and his heart
+flowed over into curses as he thought of Thibault d'Aussigny, walking
+the streets in God's sunlight, and blessing people with extended
+fingers. So much we find sharply lined in his own poems. Why he was cast
+again into prison--how he had again managed to shave the gallows--this
+we know not, nor, from the destruction of authorities, are we ever
+likely to learn. But on October 2nd, 1461, or some day immediately
+preceding, the new King, Louis Eleventh, made his joyous entry into
+Méun. Now it was a part of the formality on such occasions for the new
+King to liberate certain prisoners; and so the basket was let down into
+Villon's pit, and hastily did Master Francis scramble in, and was most
+joyfully hauled up, and shot out, blinking and tottering, but once more
+a free man, into the blessed sun and wind. Now or never is the time for
+verses! Such a happy revolution would turn the head of a
+stocking-weaver, and set him jingling rhymes. And so--after a voyage to
+Paris, where he finds Montigny and De Cayeux clattering their bones upon
+the gibbet, and his three pupils roystering in Paris streets, "with
+their thumbs under their girdles,"--down sits Master Francis to write
+his "Large Testament," and perpetuate his name in a sort of glorious
+ignominy.
+
+
+  THE "LARGE TESTAMENT"
+
+Of this capital achievement and, with it, of Villon's style in general,
+it is here the place to speak. The "Large Testament" is a hurly-burly of
+cynical and sentimental reflections about life, jesting legacies to
+friends and enemies, and, interspersed among these, many admirable
+ballades both serious and absurd. With so free a design, no thought
+that occurred to him would need to be dismissed without expression; and
+he could draw at full length the portrait of his own bedevilled soul,
+and of the bleak and blackguardly world which was the theatre of his
+exploits and sufferings. If the reader can conceive something between
+the slap-dash inconsequence of Byron's "Don Juan" and the racy humorous
+gravity and brief noble touches that distinguish the vernacular poems of
+Burns, he will have formed some idea of Villon's style. To the latter
+writer--except in the ballades, which are quite his own, and can be
+paralleled from no other language known to me--he bears a particular
+resemblance. In common with Burns he has a certain rugged compression, a
+brutal vivacity of epithet, a homely vigour, a delight in local
+personalities, and an interest in many sides of life, that are often
+despised and passed over by more effete and cultured poets. Both also,
+in their strong, easy colloquial way, tend to become difficult and
+obscure; the obscurity in the case of Villon passing at times into the
+absolute darkness of cant language. They are perhaps the only two great
+masters of expression who keep sending their readers to a glossary.
+
+"Shall we not dare to say of a thief," asks Montaigne, "that he has a
+handsome leg?" It is a far more serious claim that we have to put
+forward in behalf of Villon. Beside that of his contemporaries, his
+writing, so full of colour, so eloquent, so picturesque, stands out in
+an almost miraculous isolation. If only one or two of the chroniclers
+could have taken a leaf out of his book, history would have been a
+pastime, and the fifteenth century as present to our minds as the age of
+Charles Second. This gallows-bird was the one great writer of his age
+and country, and initiated modern literature for France. Boileau, long
+ago, in the period of perukes and snuff-boxes, recognised him as the
+first articulate poet in the language; and if we measure him, not by
+priority of merit, but living duration of influence, not on a comparison
+with obscure forerunners, but with great and famous successors, we
+shall instal this ragged and disreputable figure in a far higher niche
+in glory's temple than was ever dreamed of by the critic. It is, in
+itself, a memorable fact that before 1542, in the very dawn of printing,
+and while modern France was in the making, the works of Villon ran
+through seven different editions. Out of him flows much of Rabelais; and
+through Rabelais, directly and indirectly, a deep, permanent, and
+growing inspiration. Not only his style, but his callous pertinent way
+of looking upon the sordid and ugly sides of life, becomes every day a
+more specific feature in the literature of France. And only the other
+year, a work of some power appeared in Paris, and appeared with infinite
+scandal, which owed its whole inner significance and much of its outward
+form to the study of our rhyming thief.
+
+The world to which he introduces us is, as before said, blackguardly and
+bleak. Paris swarms before us, full of famine, shame, and death; monks
+and the servants of great lords hold high wassail upon cakes and pastry;
+the poor man licks his lips before the baker's window; people with
+patched eyes sprawl all night under the stalls; chuckling Tabary
+transcribes an improper romance; bare-bosomed lasses and ruffling
+students swagger in the streets; the drunkard goes stumbling homeward;
+the graveyard is full of bones; and away on Montfaucon, Colin de Cayeux
+and Montigny hang draggled in the rain. Is there nothing better to be
+seen than sordid misery and worthless joys? Only where the poor old
+mother of the poet kneels in church below painted windows, and makes
+tremulous supplication to the Mother of God.
+
+In our mixed world, full of green fields and happy lovers, where not
+long before Joan of Arc had led one of the highest and noblest lives in
+the whole story of mankind, this was all worth chronicling that our poet
+could perceive. His eyes were indeed sealed with his own filth. He dwelt
+all his life in a pit more noisome than the dungeon at Méun. In the
+moral world, also, there are large phenomena not cognisable out of
+holes and corners. Loud winds blow, speeding home deep-laden ships and
+sweeping rubbish from the earth; the lightning leaps and cleans the face
+of heaven; high purposes and brave passions shake and sublimate men's
+spirits; and meanwhile, in the narrow dungeon of his soul, Villon is
+mumbling crusts and picking vermin.
+
+Along with this deadly gloom of outlook, we must take another
+characteristic of his work, its unrivalled insincerity. I can give no
+better similitude of this quality than I have given already: that he
+comes up with a whine and runs away with a whoop and his finger to his
+nose. His pathos is that of a professional mendicant who should happen
+to be a man of genius; his levity that of a bitter street arab, full of
+bread. On a first reading, the pathetic passages preoccupy the reader,
+and he is cheated out of an alms in the shape of sympathy. But when the
+thing is studied the illusion fades away: in the transitions, above all,
+we can detect the evil, ironical temper of the man; and instead of a
+flighty work, where many crude but genuine feelings tumble together for
+the mastery as in the lists of tournament, we are tempted to think of
+the "Large Testament" as of one long-drawn epical grimace, pulled by a
+merry-andrew, who has found a certain despicable eminence over human
+respect and human affections by perching himself astride upon the
+gallows. Between these two views, at best, all temperate judgments will
+be found to fall; and rather, as I imagine, towards the last.
+
+There were two things on which he felt with perfect and, in one case,
+even threatening sincerity.
+
+The first of these was an undisguised envy of those richer than himself.
+He was for ever drawing a parallel, already exemplified from his own
+words, between the happy life of the well-to-do and the miseries of the
+poor. Burns, too proud and honest not to work, continued through all
+reverses to sing of poverty with a light, defiant note. Béranger waited
+till he was himself beyond the reach of want before writing the "Old
+Vagabond" or "Jacques." Samuel Johnson, although he was very sorry to
+be poor, "was a great arguer for the advantages of poverty" in his ill
+days. Thus it is that brave men carry their crosses, and smile with the
+fox burrowing in their vitals. But Villon, who had not the courage to be
+poor with honesty, now whiningly implores our sympathy, now shows his
+teeth upon the dung-heap with an ugly snarl. He envies bitterly, envies
+passionately. Poverty, he protests, drives men to steal, as hunger makes
+the wolf sally from the forest. The poor, he goes on, will always have a
+carping word to say, or, if that outlet be denied, nourish rebellious
+thoughts. It is a calumny on the noble army of the poor. Thousands in a
+small way of life, ay, and even in the smallest, go through life with
+tenfold as much honour and dignity and peace of mind as the rich
+gluttons whose dainties and state-beds awakened Villon's covetous
+temper. And every morning's sun sees thousands who pass whistling to
+their toil. But Villon was the "_mauvais pauvre_" defined by Victor
+Hugo, and, in its English expression, so admirably stereotyped by
+Dickens. He was the first wicked _sans-culotte_. He is the man of genius
+with the moleskin cap. He is mighty pathetic and beseeching here in the
+street, but I would not go down a dark road with him for a large
+consideration.
+
+The second of the points on which he was genuine and emphatic was common
+to the middle ages; a deep and somewhat snivelling conviction of the
+transitory nature of this life and the pity and horror of death. Old age
+and the grave, with some dark and yet half-sceptical terror of an
+after-world--these were ideas that clung about his bones like a disease.
+An old ape, as he says, may play all the tricks in its repertory, and
+none of them will tickle an audience into good humour. "_Tousjours vieil
+synge est desplaisant._" It is not the old jester who receives most
+recognition at a tavern party, but the young fellow, fresh and handsome,
+who knows the new slang, and carries off his vice with a certain air. Of
+this, as a tavern jester himself, he would be pointedly conscious. As
+for the women with whom he was best acquainted, his reflections on their
+old age, in all their harrowing pathos, shall remain in the original for
+me. Horace has disgraced himself to something the same tune; but what
+Horace throws out with an ill-favoured laugh, Villon dwells on with an
+almost maudlin whimper.
+
+It is in death that he finds his truest inspiration; in the swift and
+sorrowful change that overtakes beauty; in the strange revolution by
+which great fortunes and renowns are diminished to a handful of
+churchyard dust; and in the utter passing away of what was once lovable
+and mighty. It is in this that the mixed texture of his thought enables
+him to reach such poignant and terrible effects, and to enhance pity
+with ridicule, like a man cutting capers to a funeral march. It is in
+this also that he rises out of himself into the higher spheres of art.
+So, in the ballade by which he is best known, he rings the changes on
+names that once stood for beautiful and queenly women, and are now no
+more than letters and a legend. "Where are the snows of yester year?"
+runs the burden. And so, in another not so famous, he passes in review
+the different degrees of bygone men, from the holy Apostles and the
+golden Emperor of the East, down to the heralds, pursuivants, and
+trumpeters, who also bore their part in the world's pageantries and ate
+greedily at great folks' tables: all this to the refrain of "So much
+carry the winds away!" Probably, there was some melancholy in his mind
+for a yet lower grade, and Montigny and Colin de Cayeux clattering their
+bones on Paris gibbet. Alas, and with so pitiful an experience of life,
+Villon can offer us nothing but terror and lamentation about death! No
+one has ever more skilfully communicated his own disenchantment; no one
+ever blown a more ear-piercing note of sadness. This unrepentant thief
+can attain neither to Christian confidence nor to the spirit of the
+bright Greek saying, that whom the gods love die early. It is a poor
+heart, and a poorer age, that cannot accept the conditions of life with
+some heroic readiness.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The date of the "Large Testament" is the last date in the poet's
+biography. After having achieved that admirable and despicable
+performance, he disappears into the night from whence he came. How or
+when he died, whether decently in bed or trussed up to a gallows,
+remains a riddle for foolhardy commentators. It appears his health had
+suffered in the pit at Méun; he was thirty years of age and quite bald;
+with the notch in his under lip where Sermaise had struck him with the
+sword, and what wrinkles the reader may imagine. In default of
+portraits, that is all I have been able to piece together, and perhaps
+even the baldness should be taken as a figure of his destitution. A
+sinister dog, in all likelihood, but with a look in his eye, and the
+loose flexile mouth that goes with wit and an overweening sensual
+temperament. Certainly the sorriest figure on the rolls of fame.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [6] "Étude Biographique sur François Villon." Paris: H. Menu.
+
+  [7] "Bourgeois de Paris," ed. Panthéon, pp. 688, 689.
+
+  [8] "Bourgeois," pp. 627, 636, and 725.
+
+  [9] "Chronique Scandaleuse," ed. Panthéon, p. 237.
+
+  [10] Monstrelet: "Panthéon Littéraire," p. 26.
+
+  [11] "Chron. Scand." _ut supra_.
+
+  [12] Here and there, principally in the order of events, this article
+    differs from M. Longnon's own reading of his material. The ground on
+    which he defers the execution of Montigny and De Cayeux beyond the
+    date of their trials seems insufficient. There is a law of parsimony
+    for the construction of historical documents; simplicity is the
+    first duty of narration; and hanged they were.
+
+  [13] "Chron. Scand.," p. 338.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+CHARLES OF ORLEANS
+
+
+For one who was no great politician, nor (as men go) especially wise,
+capable, or virtuous, Charles of Orleans is more than usually enviable
+to all who love that better sort of fame which consists in being known
+not widely, but intimately. "To be content that time to come should know
+there was such a man, not caring whether they knew more of him, or to
+subsist under naked denominations, without deserts or noble acts," is,
+says Sir Thomas Browne, a frigid ambition. It is to some more specific
+memory that youth looks forward in its vigils. Old kings are sometimes
+disinterred in all the emphasis of life, the hands untainted by decay,
+the beard that had so often wagged in camp or senate still spread upon
+the royal bosom; and in busts and pictures, some similitude of the great
+and beautiful of former days is handed down. In this way, public
+curiosity may be gratified, but hardly any private aspiration after
+fame. It is not likely that posterity will fall in love with us, but not
+impossible that it may respect or sympathise; and so a man would rather
+leave behind him the portrait of his spirit than a portrait of his face,
+_figura animi magis quam corporis_. Of those who have thus survived
+themselves most completely, left a sort of personal seduction behind
+them in the world, and retained, after death, the art of making friends,
+Montaigne and Samuel Johnson certainly stand first. But we have
+portraits of all sorts of men, from august Cæsar to the king's dwarf;
+and all sorts of portraits, from a Titian treasured in the Louvre to a
+profile over the grocer's chimney shelf. And so in a less degree, but
+no less truly, than the spirit of Montaigne lives on in the delightful
+Essays, that of Charles of Orleans survives in a few old songs and old
+account-books; and it is still in the choice of the reader to make this
+duke's acquaintance, and, if their humours suit, become his friend.
+
+
+  I
+
+His birth--if we are to argue from a man's parents--was above his merit.
+It is not merely that he was the grandson of one king, the father of
+another, and the uncle of a third; but something more specious was to be
+looked for from the son of his father, Louis de Valois, Duke of Orleans,
+brother to the mad king Charles VI., lover of Queen Isabel, and the
+leading patron of art and one of the leading politicians in France. And
+the poet might have inherited yet higher virtues from his mother,
+Valentina of Milan, a very pathetic figure of the age, the faithful wife
+of an unfaithful husband, and the friend of a most unhappy king. The
+father, beautiful, eloquent, and accomplished, exercised a strange
+fascination over his contemporaries; and among those who dip nowadays
+into the annals of the time there are not many--and these few are little
+to be envied--who can resist the fascination of the mother. All mankind
+owe her a debt of gratitude because she brought some comfort into the
+life of the poor madman who wore the crown of France.
+
+Born (May 1391) of such a noble stock, Charles was to know from the
+first all favours of nature and art. His father's gardens were the
+admiration of his contemporaries; his castles were situated in the most
+agreeable parts of France, and sumptuously adorned. We have preserved,
+in an inventory of 1403, the description of tapestried rooms where
+Charles may have played in childhood.[14] "A green room, with the
+ceiling full of angels, and the _dossier_ of shepherds and shepherdesses
+seeming (_faisant contenance_) to eat nuts and cherries. A room of gold,
+silk and worsted, with a device of little children in a river, and the
+sky full of birds. A room of green tapestry, showing a knight and lady
+at chess in a pavilion. Another green-room, with shepherdesses in a
+trellised garden worked in gold and silk. A carpet representing
+cherry-trees, where there is a fountain, and a lady gathering cherries
+in a basin." These were some of the pictures over which his fancy might
+busy itself of an afternoon, or at morning as he lay awake in bed. With
+our deeper and more logical sense of life, we can have no idea how large
+a space in the attention of mediæval men might be occupied by such
+figured hangings on the wall. There was something timid and purblind in
+the view they had of the world. Morally, they saw nothing outside of
+traditional axioms; and little of the physical aspect of things entered
+vividly into their mind, beyond what was to be seen on church windows
+and the walls and floors of palaces. The reader will remember how
+Villon's mother conceived of heaven and hell and took all her scanty
+stock of theology from the stained glass that threw its light upon her
+as she prayed. And there is scarcely a detail of external effect in the
+chronicles and romances of the time, but might have been borrowed at
+second hand from a piece of tapestry. It was a stage in the history of
+mankind which we may see paralleled to some extent in the first infant
+school, where the representations of lions and elephants alternate round
+the wall with moral verses and trite presentments of the lesser virtues.
+So that to live in a house of many pictures was tantamount, for a time,
+to a liberal education in itself.
+
+At Charles's birth an order of knighthood was inaugurated in his honour.
+At nine years old he was a squire; at eleven, he had the escort of a
+chaplain and a schoolmaster; at twelve, his uncle the king made him a
+pension of twelve thousand livres d'or.[15] He saw the most brilliant
+and the most learned persons of France in his father's court; and would
+not fail to notice that these brilliant and learned persons were one and
+all engaged in rhyming. Indeed, if it is difficult to realise the part
+played by pictures, it is perhaps even more difficult to realise that
+played by verses in the polite and active history of the age. At the
+siege of Pontoise, English and French exchanged defiant ballades over
+the walls.[16] If a scandal happened, as in the loathsome thirty-third
+story of the "Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles," all the wits must make rondels
+and chansonettes, which they would hand from one to another with an
+unmanly sneer. Ladies carried their favourite's ballades in their
+girdles.[17] Margaret of Scotland, all the world knows already, kissed
+Alain Chartier's lips in honour of the many virtuous thoughts and golden
+sayings they had uttered; but it is not so well known that this princess
+was herself the most industrious of poetasters, that she is supposed to
+have hastened her death by her literary vigils, and sometimes wrote as
+many as twelve rondels in the day.[18] It was in rhyme, even, that the
+young Charles should learn his lessons. He might get all manner of
+instruction in the truly noble art of the chase, not without a smack of
+ethics by the way, from the compendious didactic poem of Gace de la
+Bigne. Nay, and it was in rhyme that he should learn rhyming: in the
+verses of his father's Maître d'Hôtel, Eustache Deschamps, which treated
+of _l'art de dictier et de faire chançons, ballades, virelais et
+rondeaux_, along with many other matters worth attention, from the
+courts of Heaven to the misgovernment of France.[19] At this rate, all
+knowledge is to be had in a goody, and the end of it is an old song. We
+need not wonder when we hear from Monstrelet that Charles was a very
+well educated person. He could string Latin texts together by the hour,
+and make ballades and rondels better than Eustache Deschamps himself. He
+had seen a mad king who would not change his clothes, and a drunken
+emperor who could not keep his hand from the wine-cup. He had spoken a
+great deal with jesters and fiddlers, and with the profligate lords who
+helped his father to waste the revenues of France. He had seen ladies
+dance on into broad daylight, and much burning of torches and waste of
+dainties and good wine.[20] And when all is said, it was no very helpful
+preparation for the battle of life. "I believe Louis XI.," writes
+Comines, "would not have saved himself, if he had not been very
+differently brought up from such other lords as I have seen educated in
+this country; for these were taught nothing but to play the jackanapes
+with finery and fine words."[21] I am afraid Charles took such lessons
+to heart, and conceived of life as a season principally for junketing
+and war. His view of the whole duty of man, so empty, vain, and
+wearisome to us, was yet sincerely and consistently held. When he came
+in his ripe years to compare the glory of two kingdoms, England and
+France, it was on three points only--pleasures, valour, and
+riches,--that he cared to measure them; and in the very outset of that
+tract he speaks of the life of the great as passed, "whether in arms, as
+in assaults, battles, and sieges, or in jousts and tournaments, in high
+and stately festivities and in funeral solemnities."[22]
+
+When he was no more than thirteen, his father had him affianced to
+Isabella, virgin-widow of our Richard II. and daughter of his uncle
+Charles VI.; and, two years after (June 29, 1406), the cousins were
+married at Compiégne, he fifteen, she seventeen years of age. It was in
+every way a most desirable match. The bride brought five hundred
+thousand francs of dowry. The ceremony was of the utmost magnificence,
+Louis of Orleans figuring in crimson velvet, adorned with no less than
+seven hundred and ninety-five pearls, gathered together expressly for
+this occasion. And no doubt it must have been very gratifying for a
+young gentleman of fifteen to play the chief part in a pageant so gaily
+put upon the stage. Only, the bridegroom might have been a little older;
+and, as ill-luck would have it, the bride herself was of this way of
+thinking, and would not be consoled for the loss of her title as queen,
+or the contemptible age of her new husband. _Pleuroit fort ladite
+Isabeau_; the said Isabella wept copiously.[23] It is fairly debatable
+whether Charles was much to be pitied when, three years later (September
+1409), this odd marriage was dissolved by death. Short as it was,
+however, this connection left a lasting stamp upon his mind; and we find
+that, in the last decade of his life, and after he had re-married for
+perhaps the second time, he had not yet forgotten or forgiven the
+violent death of Richard II. _Ce mauvais cas_--that ugly business, he
+writes, has yet to be avenged.
+
+The marriage festivity was on the threshold of evil days. The great
+rivalry between Louis of Orleans and John the Fearless, Duke of
+Burgundy, had been forsworn with the most reverend solemnities. But the
+feud was only in abeyance, and John of Burgundy still conspired in
+secret. On November 23, 1407--in that black winter when the frost lasted
+six-and-sixty days on end--a summons from the King reached Louis of
+Orleans at the Hôtel Barbette, where he had been supping with Queen
+Isabel. It was seven or eight in the evening, and the inhabitants of the
+quarter were abed. He set forth in haste, accompanied by two squires
+riding on one horse, a page and a few varlets running with torches. As
+he rode, he hummed to himself and trifled with his glove. And so riding,
+he was beset by the bravoes of his enemy and slain. My lord of Burgundy
+set an ill precedent in this deed, as he found some years after on the
+bridge of Montereau; and even in the meantime he did not profit quietly
+by his rival's death. The horror of the other princes seems to have
+perturbed himself; he avowed his guilt in the council, tried to brazen
+it out, finally lost heart and fled at full gallop, cutting bridges
+behind him, towards Bapaume and Lille. And so there we have the head of
+one faction, who had just made himself the most formidable man in
+France, engaged in a remarkably hurried journey, with black care on the
+pillion. And meantime, on the other side, the widowed duchess came to
+Paris, in appropriate mourning, to demand justice for her husband's
+death. Charles VI., who was then in a lucid interval, did probably all
+that he could, when he raised up the kneeling suppliant with kisses and
+smooth words. Things were at a dead-lock. The criminal might be in the
+sorriest fright, but he was still the greatest of vassals. Justice was
+easy to ask and not difficult to promise; how it was to be executed was
+another question. No one in France was strong enough to punish John of
+Burgundy; and perhaps no one, except the widow, very sincere in wishing
+to punish him.
+
+She, indeed, was eaten up of zeal; but the intensity of her eagerness
+wore her out; and she died about a year after the murder, of grief and
+indignation, unrequited love and unsatisfied resentment. It was during
+the last months of her life that this fiery and generous woman, seeing
+the soft hearts of her own children, looked with envy on a certain
+natural son of her husband's, destined to become famous in the sequel as
+the Bastard of Orleans, or the brave Dunois. "_You were stolen from
+me_," she said; "it is you who are fit to avenge your father." These are
+not the words of ordinary mourning, or of an ordinary woman. It is a
+saying over which Balzac would have rubbed his episcopal hands. That the
+child who was to avenge her husband had not been born out of her body
+was a thing intolerable to Valentina of Milan; and the expression of
+this singular and tragic jealousy is preserved to us by a rare chance,
+in such straightforward and vivid words as we are accustomed to hear
+only on the stress of actual life, or in the theatre. In history--where
+we see things as in a glass darkly, and the fashion of former times is
+brought before us, deplorably adulterated and defaced, fitted to very
+vague and pompous words, and strained through many men's minds of
+everything personal or precise--this speech of the widowed duchess
+startles a reader, somewhat as the footprint startled Robinson Crusoe. A
+human voice breaks in upon the silence of the study, and the student is
+aware of a fellow-creature in his world of documents. With such a clue
+in hand, one may imagine how this wounded lioness would spur and
+exasperate the resentment of her children, and what would be the last
+words of counsel and command she left behind her.
+
+With these instancies of his dying mother--almost a voice from the
+tomb--still tingling in his ears, the position of young Charles of
+Orleans, when he was left at the head of that great house, was curiously
+similar to that of Shakespeare's Hamlet. The times were out of joint;
+here was a murdered father to avenge on a powerful murderer; and here,
+in both cases, a lad of inactive disposition born to set these matters
+right. Valentina's commendation of Dunois involved a judgment on
+Charles, and that judgment was exactly correct. Whoever might be,
+Charles was not the man to avenge his father. Like Hamlet, this son of a
+dear father murdered was sincerely grieved at heart. Like Hamlet, too,
+he could unpack his heart with words, and wrote a most eloquent letter
+to the King, complaining that what was denied to him would not be denied
+"to the lowest born and poorest man on earth." Even in his private
+hours he strove to preserve a lively recollection of his injury, and
+keep up the native hue of resolution. He had gems engraved with
+appropriate legends, hortatory or threatening: "_Dieu le scet_", God
+knows it; or "_Souvenez-vous de_--" Remember![24] It is only towards the
+end that the two stories begin to differ; and in some points the
+historical version is the more tragic. Hamlet only stabbed a silly old
+councillor behind the arras; Charles of Orleans trampled France for five
+years under the hoofs of his banditti. The miscarriage of Hamlet's
+vengeance was confined, at widest, to the palace; the ruin wrought by
+Charles of Orleans was as broad as France.
+
+Yet the first act of the young duke is worthy of honourable mention.
+Prodigal Louis had made enormous debts; and there is a story extant, to
+illustrate how lightly he himself regarded these commercial obligations.
+It appears that Louis, after a narrow escape he made in a thunderstorm,
+had a smart access of penitence, and announced he would pay his debts on
+the following Sunday. More than eight hundred creditors presented
+themselves, but by that time the devil was well again, and they were
+shown the door with more gaiety than politeness. A time when such
+cynical dishonesty was possible for a man of culture is not, it will be
+granted, a fortunate epoch for creditors. When the original debtor was
+so lax, we may imagine how an heir would deal with the incumbrances of
+his inheritance. On the death of Philip the Forward, father of that John
+the Fearless whom we have seen at work, the widow went through the
+ceremony of a public renunciation of goods; taking off her purse and
+girdle, she left them on the grave, and thus, by one notable act,
+cancelled her husband's debts and defamed his honour. The conduct of
+young Charles of Orleans was very different. To meet the joint
+liabilities of his father and mother (for Valentina also was lavish), he
+had to sell or pledge a quantity of jewels; and yet he would not take
+advantage of a pretext, even legally valid, to diminish the amount.
+Thus, one Godefroi Lefèvre, having disbursed many odd sums for the late
+duke, and received or kept no vouchers, Charles ordered that he should
+be believed upon his oath.[25] To a modern mind this seems as honourable
+to his father's memory as if John the Fearless had been hanged as high
+as Haman. And as things fell out, except a recantation from the
+University of Paris, which had justified the murder out of party
+feeling, and various other purely paper reparations, this was about the
+outside of what Charles was to effect in that direction. He lived five
+years, and grew up from sixteen to twenty-one, in the midst of the most
+horrible civil war, or series of civil wars, that ever devastated
+France; and from first to last his wars were ill-starred, or else his
+victories useless. Two years after the murder (March 1409), John the
+Fearless having the upper hand for the moment, a shameful and useless
+reconciliation took place, by the King's command, in the Church of Our
+Lady at Chartres. The advocate of the Duke of Burgundy stated that Louis
+of Orleans had been killed "for the good of the King's person and
+realm." Charles and his brothers, with tears of shame, under protest,
+_pour ne pas desobéir au roi_, forgave their father's murderer and swore
+peace upon the missal. It was, as I say, a shameful and useless
+ceremony; the very greffier, entering it in his register, wrote in the
+margin, "_Pax, pax, inquit Propheta, et non est pax._"[26] Charles was
+soon after allied with the abominable Bernard d'Armagnac, even betrothed
+or married to a daughter of his, called by a name that sounds like a
+contradiction in terms, Bonne d'Armagnac. From that time forth,
+throughout all this monstrous period--a very nightmare in the history of
+France--he is no more than a stalking-horse for the ambitious Gascon.
+Sometimes the smoke lifts, and you can see him for the twinkling of an
+eye, a very pale figure; at one moment there is a rumour he will be
+crowned king; at another, when the uproar has subsided, he will be heard
+still crying out for justice; and the next (1412), he is showing himself
+to the applauding populace on the same horse with John of Burgundy. But
+these are exceptional seasons, and for the most part he merely rides at
+the Gascon's bridle over devastated France. His very party go, not by
+the name of Orleans, but by the name of Armagnac. Paris is in the hands
+of the butchers: the peasants have taken to the woods. Alliances are
+made and broken as if in a country dance; the English called in, now by
+this one, now by the other. Poor people sing in church, with white faces
+and lamentable music: "_Domine Jesu, parce populo tuo, dirige in viam
+pacis principes._" And the end and upshot of the whole affair for
+Charles of Orleans is another peace with John the Fearless. France is
+once more tranquil, with the tranquillity of ruin; he may ride home
+again to Blois, and look, with what countenance he may, on those gems he
+had got engraved in the early days of his resentment, "_Souvenez-vous
+de--_" Remember! He has killed Polonius, to be sure; but the King is
+never a penny the worse.
+
+
+  II
+
+From the battle of Agincourt (Oct. 1415) dates the second period of
+Charles's life. The English reader will remember the name of Orleans in
+the play of _Henry V._; and it is at least odd that we can trace a
+resemblance between the puppet and the original. The interjection, "I
+have heard a sonnet begin so to one's mistress" (Act iii. scene 7), may
+very well indicate one who was already an expert in that sort of trifle;
+and the game of proverbs he plays with the Constable in the same scene
+would be quite in character for a man who spent many years of his life
+capping verses with his courtiers. Certainly, Charles was in the great
+battle with five hundred lances (say, three thousand men), and there he
+was made prisoner as he led the van. According to one story, some ragged
+English archer shot him down; and some diligent English Pistol, hunting
+ransoms on the field of battle, extracted him from under a heap of
+bodies and retailed him to our King Henry. He was the most important
+capture of the day, and used with all consideration. On the way to
+Calais, Henry sent him a present of bread and wine (and bread, you will
+remember, was an article of luxury in the English camp), but Charles
+would neither eat nor drink. Thereupon Henry came to visit him in his
+quarters. "Noble cousin," said he, "how are you?" Charles replied that
+he was well. "Why then do you neither eat nor drink?" And then with some
+asperity, as I imagine, the young duke told him that "truly he had no
+inclination for food." And our Henry improved the occasion with
+something of a snuffle, assuring his prisoner that God had fought
+against the French on account of their manifold sins and transgressions.
+Upon this there supervened the agonies of a rough sea-passage; and many
+French lords, Charles certainly among the number, declared they would
+rather endure such another defeat than such another sore trial on
+shipboard. Charles, indeed, never forgot his sufferings. Long
+afterwards, he declared his hatred to a seafaring life, and willingly
+yielded to England the empire of the seas, "because there is danger and
+loss of life, and God knows what pity when it storms; and sea-sickness
+is for many people hard to bear; and the rough life that must be led is
+little suitable for the nobility":[27] which, of all babyish utterances
+that ever fell from any public man, may surely bear the bell. Scarcely
+disembarked, he followed his victor, with such wry face as we may fancy,
+through the streets of holiday London. And then the doors closed upon
+his last day of garish life for more than a quarter of a century. After
+a boyhood passed in the dissipations of a luxurious court or in the camp
+of war, his ears still stunned and his cheeks still burning from his
+enemies' jubilations; out of all this ringing of English bells and
+singing of English anthems, from among all these shouting citizens in
+scarlet cloaks, and beautiful virgins attired in white, he passed into
+the silence and solitude of a political prison.[28]
+
+His captivity was not without alleviations. He was allowed to go
+hawking, and he found England an admirable country for the sport; he was
+a favourite with English ladies, and admired their beauty; and he did
+not lack for money, wine, or books; he was honourably imprisoned in the
+strongholds of great nobles, in Windsor Castle and the Tower of London.
+But when all is said, he was a prisoner for five-and-twenty years. For
+five-and-twenty years he could not go where he would, or do what he
+liked, or speak with any but his jailers. We may talk very wisely of
+alleviations; there is only one alleviation for which the man would
+thank you: he would thank you to open the door. With what regret
+Scottish James I. bethought him (in the next room perhaps to Charles) of
+the time when he rose "as early as the day." What would he not have
+given to wet his boots once more with morning dew, and follow his
+vagrant fancy among the meadows? The only alleviation to the misery of
+constraint lies in the disposition of the prisoner. To each one this
+place of discipline brings his own lesson. It stirs Latude or Baron
+Trenck into heroic action; it is a hermitage for pious and conformable
+spirits. Béranger tells us he found prison life, with its regular hours
+and long evenings, both pleasant and profitable. The "Pilgrim's
+Progress" and "Don Quixote" were begun in prison. It was after they were
+become (to use the words of one of them), "Oh, worst imprisonment--the
+dungeon of themselves!" that Homer and Milton worked so hard and so well
+for the profit of mankind. In the year 1415 Henry V. had two
+distinguished prisoners, French Charles of Orleans and Scottish James
+I., who whiled away the hours of their captivity with rhyming. Indeed,
+there can be no better pastime for a lonely man than the mechanical
+exercise of verse. Such intricate forms as Charles had been used to from
+childhood, the ballade with its scanty rhymes; the rondel, with the
+recurrence first of the whole, then of half the burthen, in thirteen
+verses, seem to have been invented for the prison and the sick-bed. The
+common Scots saying, on the sight of anything operose and finical, "he
+must have had little to do that made that!" might be put as epigraph on
+all the song-books of old France. Making such sorts of verse belongs to
+the same class of pleasures as guessing acrostics or "burying proverbs."
+It is almost purely formal, almost purely verbal. It must be done gently
+and gingerly. It keeps the mind occupied a long time, and never so
+intently as to be distressing; for anything like strain is against the
+very nature of the craft. Sometimes things go easily, the refrains fall
+into their place as if of their own accord, and it becomes something of
+the nature of an intellectual tennis; you must make your poem as the
+rhymes will go, just as you must strike your ball as your adversary
+played it. So that these forms are suitable rather for those who wish to
+make verses than for those who wish to express opinions. Sometimes, on
+the other hand, difficulties arise: rival verses come into a man's head,
+and fugitive words elude his memory. Then it is that he enjoys at the
+same time the deliberate pleasures of a connoisseur comparing wines, and
+the ardour of the chase. He may have been sitting all day long in prison
+with folded hands; but when he goes to bed the retrospect will seem
+animated and eventful.
+
+Besides confirming himself as an habitual maker of verses, Charles
+acquired some new opinions during his captivity. He was perpetually
+reminded of the change that had befallen him. He found the climate of
+England cold and "prejudicial to the human frame"; he had a great
+contempt for English fruit and English beer; even the coal fires were
+unpleasing in his eyes.[29] He was rooted up from among his friends and
+customs and the places that had known him. And so in this strange land
+he began to learn the love of his own. Sad people all the world over are
+like to be moved when the wind is in some particular quarter. So Burns
+preferred when it was in the west, and blew to him from his mistress; so
+the girl in the ballade, looking south to Yarrow, thought it might carry
+a kiss betwixt her and her gallant; and so we find Charles singing of
+the "pleasant wind that comes from France."[30] One day, at
+"Dover-on-the-Sea," he looked across the straits, and saw the sandhills
+about Calais. And it happened to him, he tells us in a ballade, to
+remember his happiness over there in the past; and he was both sad and
+merry at the recollection, and could not have his fill of gazing on the
+shores of France.[31] Although guilty of unpatriotic acts, he had never
+been exactly unpatriotic in feeling. But his sojourn in England gave,
+for the time at least, some consistency to what had been a very weak and
+ineffectual prejudice. He must have been under the influence of more
+than usually solemn considerations, when he proceeded to turn Henry's
+puritanical homily after Agincourt into a ballade, and reproach France,
+and himself by implication, with pride, gluttony, idleness, unbridled
+covetousness, and sensuality.[32] For the moment, he must really have
+been thinking more of France than of Charles of Orleans.
+
+And another lesson he learned. He who was only to be released in case of
+peace begins to think upon the disadvantages of war. "Pray for peace,"
+is his refrain: a strange enough subject for the ally of Bernard
+d'Armagnac.[33] But this lesson was plain and practical; it had one side
+in particular that was specially attractive for Charles; and he did not
+hesitate to explain it in so many words. "Everybody," he writes--I
+translate roughly--"everybody should be much inclined to peace, for
+everybody has a deal to gain by it."[34]
+
+Charles made laudable endeavours to acquire English, and even learned to
+write a rondel in that tongue of quite average mediocrity.[35] He was
+for some time billeted on the unhappy Suffolk, who received fourteen
+shillings and fourpence a day for his expenses; and from the fact that
+Suffolk afterwards visited Charles in France while he was negotiating
+the marriage of Henry VI., as well as the terms of that nobleman's
+impeachment, we may believe there was some not unkindly intercourse
+between the prisoner and his jailer: a fact of considerable interest
+when we remember that Suffolk's wife was the grand-daughter of the poet
+Geoffrey Chaucer.[36] Apart from this, and a mere catalogue of dates and
+places, only one thing seems evident in the story of Charles's
+captivity. It seems evident that, as these five-and-twenty years drew
+on, he became less and less resigned. Circumstances were against the
+growth of such a feeling. One after another of his fellow-prisoners was
+ransomed and went home. More than once he was himself permitted to visit
+France; where he worked on abortive treaties and showed himself more
+eager for his own deliverance than for the profit of his native land.
+Resignation may follow after a reasonable time upon despair; but if a
+man is persecuted by a series of brief and irritating hopes, his mind no
+more attains to a settled frame of resolution than his eye would grow
+familiar with a night of thunder and lightning. Years after, when he was
+speaking at the trial of that Duke of Alençon who began life so
+hopefully as the boyish favourite of Joan of Arc, he sought to prove
+that captivity was a harder punishment than death. "For I have had
+experience myself," he said; "and in my prison of England, for the
+weariness, danger, and displeasure in which I then lay, I have many a
+time wished I had been slain at the battle where they took me."[37] This
+is a flourish, if you will, but it is something more. His spirit would
+sometimes rise up in a fine anger against the petty desires and
+contrarieties of life. He would compare his own condition with the quiet
+and dignified estate of the dead; and aspire to lie among his comrades
+on the field of Agincourt, as the Psalmist prayed to have the wings of a
+dove and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea. But such high thoughts
+came to Charles only in a flash.
+
+John the Fearless had been murdered in his turn on the bridge of
+Montereau so far back as 1419. His son, Philip the Good--partly to
+extinguish the feud, partly that he might do a popular action, and
+partly, in view of his ambitious schemes, to detach another great vassal
+from the throne of France--had taken up the cause of Charles of Orleans,
+and negotiated diligently for his release. In 1433 a Burgundian embassy
+was admitted to an interview with the captive duke, in the presence of
+Suffolk. Charles shook hands most affectionately with the ambassadors.
+They asked after his health. "I am well enough in body," he replied,
+"but far from well in mind. I am dying of grief at having to pass the
+best days of my life in prison, with none to sympathise." The talk
+falling on the chances of peace, Charles referred to Suffolk if he were
+not sincere and constant in his endeavours to bring it about. "If peace
+depended on me," he said, "I should procure it gladly, were it to cost
+me my life seven days after." We may take this as showing what a large
+price he set, not so much on peace, as on seven days of freedom. Seven
+days!--he would make them seven years in the employment. Finally, he
+assured the ambassadors of his good-will to Philip of Burgundy;
+squeezed one of them by the hand and nipped him twice in the arm to
+signify things unspeakable before Suffolk; and two days after sent them
+Suffolk's barber, one Jean Carnet, a native of Lille, to testify more
+freely of his sentiments. "As I speak French," said this emissary, "the
+Duke of Orleans is more familiar with me than any other of the
+household; and I can bear witness he never said anything against Duke
+Philip."[38] It will be remembered that this person, with whom he was so
+anxious to stand well, was no other than his hereditary enemy, the son
+of his father's murderer. But the honest fellow bore no malice,
+indeed--not he. He began exchanging ballades with Philip, whom he
+apostrophises as his companion, his cousin, and his brother. He assures
+him that, soul and body, he is altogether Burgundian; and protests that
+he has given his heart in pledge to him. Regarded as the history of a
+vendetta, it must be owned that Charles's life has points of some
+originality. And yet there is an engaging frankness about these ballades
+which disarms criticism.[39] You see Charles throwing himself
+head-foremost into the trap; you hear Burgundy, in his answers, begin to
+inspire him with his own prejudices, and draw melancholy pictures of the
+misgovernment of France. But Charles's own spirits are so high and so
+amiable, and he is so thoroughly convinced his cousin is a fine fellow,
+that one's scruples are carried away in the torrent of his happiness and
+gratitude. And his would be a sordid spirit who would not clap hands at
+the consummation (Nov. 1440); when Charles, after having sworn on the
+Sacrament that he would never again bear arms against England, and
+pledged himself body and soul to the unpatriotic faction in his own
+country, set out from London with a light heart and a damaged integrity.
+
+In the magnificent copy of Charles's poems, given by our Henry VII. to
+Elizabeth of York on the occasion of their marriage, a large
+illumination figures at the head of one of the pages, which, in
+chronological perspective, is almost a history of his imprisonment. It
+gives a view of London with all its spires, the river passing through
+the old bridge and busy with boats. One side of the white Tower has been
+taken out, and we can see, as under a sort of shrine, the paved room
+where the duke sits writing. He occupies a high-backed bench in front of
+a great chimney; red and black ink are before him; and the upper end of
+the apartment is guarded by many halberdiers, with the red cross of
+England on their breast. On the next side of the tower he appears again,
+leaning out of window and gazing on the river; doubtless there blows
+just then "a pleasant wind from out the land of France," and some ship
+comes up the river: "the ship of good news." At the door we find him yet
+again; this time embracing a messenger, while a groom stands by holding
+two saddled horses. And yet farther to the left, a cavalcade defiles out
+of the tower; the duke is on his way at last towards "the sunshine of
+France."
+
+
+  III
+
+During the five-and-twenty years of his captivity Charles had not lost
+in the esteem of his fellow-countrymen. For so young a man, the head of
+so great a house and so numerous a party, to be taken prisoner as he
+rode in the vanguard of France, and stereotyped for all men in this
+heroic attitude, was to taste untimeously the honours of the grave. Of
+him, as of the dead, it would be ungenerous to speak evil; what little
+energy he had displayed would be remembered with piety, when all that he
+had done amiss was courteously forgotten. As English folk looked for
+Arthur; as Danes awaited the coming of Ogier; as Somersetshire peasants
+or sergeants of the Old Guard expected the return of Monmouth or
+Napoleon; the countrymen of Charles of Orleans looked over the straits
+towards his English prison with desire and confidence. Events had so
+fallen out while he was rhyming ballades, that he had become the type of
+all that was most truly patriotic. The remnants of his old party had
+been the chief defenders of the unity of France. His enemies of Burgundy
+had been notoriously favourers and furtherers of English domination.
+People forgot that his brother still lay by the heels for an unpatriotic
+treaty with England, because Charles himself had been taken prisoner
+patriotically fighting against it. That Henry V. had left special orders
+against his liberation served to increase the wistful pity with which he
+was regarded. And when, in defiance of all contemporary virtue, and
+against express pledges, the English carried war into their prisoner's
+fief, not only France, but all thinking men in Christendom, were roused
+to indignation against the oppressors, and sympathy with the victim. It
+was little wonder if he came to bulk somewhat largely in the imagination
+of the best of those at home. Charles le Boutteillier, when (as the
+story goes) he slew Clarence at Beaugé, was only seeking an exchange for
+Charles of Orleans.[40] It was one of Joan of Arc's declared intentions
+to deliver the captive duke. If there was no other way, she meant to
+cross the seas and bring him home by force. And she professed before her
+judges a sure knowledge that Charles of Orleans was beloved of God.[41]
+
+Alas! it was not at all as a deliverer that Charles returned to France.
+He was nearly fifty years old. Many changes had been accomplished since,
+at twenty-three, he was taken on the field of Agincourt. But of all
+these he was profoundly ignorant, or had only heard of them in the
+discoloured reports of Philip of Burgundy. He had the ideas of a former
+generation, and sought to correct them by the scandal of a factious
+party. With such qualifications he came back eager for the domination,
+the pleasures, and the display that befitted his princely birth. A long
+disuse of all political activity combined with the flatteries of his new
+friends to fill him with an overweening conceit of his own capacity and
+influence. If aught had gone wrong in his absence, it seemed quite
+natural men should look to him for its redress. Was not King Arthur come
+again?
+
+The Duke of Burgundy received him with politic honours. He took his
+guest by his foible for pageantry, all the easier as it was a foible of
+his own; and Charles walked right out of prison into much the same
+atmosphere of trumpeting and bell-ringing as he had left behind when he
+went in. Fifteen days after his deliverance he was married to Mary of
+Cleves, at St. Omer. The marriage was celebrated with the usual pomp of
+the Burgundian court; there were joustings, and illuminations, and
+animals that spouted wine; and many nobles dined together, _comme en
+brigade_, and were served abundantly with many rich and curious
+dishes.[42] It must have reminded Charles not a little of his first
+marriage at Compiègne; only then he was two years the junior of his
+bride, and this time he was five-and-thirty years her senior. It will be
+a fine question which marriage promises more: for a boy of fifteen to
+lead off with a lass of seventeen, or a man of fifty to make a match of
+it with a child of fifteen. But there was something bitter in both. The
+lamentations of Isabella will not have been forgotten. As for Mary, she
+took up with one Jaquet de la Lain, a sort of muscular Methody of the
+period, with a huge appetite for tournaments, and a habit of confessing
+himself the last thing before he went to bed.[43] With such a hero, the
+young duchess's amours were most likely innocent; and in all other ways
+she was a suitable partner for the duke, and well fitted to enter into
+his pleasures.
+
+When the festivities at Saint Omer had come to an end, Charles and his
+wife set forth by Ghent and Tournay. The towns gave him offerings of
+money as he passed through, to help in the payment of his ransom. From
+all sides, ladies and gentlemen thronged to offer him their services;
+some gave him their sons for pages, some archers for a bodyguard; and by
+the time he reached Tournay, he had a following of 300 horse. Everywhere
+he was received as though he had been the king of France.[44] If he did
+not come to imagine himself something of the sort, he certainly forgot
+the existence of any one with a better claim to the title. He conducted
+himself on the hypothesis that Charles VII. was another Charles VI. He
+signed with enthusiasm that treaty of Arras, which left France almost at
+the discretion of Burgundy. On December 18 he was still no further than
+Bruges, where he entered into a private treaty with Philip; and it was
+not until January 14, ten weeks after he disembarked in France, and
+attended by a ruck of Burgundian gentlemen, that he arrived in Paris and
+offered to present himself before Charles VII. The King sent word that
+he might come, if he would, with a small retinue, but not with his
+present following; and the duke, who was mightily on his high horse
+after all the ovations he had received, took the King's attitude amiss,
+and turned aside into Touraine, to receive more welcome and more
+presents, and be convoyed by torchlight into faithful cities.
+
+And so you see here was King Arthur home again, and matters nowise
+mended in consequence. The best we can say is, that this last stage of
+Charles's public life was of no long duration. His confidence was soon
+knocked out of him in the contact with others. He began to find he was
+an earthen vessel among many vessels of brass; he began to be shrewdly
+aware that he was no King Arthur. In 1442, at Limoges, he made himself
+the spokesman of the malcontent nobility. The King showed himself
+humiliatingly indifferent to his counsels, and humiliatingly generous
+towards his necessities. And there, with some blushes, he may be said to
+have taken farewell of the political stage. A feeble attempt on the
+county of Asti is scarce worth the name of exception. Thenceforward let
+Ambition wile whom she may into the turmoil of events, our duke will
+walk cannily in his well-ordered garden, or sit by the fire to touch the
+slender reed.[45]
+
+
+  IV
+
+If it were given each of us to transplant his life wherever he pleased
+in time or space, with all the ages and all the countries of the world
+to choose from, there would be quite an instructive diversity of taste.
+A certain sedentary majority would prefer to remain where they were.
+Many would choose the Renaissance; many some stately and simple period
+of Grecian life; and still more elect to pass a few years wandering
+among the villages of Palestine with an inspired conductor. For some of
+our quaintly vicious contemporaries, we have the decline of the Roman
+Empire and the reign of Henry III. of France. But there are others not
+quite so vicious, who yet cannot look upon the world with perfect
+gravity, who have never taken the categorical imperative to wife, and
+have more taste for what is comfortable than for what is magnanimous and
+high; and I can imagine some of these casting their lot in the court of
+Blois during the last twenty years of the life of Charles of Orleans.
+
+The duke and duchess, their staff of officers and ladies, and the
+high-born and learned persons who were attracted to Blois on a visit,
+formed a society for killing time and perfecting each other in various
+elegant accomplishments, such as we might imagine for an ideal
+watering-place in the Delectable Mountains. The company hunted and went
+on pleasure-parties; they played chess, tables, and many other games.
+What we now call the history of the period passed, I imagine, over the
+heads of these good people much as it passes over our own. News reached
+them, indeed, of great and joyful import. William Peel received eight
+livres and five sous from the duchess when he brought the first tidings
+that Rouen was recaptured from the English.[46] A little later and the
+duke sang, in a truly patriotic vein, the deliverance of Guyenne and
+Normandy.[47] They were liberal of rhymes and largesse, and welcomed the
+prosperity of their country much as they welcomed the coming of spring,
+and with no more thought of collaborating towards the event. Religion
+was not forgotten in the court of Blois. Pilgrimages were agreeable and
+picturesque excursions. In those days a well-served chapel was something
+like a good vinery in our own,--an opportunity for display and the
+source of mild enjoyments. There was probably something of his rooted
+delight in pageantry, as well as a good deal of gentle piety, in the
+feelings with which Charles gave dinner every Friday to thirteen poor
+people, served them himself, and washed their feet with his own
+hands.[48] Solemn affairs would interest Charles and his courtiers from
+their trivial side. The duke perhaps cared less for the deliverance of
+Guyenne and Normandy than for his own verses on the occasion; just as
+Dr. Russell's correspondence in _The Times_ was among the most material
+parts of the Crimean War for that talented correspondent. And I think it
+scarcely cynical to suppose that religion as well as patriotism was
+principally cultivated as a means of filling up the day.
+
+It was not only messengers fiery red with haste and charged with the
+destiny of nations who were made welcome at the gates of Blois. If any
+man of accomplishment came that way, he was sure of an audience, and
+something for his pocket. The courtiers would have received Ben Jonson
+like Drummond of Hawthornden, and a good pugilist like Captain Barclay.
+They were catholic, as none but the entirely idle can be catholic. It
+might be Pierre, called Dieu d'amours, the juggler; or it might be
+three high English minstrels; or the two men, players of ghitterns, from
+the kingdom of Scotland, who sang the destruction of the Turks; or again
+Jehan Rognelet, player of instruments of music, who played and danced
+with his wife and two children; they would each be called into the
+castle to give a taste of his proficiency before my lord the duke.[49]
+Sometimes the performance was of a more personal interest, and produced
+much the same sensations as are felt on an English green on the arrival
+of a professional cricketer, or round an English billiard-table during a
+match between Roberts and Cook. This was when Jehan Nègre, the Lombard,
+came to Blois and played chess against all these chess-players, and won
+much money from my lord and his intimates; or when Baudet Harenc of
+Chalons made ballades before all these ballade-makers.[50]
+
+It will not surprise the reader to learn they were all makers of
+ballades and rondels. To write verses for May-day seems to have been as
+much a matter of course as to ride out with the cavalcade that went to
+gather hawthorn. The choice of Valentines was a standing challenge, and
+the courtiers pelted each other with humorous and sentimental verses as
+in a literary carnival. If an indecorous adventure befell our friend
+Maistre Estienne le Gout, my lord the duke would turn it into the
+funniest of rondels, all the rhymes being the names of the cases of
+nouns or the moods of verbs; and Maistre Estienne would make reply in
+similar fashion, seeking to prune the story of its more humiliating
+episodes. If Frédet was too long away from Court, a rondel went to
+upbraid him; and it was in a rondel that Frédet would excuse himself.
+Sometimes two or three, or as many as a dozen, would set to work on the
+same refrain, the same idea, or in the same macaronic jargon. Some of
+the poetasters were heavy enough; others were not wanting in address;
+and the duchess herself was among those who most excelled. On one
+occasion eleven competitors made a ballade on the idea,
+
+  "I die of thirst beside the fountain's edge"
+   (Je meurs de soif emprès de la fontaine).
+
+These eleven ballades still exist; and one of them arrests the attention
+rather from the name of the author than from any special merit in
+itself. It purports to be the work of François Villon; and so far as a
+foreigner can judge (which is indeed a small way), it may very well be
+his. Nay, and if any one thing is more probable than another, in the
+great _tabula rasa_, or unknown land, which we are fain to call the
+biography of Villon, it seems probable enough that he may have gone upon
+a visit to Charles of Orleans. Where Master Baudet Harenc, of Chalons,
+found a sympathetic, or perhaps a derisive audience (for who can tell
+nowadays the degree of Baudet's excellence in his art?), favour would
+not be wanting for the greatest ballade-maker of all time. Great as
+would seem the incongruity, it may have pleased Charles to own a sort of
+kinship with ragged singers, and whimsically regard himself as one of
+the confraternity of poets. And he would have other grounds of intimacy
+with Villon. A room looking upon Windsor gardens is a different matter
+from Villon's dungeon at Méun; yet each in his own degree had been tried
+in prison. Each in his own way also loved the good things of this life
+and the service of the Muses. But the same gulf that separated Burns
+from his Edinburgh patrons would separate the singer of Bohemia from the
+rhyming duke. And it is hard to imagine that Villon's training amongst
+thieves, loose women, and vagabond students had fitted him to move in a
+society of any dignity and courtliness. Ballades are very admirable
+things; and a poet is doubtless a most interesting visitor. But among
+the courtiers of Charles there would be considerable regard for the
+proprieties of etiquette; and even a duke will sometimes have an eye to
+his teaspoons. Moreover, as a poet, I can conceive he may have
+disappointed expectation. It need surprise nobody if Villon's ballade on
+the theme,
+
+  "I die of thirst beside the fountain's edge,"
+
+was but a poor performance. He would make better verses on the lee-side
+of a flagon at the sign of the Pomme du Pin, than in a cushioned settle
+in the halls of Blois.
+
+Charles liked change of place. He was often not so much travelling as
+making a progress; now to join the King for some great tournament; now
+to visit King René, at Tarascon, where he had a study of his own and saw
+all manner of interesting things--Oriental curios, King René painting
+birds, and, what particularly pleased him, Triboulet, the dwarf jester,
+whose skull-cap was no bigger than an orange.[51] Sometimes the journeys
+were set about on horseback in a large party, with the _fourriers_ sent
+forward to prepare a lodging at the next stage. We find almost
+Gargantuan details of the provision made by these officers against the
+duke's arrival, of eggs and butter and bread, cheese and peas and
+chickens, pike and bream and barbel, and wine both white and red.[52]
+Sometimes he went by water in a barge, playing chess or tables with a
+friend in the pavilion, or watching other vessels as they went before
+the wind.[53] Children ran along the bank, as they do to this day on the
+Crinan Canal; and when Charles threw in money they would dive and bring
+it up.[54] As he looked on their exploits, I wonder whether that room of
+gold and silk and worsted came back into his memory, with the device of
+little children in the river, and the sky full of birds?
+
+He was a bit of a book-fancier, and had vied with his brother Angoulême
+in bringing back the library of their grandfather Charles V., when
+Bedford put it up for sale in London.[55] The duchess had a library of
+her own; and we hear of her borrowing romances from ladies in attendance
+on the blue-stocking Margaret of Scotland.[56] Not only were books
+collected, but new books were written at the court of Blois. The widow
+of one Jean Fougère, a book-binder, seems to have done a number of odd
+commissions for the bibliophilous count. She it was who received three
+vellum skins to bind the duchess's Book of Hours, and who was employed
+to prepare parchment for the use of the duke's scribes. And she it was
+who bound in vermilion leather the great manuscript of Charles's own
+poems, which was presented to him by his secretary, Anthony Astesan,
+with the text in one column, and Astesan's Latin version in the
+other.[57]
+
+Such tastes, with the coming of years, would doubtless take the place of
+many others. We find in Charles's verse much semi-ironical regret for
+other days, and resignation to growing infirmities. He who had been
+"nourished in the schools of love" now sees nothing either to please or
+displease him. Old age has imprisoned him within doors, where he means
+to take his ease, and let younger fellows bestir themselves in life. He
+had written (in earlier days, we may presume) a bright and defiant
+little poem in praise of solitude. If they would but leave him alone
+with his own thoughts and happy recollections, he declared it was beyond
+the power of melancholy to affect him. But now, when his animal strength
+has so much declined that he sings the discomforts of winter instead of
+the inspirations of spring, and he has no longer any appetite for life,
+he confesses he is wretched when alone, and, to keep his mind from
+grievous thoughts, he must have many people around him, laughing,
+talking, and singing.[58]
+
+While Charles was thus falling into years, the order of things, of
+which he was the outcome and ornament, was growing old along with him.
+The semi-royalty of the princes of the blood was already a thing of the
+past; and when Charles VII. was gathered to his fathers, a new king
+reigned in France, who seemed every way the opposite of royal. Louis XI.
+had aims that were incomprehensible, and virtues that were
+inconceivable, to his contemporaries. But his contemporaries were able
+enough to appreciate his sordid exterior, and his cruel and treacherous
+spirit. To the whole nobility of France he was a fatal and unreasonable
+phenomenon. All such courts as that of Charles at Blois, or his friend
+René's in Provence, would soon be made impossible: interference was the
+order of the day; hunting was already abolished; and who should say what
+was to go next? Louis, in fact, must have appeared to Charles primarily
+in the light of a kill-joy. I take it, when missionaries land in South
+Sea Islands and lay strange embargo on the simplest things in life, the
+islanders will not be much more puzzled and irritated than Charles of
+Orleans at the policy of the Eleventh Louis. There was one thing, I seem
+to apprehend, that had always particularly moved him; and that was, any
+proposal to punish a person of his acquaintance. No matter what treason
+he may have made or meddled with, an Alençon or an Armagnac was sure to
+find Charles reappear from private life and do his best to get him
+pardoned. He knew them quite well. He had made rondels with them. They
+were charming people in every way. There must certainly be some mistake.
+Had not he himself made anti-national treaties almost before he was out
+of his nonage? And for the matter of that, had not every one else done
+the like? Such are some of the thoughts by which he might explain to
+himself his aversion to such extremities; but it was on a deeper basis
+that the feeling probably reposed. A man of his temper could not fail to
+be impressed at the thought of disastrous revolutions in the fortunes of
+those he knew. He would feel painfully the tragic contrast, when those
+who had everything to make life valuable were deprived of life itself
+And it was shocking to the clemency of his spirit, that sinners should
+be hurried before their Judge without a fitting interval for penitence
+and satisfaction. It was this feeling which brought him at last, a poor,
+purblind blue-bottle of the later autumn, into collision with "the
+universal spider," Louis XI. He took up the defence of the Duke of
+Brittany at Tours. But Louis was then in no humour to hear Charles's
+texts and Latin sentiments; he had his back to the wall, the future of
+France was at stake; and if all the old men in the world had crossed his
+path, they would have had the rough side of his tongue like Charles of
+Orleans. I have found nowhere what he said, but it seems it was
+monstrously to the point, and so rudely conceived that the old duke
+never recovered the indignity. He got home as far as Amboise, sickened,
+and died two days after (Jan. 4, 1465), in the seventy-fourth year of
+his age. And so a whiff of pungent prose stopped the issue of melodious
+rondels to the end of time.
+
+
+  V
+
+The futility of Charles's public life was of a piece throughout. He
+never succeeded in any single purpose he set before him; for his
+deliverance from England, after twenty-five years of failure, and at the
+cost of dignity and consistency, it would be ridiculously hyperbolical
+to treat as a success. During the first part of his life he was the
+stalking-horse of Bernard d'Armagnac; during the second, he was the
+passive instrument of English diplomatists; and before he was well
+entered on the third, he hastened to become the dupe and catspaw of
+Burgundian treason. On each of these occasions, a strong and not
+dishonourable personal motive determined his behaviour. In 1407 and the
+following years he had his father's murder uppermost in his mind.
+During his English captivity, that thought was displaced by a more
+immediate desire for his own liberation. In 1440 a sentiment of
+gratitude to Philip of Burgundy blinded him to all else, and led him to
+break with the tradition of his party and his own former life. He was
+born a great vassal, and he conducted himself like a private gentleman.
+He began life in a showy and brilliant enough fashion, by the light of a
+petty personal chivalry. He was not without some tincture of patriotism;
+but it was resolvable into two parts: a preference for life among his
+fellow-countrymen, and a barren point of honour. In England, he could
+comfort himself by the reflection that "he had been taken while loyally
+doing his devoir," without any misgiving as to his conduct in the
+previous years, when he had prepared the disaster of Agincourt by
+wasteful feud. This unconsciousness of the larger interests is perhaps
+most happily exampled out of his own mouth. When Alençon stood accused
+of betraying Normandy into the hands of the English, Charles made a
+speech in his defence, from which I have already quoted more than once.
+Alençon, he said, had professed a great love and trust towards him; "yet
+did he give no great proof thereof, when he sought to betray Normandy;
+whereby he would have made me lose an estate of 10,000 livres a year,
+and might have occasioned the destruction of the kingdom and of all us
+Frenchmen." These are the words of one, mark you, against whom
+Gloucester warned the English Council because of his "great subtility
+and cautelous disposition." It is not hard to excuse the impatience of
+Louis XI. if such stuff was foisted on him by way of political
+deliberation.
+
+This incapacity to see things with any greatness, this obscure and
+narrow view, was fundamentally characteristic of the man as well as of
+the epoch. It is not even so striking in his public life, where he
+failed, as in his poems, where he notably succeeded. For wherever we
+might expect a poet to be unintelligent, it certainly would not be in
+his poetry. And Charles is unintelligent even there. Of all authors
+whom a modern may still read, and read over again with pleasure, he has
+perhaps the least to say. His poems seem to bear testimony rather to the
+fashion of rhyming, which distinguished the age, than to any special
+vocation in the man himself. Some of them are drawing-room exercises,
+and the rest seem made by habit. Great writers are struck with something
+in nature or society, with which they become pregnant and longing; they
+are possessed with an idea, and cannot be at peace until they have put
+it outside of them in some distinct embodiment. But with Charles
+literature was an object rather than a mean; he was one who loved
+bandying words for its own sake; the rigidity of intricate metrical
+forms stood him in lieu of precise thought; instead of communicating
+truth, he observed the laws of a game; and when he had no one to
+challenge at chess or rackets, he made verses in a wager against
+himself. From the very idleness of the man's mind, and not from
+intensity of feeling, it happens that all his poems are more or less
+autobiographical. But they form an autobiography singularly bald and
+uneventful. Little is therein recorded beside sentiments. Thoughts, in
+any true sense, he had none to record. And if we can gather that he had
+been a prisoner in England, that he had lived in the Orleannese, and
+that he hunted and went in parties of pleasure, I believe it is about as
+much definite experience as is to be found in all these five hundred
+pages of autobiographical verse. Doubtless, we find here and there a
+complaint on the progress of the infirmities of age. Doubtless, he feels
+the great change of the year, and distinguishes winter from spring;
+winter as the time of snow and the fireside; spring as the return of
+grass and flowers, the time of St. Valentine's day and a beating heart.
+And he feels love after a fashion. Again and again we learn that Charles
+of Orleans is in love, and hear him ring the changes through the whole
+gamut of dainty and tender sentiment. But there is never a spark of
+passion; and heaven alone knows whether there was any real woman in the
+matter, or the whole thing was an exercise in fancy. If these poems were
+indeed inspired by some living mistress, one would think he had never
+seen, never heard, and never touched her. There is nothing in any one of
+these so numerous love-songs to indicate who or what the lady was. Was
+she dark or fair, passionate or gentle like himself, witty or simple?
+Was it always one woman? or are there a dozen here immortalised in cold
+indistinction? The old English translator mentions grey eyes in his
+version of one of the amorous rondels; so far as I remember, he was
+driven by some emergency of the verse; but in the absence of all sharp
+lines of character and anything specific, we feel for the moment a sort
+of surprise, as though the epithet were singularly happy and unusual, or
+as though we had made our escape from cloudland into something tangible
+and sure. The measure of Charles's indifference to all that now
+preoccupies and excites a poet is best given by a positive example. If,
+besides the coming of spring, any one external circumstance may be said
+to have struck his imagination, it was the despatch of _fourriers_,
+while on a journey, to prepare the night's lodging. This seems to be his
+favourite image; it reappears like the upas-tree in the early work of
+Coleridge: we may judge with what childish eyes he looked upon the
+world, if one of the sights which most impressed him was that of a man
+going to order dinner.
+
+Although they are not inspired by any deeper motive than the common run
+of contemporaneous drawing-room verses, those of Charles of Orleans are
+executed with inimitable lightness and delicacy of touch. They deal with
+floating and colourless sentiments, and the writer is never greatly
+moved, but he seems always genuine. He makes no attempt to set off thin
+conceptions with a multiplicity of phrases. His ballades are generally
+thin and scanty of import; for the ballade presented too large a canvas,
+and he was preoccupied by technical requirements. But in the rondel he
+has put himself before all competitors by a happy knack and a
+prevailing distinction of manner. He is very much more of a duke in his
+verses than in his absurd and inconsequential career as a statesman; and
+how he shows himself a duke is precisely by the absence of all
+pretension, turgidity, or emphasis. He turns verses, as he would have
+come into the king's presence, with a quiet accomplishment of grace.
+
+Théodore de Banville, the youngest poet of a famous generation now
+nearly extinct, and himself a sure and finished artist, knocked off, in
+his happiest vein, a few experiments in imitation of Charles of Orleans.
+I would recommend these modern rondels to all who care about the old
+duke, not only because they are delightful in themselves, but because
+they serve as a contrast to throw into relief the peculiarities of their
+model. When de Banville revives a forgotten form of verse--and he has
+already had the honour of reviving the ballade--he does it in the spirit
+of a workman choosing a good tool wherever he can find one, and not at
+all in that of the dilettante, who seeks to renew bygone forms of
+thought and make historic forgeries. With the ballade this seemed
+natural enough; for in connection with ballades the mind recurs to
+Villon, and Villon was almost more of a modern than de Banville himself.
+But in the case of the rondel, a comparison is challenged with Charles
+of Orleans, and the difference between two ages and two literatures is
+illustrated in a few poems of thirteen lines. Something, certainly, has
+been retained of the old movement; the refrain falls in time like a
+well-played bass; and the very brevity of the thing, by hampering and
+restraining the greater fecundity of the modern mind, assists the
+imitation. But de Banville's poems are full of form and colour; they
+smack racily of modern life, and own small kindred with the verse of
+other days, when it seems as if men walked by twilight, seeing little,
+and that with distracted eyes, and instead of blood, some thin and
+spectral fluid circulated in their veins. They might gird themselves for
+battle, make love, eat and drink, and acquit themselves manfully in all
+the external parts of life; but of the life that is within, and those
+processes by which we render ourselves an intelligent account of what we
+feel and do, and so represent experience that we for the first time make
+it ours, they had only a loose and troubled possession. They beheld or
+took part in great events, but there was no answerable commotion in
+their reflective being; and they passed throughout turbulent epochs in a
+sort of ghostly quiet and abstraction. Feeling seems to have been
+strangely disproportioned to the occasion, and words were laughably
+trivial and scanty to set forth the feeling even such as it was. Juvenal
+des Ursins chronicles calamity after calamity, with but one comment for
+them all: that "it was great pity." Perhaps, after too much of our
+florid literature, we find an adventitious charm in what is so
+different; and while the big drums are beaten every day by perspiring
+editors over the loss of a cock-boat or the rejection of a clause, and
+nothing is heard that is not proclaimed with sound of trumpet, it is not
+wonderful if we retire with pleasure into old books, and listen to
+authors who speak small and clear, as if in a private conversation.
+Truly this is so with Charles of Orleans. We are pleased to find a small
+man without the buskin, and obvious sentiments stated without
+affectation. If the sentiments are obvious, there is all the more chance
+we may have experienced the like. As we turn over the leaves, we may
+find ourselves in sympathy with some one or other of these staid joys
+and smiling sorrows. If we do we shall be strangely pleased, for there
+is a genuine pathos in these simple words, and the lines go with a lilt,
+and sing themselves to music of their own.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [14] Champollion-Figeac's "Louis et Charles d'Orlèans," p. 348.
+
+  [15] D'Héricault's admirable "Memoir," prefixed to his edition of
+    Charles's works, vol. i. p. xi.
+
+  [16] Vallet de Viriville, "Charles VII. et son Époque," ii. 428,
+    note 2.
+
+  [17] _See_ Lecoy de la Marche, "Le Roi René," i. 167.
+
+  [18] Vallet, "Charles VII.," ii. 85, 86, note 2.
+
+  [19] Champollion-Figeac, pp. 193-198.
+
+  [20] Champollion-Figeac, p. 209.
+
+  [21] The student will see that there are facts cited, and expressions
+    borrowed, in this paragraph, from a period extending over almost the
+    whole of Charles's life, instead of being confined entirely to his
+    boyhood. As I do not believe there was any change, so I do not
+    believe there is any anachronism involved.
+
+  [22] "The Debate between the Heralds of France and England,"
+    translated and admirably edited by Mr. Henry Pyne. For the
+    attribution of this tract to Charles, the reader is referred to Mr.
+    Pyne's conclusive argument.
+
+  [23] Des Ursins.
+
+  [24] Michelet, iv. App. 179, p. 337.
+
+  [25] Champollion-Figeac, pp. 279-82.
+
+  [26] Michelet, iv. pp. 123-24.
+
+  [27] "Debate between the Heralds."
+
+  [28] Sir H. Nicholas, "Agincourt."
+
+  [29] "Debate between the Heralds."
+
+  [30] Works (ed. d'Héricault), i. 43.
+
+  [31] _Ibid._ i. 143.
+
+  [32] _Ibid._ i. 190.
+
+  [33] _Ibid._ i. 144.
+
+  [34] Works (ed. d'Héricault), i. 158.
+
+  [35] M. Champollion-Figeac gives many in his editions of Charles's
+    works, most (as I should think) of very doubtful authenticity, or
+    worse.
+
+  [36] Rymer, x. 564; D'Héricault's "Memoir," p. xli.; Gairdner's
+    "Paston Letters," i. 27, 99.
+
+  [37] Champollion-Figeac, p. 377.
+
+  [38] Dom Plancher, iv. 178-9.
+
+  [39] Works, i. 157-63.
+
+  [40] Vallet's "Charles VII.," i. 251.
+
+  [41] "Procès de Jeanne d'Arc," i. 133-55.
+
+  [42] Monstrelet.
+
+  [43] Vallet's "Charles VII.," iii. chap. i. But see the chronicle that
+    bears Jaquet's name; a lean and dreary book.
+
+  [44] Monstrelet.
+
+  [45] D'Héricault's "Memoir," xl. xli.; Vallet, "Charles VII.," ii. 435.
+
+  [46] Champollion-Figeac, p. 368.
+
+  [47] Works, i. 115.
+
+  [48] D'Héricault's "Memoir," xlv.
+
+  [49] Champollion-Figeac, pp. 361, 381.
+
+  [50] _Ibid._, pp. 359, 361.
+
+  [51] Lecoy de la Marche, "Roi René," ii. 155, 177.
+
+  [52] Champollion-Figeac, chaps, v. and vi.
+
+  [53] _Ibid._, p. 364; Works, i. 172.
+
+  [54] Champollion-Figeac, p. 364: "Jeter de l'argent aux petis enfans
+    qui estoient au long de Bourbon, pour les faire nonner en l'eau et
+    aller querre l'argent au fond."
+
+  [55] Champollion-Figeac, p. 387.
+
+  [56] "Nouvelle Biographie Didot," art. "Marie de Clèves"; Vallet,
+    "Charles VII.," iii. 85, note 1.
+
+  [57] Champollion-Figeac, pp. 383-386.
+
+  [58] Works, ii. 57, 258.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+SAMUEL PEPYS
+
+
+In two books a fresh light has recently been thrown on the character and
+position of Samuel Pepys. Mr. Mynors Bright has given us a new
+transcription of the Diary, increasing it in bulk by near a third,
+correcting many errors, and completing our knowledge of the man in some
+curious and important points. We can only regret that he has taken
+liberties with the author and the public. It is no part of the duties of
+the editor of an established classic to decide what may or may not be
+"tedious to the reader." The book is either an historical document or
+not, and in condemning Lord Braybrooke Mr. Bright condemns himself. As
+for the time-honoured phrase, "unfit for publication," without being
+cynical, we may regard it as the sign of a precaution more or less
+commercial; and we may think, without being sordid, that when we
+purchase six huge and distressingly expensive volumes, we are entitled
+to be treated rather more like scholars and rather less like children.
+But Mr. Bright may rest assured: while we complain, we are still
+grateful. Mr. Wheatley, to divide our obligation, brings together,
+clearly and with no lost words, a body of illustrative material.[59]
+Sometimes we might ask a little more; never, I think, less. And as a
+matter of fact, a great part of Mr. Wheatley's volume might be
+transferred, by a good editor of Pepys, to the margin of the text, for
+it is precisely what the reader wants.
+
+In the light of these two books, at least, we have now to read our
+author. Between them they contain all we can expect to learn for, it may
+be, many years. Now, if ever, we should be able to form some notion of
+that unparalleled figure in the annals of mankind--unparalleled for
+three good reasons: first, because he was a man known to his
+contemporaries in a halo of almost historical pomp, and to his remote
+descendants with an indecent familiarity, like a tap-room comrade;
+second, because he has outstripped all competitors in the art or virtue
+of a conscious honesty about oneself; and, third, because, being in many
+ways a very ordinary person, he has yet placed himself before the public
+eye with such a fulness and such an intimacy of detail as might be
+envied by a genius like Montaigne. Not then for his own sake only, but
+as a character in a unique position, endowed with a unique talent, and
+shedding a unique light upon the lives of the mass of mankind, he is
+surely worthy of prolonged and patient study.
+
+
+  THE DIARY
+
+That there should be such a book as Pepys's Diary is incomparably
+strange. Pepys, in a corrupt and idle period, played the man in public
+employments, toiling hard and keeping his honour bright. Much of the
+little good that is set down to James the Second comes by right to
+Pepys; and if it were little for a king, it is much for a subordinate.
+To his clear, capable head was owing somewhat of the greatness of
+England on the seas. In the exploits of Hawke, Rodney, or Nelson, this
+dead Mr. Pepys of the Navy Office had some considerable share. He stood
+well by his business in the appalling plague of 1666. He was loved and
+respected by some of the best and wisest men in England. He was
+President of the Royal Society; and when he came to die, people said of
+his conduct in that solemn hour--thinking it needless to say more--that
+it was answerable to the greatness of his life. Thus he walked in
+dignity, guards of soldiers sometimes attending him in his walks,
+subalterns bowing before his periwig; and when he uttered his thoughts
+they were suitable to his state and services. On February 8, 1668, we
+find him writing to Evelyn, his mind bitterly occupied with the late
+Dutch war, and some thoughts of the different story of the repulse of
+the Great Armada: "Sir, you will not wonder at the backwardness of my
+thanks for the present you made me, so many days since, of the Prospect
+of the Medway, while the Hollander rode master in it, when I have told
+you that the sight of it hath led me to such reflections on my
+particular interest, by my employment, in the reproach due to that
+miscarriage, as have given me little less disquiet than he is fancied to
+have who found his face in Michael Angelo's hell. The same should serve
+me also in excuse for my silence in celebrating your mastery shown in
+the design and draught, did not indignation rather than courtship urge
+me so far to commend them, as to wish the furniture of our House of
+Lords changed from the story of '88 to that of '67 (of Evelyn's
+designing), till the pravity of this were reformed to the temper of that
+age, wherein God Almighty found his blessings more operative than, I
+fear, he doth in ours his judgments."
+
+This is a letter honourable to the writer, where the meaning rather than
+the words is eloquent. Such was the account he gave of himself to his
+contemporaries; such thoughts he chose to utter, and in such language:
+giving himself out for a grave and patriotic public servant. We turn to
+the same date in the Diary by which he is known, after two centuries, to
+his descendants. The entry begins in the same key with the letter,
+blaming the "madness of the House of Commons" and "the base proceedings,
+just the epitome of all our public proceedings in this age, of the House
+of Lords"; and then, without the least transition, this is how our
+diarist proceeds: "To the Strand, to my bookseller's, and there bought
+an idle, rogueish French book, 'L'escholle des Filles,' which I have
+bought in plain binding, avoiding the buying of it better bound,
+because I resolve, as soon as I have read it, to burn it, that it may
+not stand in the list of books, nor among them, to disgrace them, if it
+should be found." Even in our day, when responsibility is so much more
+clearly apprehended, the man who wrote the letter would be notable; but
+what about the man, I do not say who bought a roguish book, but who was
+ashamed of doing so, yet did it, and recorded both the doing and the
+shame in the pages of his daily journal?
+
+We all, whether we write or speak, must somewhat drape ourselves when we
+address our fellows; at a given moment we apprehend our character and
+acts by some particular side; we are merry with one, grave with another,
+as befits the nature and demands of the relation. Pepys's letter to
+Evelyn would have little in common with that other one to Mrs. Knipp
+which he signed by the pseudonym of _Dapper Dicky_; yet each would be
+suitable to the character of his correspondent. There is no untruth in
+this, for man, being a Protean animal, swiftly shares and changes with
+his company and surroundings; and these changes are the better part of
+his education in the world. To strike a posture once for all, and to
+march through life like a drum-major, is to be highly disagreeable to
+others and a fool for oneself into the bargain. To Evelyn and to Knipp
+we understand the double facing; but to whom was he posing in the Diary,
+and what, in the name of astonishment, was the nature of the pose? Had
+he suppressed all mention of the book, or had he bought it, gloried in
+the act, and cheerfully recorded his glorification, in either case we
+should have made him out. But no; he is full of precautions to conceal
+the "disgrace" of the purchase, and yet speeds to chronicle the whole
+affair in pen and ink. It is a sort of anomaly in human action, which we
+can exactly parallel from another part of the Diary.
+
+Mrs. Pepys had written a paper of her too just complaints against her
+husband, and written it in plain and very pungent English. Pepys, in an
+agony lest the world should come to see it, brutally seizes and destroys
+the tell-tale document; and then--you disbelieve your eyes--down goes
+the whole story with unsparing truth and in the cruellest detail. It
+seems he has no design but to appear respectable, and here he keeps a
+private book to prove he was not. You are at first faintly reminded of
+some of the vagaries of the morbid religious diarist; but at a moment's
+thought the resemblance disappears. The design of Pepys is not at all to
+edify; it is not from repentance that he chronicles his peccadilloes,
+for he tells us when he does repent, and, to be just to him, there often
+follows some improvement. Again, the sins of the religious diarist are
+of a very formal pattern, and are told with an elaborate whine. But in
+Pepys you come upon good, substantive misdemeanours; beams in his eye of
+which he alone remains unconscious; healthy outbreaks of the animal
+nature, and laughable subterfuges to himself that always command belief
+and often engage the sympathies.
+
+Pepys was a young man for his age, came slowly to himself in the world,
+sowed his wild oats late, took late to industry, and preserved till
+nearly forty the headlong gusto of a boy. So, to come rightly at the
+spirit in which the Diary was written, we must recall a class of
+sentiments which with most of us are over and done before the age of
+twelve. In our tender years we still preserve a freshness of surprise at
+our prolonged existence; events make an impression out of all proportion
+to their consequence; we are unspeakably touched by our own past
+adventures, and look forward to our future personality with sentimental
+interest. It was something of this, I think, that clung to Pepys.
+Although not sentimental in the abstract, he was sweetly sentimental
+about himself. His own past clung about his heart, an evergreen. He was
+the slave of an association. He could not pass by Islington, where his
+father used to carry him to cakes and ale, but he must light at the
+"King's Head" and eat and drink "for remembrance of the old house
+sake." He counted it good fortune to lie a night at Epsom to renew his
+old walks, "where Mrs. Hely and I did use to walk and talk, with whom I
+had the first sentiments of love and pleasure in a woman's company,
+discourse and taking her by the hand, she being a pretty woman." He goes
+about weighing up the _Assurance_, which lay near Woolwich under water,
+and cries in a parenthesis, "Poor ship, that I have been twice merry in,
+in Captain Holland's time"; and after revisiting the _Naseby_, now
+changed into the _Charles_, he confesses "it was a great pleasure to
+myself to see the ship that I began my good fortune in." The stone that
+he was cut for he preserved in a case; and to the Turners he kept alive
+such gratitude for their assistance, that for years, and after he had
+begun to mount himself into higher zones, he continued to have that
+family to dinner on the anniversary of the operation. Not Hazlitt nor
+Rousseau had a more romantic passion for their past, although at times
+they might express it more romantically; and if Pepys shared with them
+this childish fondness, did not Rousseau, who left behind him the
+"Confessions," or Hazlitt, who wrote the "Liber Amoris," and loaded his
+essays with loving personal detail, share with Pepys in his unwearied
+egotism? For the two things go hand in hand; or, to be more exact, it is
+the first that makes the second either possible or pleasing.
+
+But, to be quite in sympathy with Pepys, we must return once more to the
+experience of children. I can remember to have written, in the fly-leaf
+of more than one book, the date and the place where I then was--if, for
+instance, I was ill in bed or sitting in a certain garden; these were
+jottings for my future self; if I should chance on such a note in after
+years, I thought it would cause me a particular thrill to recognise
+myself across the intervening distance. Indeed, I might come upon them
+now, and not be moved one tittle--which shows that I have comparatively
+failed in life, and grown older than Samuel Pepys. For in the Diary we
+can find more than one such note of perfect childish egotism; as when
+he explains that his candle is going out, "which makes me write thus
+slobberingly"; or as in this incredible particularity, "To my study,
+where I only wrote thus much of this day's passages to this *, and so
+out again"; or lastly, as here, with more of circumstance: "I staid up
+till the bellman came by with his bell under my window, as _I was
+writing of this very line_, and cried, 'Past one of the clock, and a
+cold, frosty, windy morning.'" Such passages are not to be
+misunderstood. The appeal to Samuel Pepys years hence is unmistakable.
+He desires that dear, though unknown, gentleman keenly to realise his
+predecessor; to remember why a passage was uncleanly written; to recall
+(let us fancy, with a sigh) the tones of the bellman, the chill of the
+early, windy morning, and the very line his own romantic self was
+scribing at the moment. The man, you will perceive, was making
+reminiscences--a sort of pleasure by ricochet, which comforts many in
+distress, and turns some others into sentimental libertines: and the
+whole book, if you will but look at it in that way, is seen to be a work
+of art to Pepys's own address.
+
+Here, then, we have the key to that remarkable attitude preserved by him
+throughout his Diary, to that unflinching--I had almost said, that
+unintelligent--sincerity which makes it a miracle among human books. He
+was not unconscious of his errors--far from it; he was often startled
+into shame, often reformed, often made and broke his vows of change. But
+whether he did ill or well, he was still his own unequalled self; still
+that entrancing _ego_ of whom alone he cared to write; and still sure of
+his own affectionate indulgence, when the parts should be changed, and
+the writer come to read what he had written. Whatever he did, or said,
+or thought, or suffered, it was still a trait of Pepys, a character of
+his career; and as, to himself, he was more interesting than Moses or
+than Alexander, so all should be faithfully set down. I have called his
+Diary a work of art. Now when the artist has found something, word or
+deed, exactly proper to a favourite character in play or novel, he will
+neither suppress nor diminish it, though the remark be silly or the act
+mean. The hesitation of Hamlet, the credulity of Othello, the baseness
+of Emma Bovary, or the irregularities of Mr. Swiveller, caused neither
+disappointment nor disgust to their creators. And so with Pepys and his
+adored protagonist: adored not blindly, but with trenchant insight and
+enduring, human toleration. I have gone over and over the greater part
+of the Diary; and the points where, to the most suspicious scrutiny, he
+has seemed not perfectly sincere, are so few, so doubtful, and so petty,
+that I am ashamed to name them. It may be said that we all of us write
+such a diary in airy characters upon our brain; but I fear there is a
+distinction to be made; I fear that as we render to our consciousness an
+account of our daily fortunes and behaviour, we too often weave a tissue
+of romantic compliments and dull excuses; and even if Pepys were the ass
+and coward that men call him, we must take rank as sillier and more
+cowardly than he. The bald truth about oneself, what we are all too
+timid to admit when we are not too dull to see it, that was what he saw
+clearly and set down unsparingly.
+
+It is improbable that the Diary can have been carried on in the same
+single spirit in which it was begun. Pepys was not such an ass, but he
+must have perceived, as he went on, the extraordinary nature of the work
+he was producing. He was a great reader, and he knew what other books
+were like. It must, at least, have crossed his mind that someone might
+ultimately decipher the manuscript, and he himself, with all his pains
+and pleasures, be resuscitated in some later day; and the thought,
+although discouraged, must have warmed his heart. He was not such an
+ass, besides, but he must have been conscious of the deadly explosives,
+the gun-cotton and the giant powder, he was hoarding in his drawer. Let
+some contemporary light upon the Journal, and Pepys was plunged for
+ever in social and political disgrace. We can trace the growth of his
+terrors by two facts. In 1660, while the Diary was still in its youth,
+he tells about it, as a matter of course, to a lieutenant in the navy;
+but in 1669, when it was already near an end, he could have bitten his
+tongue out, as the saying is, because he had let slip his secret to one
+so grave and friendly as Sir William Coventry. And from two other facts
+I think we may infer that he had entertained, even if he had not
+acquiesced in, the thought of a far-distant publicity. The first is of
+capital importance: the Diary was not destroyed. The second--that he
+took unusual precautions to confound the cipher in "rogueish"
+passages--proves, beyond question, that he was thinking of some other
+reader besides himself. Perhaps while his friends were admiring the
+"greatness of his behaviour" at the approach of death, he may have had a
+twinkling hope of immortality. _Mens cujusque is est quisque_, said his
+chosen motto; and, as he had stamped his mind with every crook and
+foible in the pages of the Diary, he might feel that what he left behind
+him was indeed himself. There is perhaps no other instance so remarkable
+of the desire of man for publicity and an enduring name. The greatness
+of his life was open, yet he longed to communicate its smallness also;
+and, while contemporaries bowed before him, he must buttonhole posterity
+with the news that his periwig was once alive with nits. But this
+thought, although I cannot doubt he had it, was neither his first nor
+his deepest; it did not colour one word that he wrote; and the Diary,
+for as long as he kept it, remained what it was when he began, a private
+pleasure for himself. It was his bosom secret; it added a zest to all
+his pleasures; he lived in and for it, and might well write these solemn
+words, when he closed that confidant for ever: "And so I betake myself
+to that course which is almost as much as to see myself go into the
+grave; for which, and all the discomforts that will accompany my being
+blind, the good God prepare me."
+
+
+  A LIBERAL GENIUS
+
+Pepys spent part of a certain winter Sunday, when he had taken physic,
+composing "a song in praise of a liberal genius (such as I take my own
+to be) to all studies and pleasures." The song was unsuccessful, but the
+Diary is, in a sense, the very song that he was seeking; and his
+portrait by Hales, so admirably reproduced in Mynors Bright's edition,
+is a confirmation of the Diary. Hales, it would appear, had known his
+business; and though he put his sitter to a deal of trouble, almost
+breaking his neck "to have the portrait full of shadows," and draping
+him in an Indian gown hired expressly for the purpose, he was
+preoccupied about no merely picturesque effects, but to portray the
+essence of the man. Whether we read the picture by the Diary or the
+Diary by the picture, we shall at least agree that Hales was among the
+number of those who can "surprise the manners in the face." Here we have
+a mouth pouting, moist with desires; eyes greedy, protuberant, and yet
+apt for weeping too; a nose great alike in character and dimensions; and
+altogether a most fleshy, melting countenance. The face is attractive by
+its promise of reciprocity. I have used the word _greedy_, but the
+reader must not suppose that he can change it for that closely kindred
+one of _hungry_, for there is here no aspiration, no waiting for better
+things, but an animal joy in all that comes. It could never be the face
+of an artist; it is the face of a _viveur_--kindly, pleased and
+pleasing, protected from excess and upheld in contentment by the
+shifting versatility of his desires. For a single desire is more rightly
+to be called a lust; but there is health in a variety, where one may
+balance and control another.
+
+The whole world, town or country, was to Pepys a garden of Armida.
+Wherever he went, his steps were winged with the most eager expectation;
+whatever he did, it was done with the most lively pleasure. An
+insatiable curiosity in all the shows of the world and all the secrets
+of knowledge filled him brimful of the longing to travel, and supported
+him in the toils of study. Rome was the dream of his life; he was never
+happier than when he read or talked of the Eternal City. When he was in
+Holland he was "with child" to see any strange thing. Meeting some
+friends and singing with them in a palace near the Hague, his pen fails
+him to express his passion of delight, "the more so because in a heaven
+of pleasure and in a strange country." He must go to see all famous
+executions. He must needs visit the body of a murdered man, defaced
+"with a broad wound," he says, "that makes my hand now shake to write of
+it." He learned to dance, and was "like to make a dancer." He learned to
+sing, and walked about Gray's Inn Fields "humming to myself (which is
+now my constant practice) the trillo." He learned to play the lute, the
+flute, the flageolet, and the theorbo, and it was not the fault of his
+intention if he did not learn the harpsichord or the spinet. He learned
+to compose songs, and burned to give forth "a scheme and theory of music
+not yet ever made in the world." When he heard "a fellow whistle like a
+bird exceeding well," he promised to return another day and give an
+angel for a lesson in the art. Once, he writes, "I took the Bezan back
+with me, and with a brave gale and tide reached up that night to the
+Hope, taking great pleasure in learning the seamen's manner of singing
+when they sound the depths." If he found himself rusty in his Latin
+grammar, he must fall to it like a schoolboy. He was a member of
+Harrington's Club till its dissolution, and of the Royal Society before
+it had received the name. Boyle's "Hydrostatics" was "of infinite
+delight" to him, walking in Barnes Elms. We find him comparing Bible
+concordances, a captious judge of sermons, deep in Descartes and
+Aristotle. We find him, in a single year, studying timber and the
+measurement of timber; tar and oil, hemp, and the process of preparing
+cordage; mathematics and accounting; the hull and the rigging of ships
+from a model; and "looking and informing himself of the (naval) stores
+with"--hark to the fellow!--"great delight." His familiar spirit of
+delight was not the same with Shelley's; but how true it was to him
+through life! He is only copying something, and behold, he "takes great
+pleasure to rule the lines, and have the capital words wrote with red
+ink"; he has only had his coal-cellar emptied and cleaned, and behold,
+"it do please him exceedingly." A hog's harslett is "a piece of meat he
+loves." He cannot ride home in my Lord Sandwich's coach, but he must
+exclaim, with breathless gusto, "his noble, rich coach." When he is
+bound for a supper-party, he anticipates a "glut of pleasure." When he
+has a new watch, "to see my childishness," says he, "I could not forbear
+carrying it in my hand and seeing what o'clock it was an hundred times."
+To go to Vauxhall, he says, and "to hear the nightingales and other
+birds, hear fiddles, and there a harp and here a Jew's trump, and here
+laughing, and there fine people walking, is mighty divertising." And the
+nightingales, I take it, were particularly dear to him; and it was again
+"with great pleasure" that he paused to hear them as he walked to
+Woolwich, while the fog was rising and the April sun broke through.
+
+He must always be doing something agreeable, and, by preference, two
+agreeable things at once. In his house he had a box of carpenter's
+tools, two dogs, an eagle, a canary, and a blackbird that whistled
+tunes, lest, even in that full life, he should chance upon an empty
+moment. If he had to wait for a dish of poached eggs, he must put in the
+time by playing on the flageolet; if a sermon were dull, he must read in
+the book of Tobit or divert his mind with sly advances on the nearest
+women. When he walked, it must be with a book in his pocket to beguile
+the way in case the nightingales were silent; and even along the streets
+of London, with so many pretty faces to be spied for and dignitaries to
+be saluted, his trail was marked by little debts "for wine, pictures,
+etc.," the true headmark of a life intolerant of any joyless passage.
+He had a kind of idealism in pleasure; like the princess in the fairy
+story, he was conscious of a rose-leaf out of place. Dearly as he loved
+to talk, he could not enjoy nor shine in a conversation when he thought
+himself unsuitably dressed. Dearly as he loved eating, he "knew not how
+to eat alone"; pleasure for him must heighten pleasure; and the eye and
+ear must be flattered like the palate ere he avow himself content. He
+had no zest in a good dinner when it fell to be eaten "in a bad street
+and in a periwig-maker's house"; and a collation was spoiled for him by
+indifferent music. His body was indefatigable, doing him yeoman's
+service in this breathless chase of pleasures. On April 11, 1662, he
+mentions that he went to bed "weary, _which I seldom am_"; and already
+over thirty, he would sit up all night cheerfully to see a comet. But it
+is never pleasure that exhausts the pleasure-seeker; for in that career,
+as in all others, it is failure that kills. The man who enjoys so
+wholly, and bears so impatiently the slightest widowhood from joy, is
+just the man to lose a night's rest over some paltry question of his
+right to fiddle on the leads, or to be "vexed to the blood" by a
+solecism in his wife's attire; and we find in consequence that he was
+always peevish when he was hungry, and that his head "aked mightily"
+after a dispute. But nothing could divert him from his aim in life; his
+remedy in care was the same as his delight in prosperity: it was with
+pleasure, and with pleasure only, that he sought to drive out sorrow;
+and, whether he was jealous of his wife or skulking from a bailiff, he
+would equally take refuge in a theatre. There, if the house be full and
+the company noble, if the songs be tunable, the actors perfect, and the
+play diverting, this odd hero of the secret Diary, this private
+self-adorer, will speedily be healed of his distresses.
+
+Equally pleased with a watch, a coach, a piece of meat, a tune upon the
+fiddle, or a fact in hydrostatics, Pepys was pleased yet more by the
+beauty, the worth, the mirth, or the mere scenic attitude in life of his
+fellow-creatures. He shows himself throughout a sterling humanist.
+Indeed, he who loves himself, not in idle vanity, but with a plenitude
+of knowledge, is the best equipped of all to love his neighbours. And
+perhaps it is in this sense that charity may be most properly said to
+begin at home. It does not matter what quality a person has: Pepys can
+appreciate and love him for it. He "fills his eyes" with the beauty of
+Lady Castlemaine; indeed, he may be said to dote upon the thought of her
+for years; if a woman be good-looking and not painted, he will walk
+miles to have another sight of her; and even when a lady by a mischance
+spat upon his clothes, he was immediately consoled when he had observed
+that she was pretty. But, on the other hand, he is delighted to see Mrs.
+Pett upon her knees, and speaks thus of his Aunt James: "a poor,
+religious, well-meaning, good soul, talking of nothing but God Almighty,
+and that with so much innocence that mightily pleased me." He is taken
+with Pen's merriment and loose songs, but not less taken with the
+sterling worth of Coventry. He is jolly with a drunken sailor, but
+listens with interest and patience, as he rides the Essex roads, to the
+story of a Quaker's spiritual trials and convictions. He lends a
+critical ear to the discourse of kings and royal dukes. He spends an
+evening at Vauxhall with "Killigrew and young Newport--loose company,"
+says he, "but worth a man's being in for once, to know the nature of it,
+and their manner of talk and lives." And when a rag-boy lights him home,
+he examines him about his business and other ways of livelihood for
+destitute children. This is almost half-way to the beginning of
+philanthropy; had it only been the fashion, as it is at present, Pepys
+had perhaps been a man famous for good deeds. And it is through this
+quality that he rises, at times, superior to his surprising egotism; his
+interest in the love affairs of others is, indeed, impersonal; he is
+filled with concern for my Lady Castlemaine, whom he only knows by
+sight, shares in her very jealousies, joys with her in her successes;
+and it is not untrue, however strange it seems in his abrupt
+presentment, that he loved his maid Jane because she was in love with
+his man Tom.
+
+Let us hear him, for once, at length: "So the women and W. Hewer and I
+walked upon the Downes, where a flock of sheep was; and the most
+pleasant and innocent sight that ever I saw in my life. We found a
+shepherd and his little boy reading, far from any houses or sight of
+people, the Bible to him; so I made the boy read to me, which he did
+with the forced tone that children do usually read, that was mighty
+pretty; and then I did give him something, and went to the father, and
+talked with him. He did content himself mightily in my liking his boy's
+reading, and did bless God for him, the most like one of the old
+patriarchs that ever I saw in my life, and it brought those thoughts of
+the old age of the world in my mind for two or three days after. We took
+notice of his woolen knit stockings of two colours mixed, and of his
+shoes shod with iron, both at the toe and heels, and with great nails in
+the soles of his feet, which was mighty pretty; and taking notice of
+them, 'Why,' says the poor man, 'the downes, you see, are full of
+stones, and we are faine to shoe ourselves thus; and these,' says he,
+'will make the stones fly till they ring before me.' I did give the poor
+man something, for which he was mighty thankful, and I tried to cast
+stones with his horne crooke. He values his dog mightily, that would
+turn a sheep any way which he would have him, when he goes to fold them;
+told me there was about eighteen score sheep in his flock, and that he
+hath four shillings a week the year round for keeping of them; and Mrs.
+Turner, in the common fields here, did gather one of the prettiest
+nosegays that ever I saw in my life."
+
+And so the story rambles on to the end of that day's pleasuring; with
+cups of milk, and glowworms, and people walking at sundown with their
+wives and children, and all the way home Pepys still dreaming "of the
+old age of the world" and the early innocence of man. This was how he
+walked through life, his eyes and ears wide open, and his hand, you will
+observe, not shut; and thus he observed the lives, the speech, and the
+manners of his fellow-men, with prose fidelity of detail and yet a
+lingering glamour of romance.
+
+It was "two or three days after" that he extended this passage in the
+pages of his Journal, and the style has thus the benefit of some
+reflection. It is generally supposed that, as a writer, Pepys must rank
+at the bottom of the scale of merit. But a style which is indefatigably
+lively, telling, and picturesque through six large volumes of everyday
+experience, which deals with the whole matter of a life, and yet is
+rarely wearisome, which condescends to the most fastidious particulars,
+and yet sweeps all away in the forthright current of the
+narrative,--such a style may be ungrammatical, it may be inelegant, it
+may be one tissue of mistakes, but it can never be devoid of merit. The
+first and the true function of the writer has been thoroughly performed
+throughout; and though the manner of his utterance may be childishly
+awkward, the matter has been transformed and assimilated by his
+unfeigned interest and delight. The gusto of the man speaks out fierily
+after all these years. For the difference between Pepys and Shelley, to
+return to that half-whimsical approximation, is one of quality but not
+one of degree; in his sphere, Pepys felt as keenly, and his is the true
+prose of poetry--prose because the spirit of the man was narrow and
+earthly, but poetry because he was delightedly alive. Hence, in such a
+passage as this about the Epsom shepherd, the result upon the reader's
+mind is entire conviction and unmingled pleasure. So, you feel, the
+thing fell out, not otherwise; and you would no more change it than you
+would change a sublimity of Shakespeare's, a homely touch of Bunyan's,
+or a favoured reminiscence of your own.
+
+There never was a man nearer being an artist, who yet was not one. The
+tang was in the family; while he was writing the journal for our
+enjoyment in his comely house in Navy Gardens, no fewer than two of his
+cousins were tramping the fens, kit under arm, to make music to the
+country girls. But he himself, though he could play so many instruments,
+and pass judgment in so many fields of art, remained an amateur. It is
+not given to any one so keenly to enjoy, without some greater power to
+understand. That he did not like Shakespeare as an artist for the stage
+may be a fault, but it is not without either parallel or excuse. He
+certainly admired him as a poet; he was the first beyond mere actors on
+the rolls of that innumerable army who have got "To be or not to be" by
+heart. Nor was he content with that; it haunted his mind; he quoted it
+to himself in the pages of the Diary, and, rushing in where angels fear
+to tread, he set it to music. Nothing, indeed, is more notable than the
+heroic quality of the verses that our little sensualist in a periwig
+chose out to marry with his own mortal strains. Some gust from brave
+Elizabethan times must have warmed his spirit, as he sat tuning his
+sublime theorbo. "To be or not to be. Whether 'tis nobler"--"Beauty
+retire, thou dost my pity move"--"It is decreed, nor shall thy fate, O
+Rome";--open and dignified in the sound, various and majestic in the
+sentiment, it was no inapt, as it was certainly no timid, spirit that
+selected such a range of themes. Of "Gaze not on Swans," I know no more
+than these four words; yet that also seems to promise well. It was,
+however, on a probable suspicion, the work of his master, Mr.
+Berkenshaw--as the drawings that figure at the breaking up of a young
+ladies' seminary are the work of the professor attached to the
+establishment. Mr. Berkenshaw was not altogether happy in his pupil. The
+amateur cannot usually rise into the artist, some leaven of the world
+still clogging him; and we find Pepys behaving like a pickthank to the
+man who taught him composition. In relation to the stage, which he so
+warmly loved and understood, he was not only more hearty but more
+generous to others. Thus he encounters Colonel Reames, "a man," says
+he, "who understands and loves a play as well as I, and I love him for
+it." And again, when he and his wife had seen a most ridiculous insipid
+piece, "Glad we were," he writes, "that Betterton had no part in it." It
+is by such a zeal and loyalty to those who labour for his delight that
+the amateur grows worthy of the artist. And it should be kept in mind
+that, not only in art, but in morals, Pepys rejoiced to recognise his
+betters. There was not one speck of envy in the whole human-hearted
+egotist.
+
+
+  RESPECTABILITY
+
+When writers inveigh against respectability, in the present degraded
+meaning of the word, they are usually suspected of a taste for clay
+pipes and beer-cellars; and their performances are thought to hail from
+the _Owl's Nest_ of the comedy. They have something more, however, in
+their eye than the dulness of a round million dinner-parties that sit
+down yearly in Old England. For to do anything because others do it, and
+not because the thing is good, or kind, or honest in its own right, is
+to resign all moral control and captaincy upon yourself, and go
+post-haste to the devil with the greater number. We smile over the
+ascendancy of priests; but I had rather follow a priest than what they
+call the leaders of society. No life can better than that of Pepys
+illustrate the dangers of this respectable theory of living. For what
+can be more untoward than the occurrence, at a critical period, and
+while the habits are still pliable, of such a sweeping transformation as
+the return of Charles the Second? Round went the whole fleet of England
+on the other tack; and while a few tall pintas, Milton or Pen, still
+sailed a lonely course by the stars and their own private compass, the
+cock-boat, Pepys, must go about with the majority among "the stupid
+starers and the loud huzzas."
+
+The respectable are not led so much by any desire of applause as by a
+positive need for countenance. The weaker and the tamer the man, the
+more will he require this support; and any positive quality relieves
+him, by just so much, of this dependence. In a dozen ways, Pepys was
+quite strong enough to please himself without regard for others; but his
+positive qualities were not co-extensive with the field of conduct; and
+in many parts of life he followed, with gleeful precision, in the
+footprints of the contemporary Mrs. Grundy. In morals, particularly, he
+lived by the countenance of others; felt a slight from another more
+keenly than a meanness in himself; and then first repented when he was
+found out. You could talk of religion or morality to such a man; and by
+the artist side of him, by his lively sympathy and apprehension, he
+could rise, as it were dramatically, to the significance of what you
+said. All that matter in religion which has been nicknamed
+other-worldliness was strictly in his gamut; but a rule of life that
+should make a man rudely virtuous, following right in good report and
+ill report, was foolishness and a stumbling-block to Pepys. He was much
+thrown across the Friends; and nothing can be more instructive than his
+attitude towards these most interesting people of that age. I have
+mentioned how he conversed with one as he rode; when he saw some brought
+from a meeting under arrest, "I would to God," said he, "they would
+either conform, or be more wise and not be catched"; and to a Quaker in
+his own office he extended a timid though effectual protection.
+Meanwhile there was growing up next door to him that beautiful nature,
+William Pen. It is odd that Pepys condemned him for a fop; odd, though
+natural enough when you see Pen's portrait, that Pepys was jealous of
+him with his wife. But the cream of the story is when Pen publishes his
+"Sandy Foundation Shaken," and Pepys has it read aloud by his wife. "I
+find it," he says, "so well writ as, I think, it is too good for him
+ever to have writ it; and it is a serious sort of book, and _not fit for
+everybody to read_." Nothing is more galling to the merely respectable
+than to be brought in contact with religious ardour. Pepys had his own
+foundation, sandy enough, but dear to him from practical considerations,
+and he would read the book with true uneasiness of spirit; for conceive
+the blow if, by some plaguy accident, this Pen were to convert him! It
+was a different kind of doctrine that he judged profitable for himself
+and others. "A good sermon of Mr. Gifford's at our church, upon 'Seek ye
+first the kingdom of heaven.' A very excellent and persuasive, good and
+moral sermon. He showed, like a wise man, that righteousness is a surer
+moral way of being rich than sin and villainy." It is thus that
+respectable people desire to have their Greathearts address them,
+telling, in mild accents, how you may make the best of both worlds, and
+be a moral hero without courage, kindness, or troublesome reflection;
+and thus the Gospel, cleared of Eastern metaphor, becomes a manual of
+worldly prudence, and a handybook for Pepys and the successful merchant.
+
+The respectability of Pepys was deeply grained. He has no idea of truth
+except for the Diary. He has no care that a thing shall be, if it but
+appear; gives out that he has inherited a good estate, when he has
+seemingly got nothing but a lawsuit; and is pleased to be thought
+liberal when he knows he has been mean. He is conscientiously
+ostentatious. I say conscientiously, with reason. He could never have
+been taken for a fop, like Pen, but arrayed himself in a manner nicely
+suitable to his position. For long he hesitated to assume the famous
+periwig; for a public man should travel gravely with the fashions, not
+foppishly before, nor dowdily behind, the central movement of his age.
+For long he durst not keep a carriage; that, in his circumstances, would
+have been improper; but a time comes, with the growth of his fortune,
+when the impropriety has shifted to the other side, and he is "ashamed
+to be seen in a hackney." Pepys talked about being "a Quaker or some
+very melancholy thing"; for my part, I can imagine nothing so
+melancholy, because nothing half so silly, as to be concerned about
+such problems. But such respectability and the duties of society haunt
+and burden their poor devotees; and what seems at first the very
+primrose path of life, proves difficult and thorny like the rest. And
+the time comes to Pepys, as to all the merely respectable, when he must
+not only order his pleasures, but even clip his virtuous movements, to
+the public pattern of the age. There was some juggling among officials
+to avoid direct taxation; and Pepys, with a noble impulse, growing
+ashamed of this dishonesty, designed to charge himself with £1000; but
+finding none to set him an example, "nobody of our ablest merchants"
+with this moderate liking for clean hands, he judged it "not decent"; he
+feared it would "be thought vain glory"; and, rather than appear
+singular, cheerfully remained a thief. One able merchant's countenance,
+and Pepys had dared to do an honest act! Had he found one brave spirit,
+properly recognised by society, he might have gone far as a disciple.
+Mrs. Turner, it is true, can fill him full of sordid scandal, and make
+him believe, against the testimony of his senses, that Pen's venison
+pasty stank like the devil; but, on the other hand, Sir William Coventry
+can raise him by a word into another being. Pepys, when he is with
+Coventry, talks in the vein of an old Roman. What does he care for
+office or emolument? "Thank God, I have enough of my own," says he, "to
+buy me a good book and a good fiddle, and I have a good wife." And
+again, we find this pair projecting an old age when an ungrateful
+country shall have dismissed them from the field of public service;
+Coventry living retired in a fine house, and Pepys dropping in, "it may
+be, to read a chapter of Seneca."
+
+Under this influence, the only good one in his life, Pepys continued
+zealous and, for the period, pure in his employment. He would not be
+"bribed to be unjust," he says, though he was "not so squeamish as to
+refuse a present after," suppose the King to have received no wrong. His
+new arrangement for the victualling of Tangier, he tells us with honest
+complacency, will save the King a thousand and gain Pepys three hundred
+pounds a year--a statement which exactly fixes the degree of the age's
+enlightenment. But for his industry and capacity no praise can be too
+high. It was an unending struggle for the man to stick to his business
+in such a garden of Armida as he found this life; and the story of his
+oaths, so often broken, so courageously renewed, is worthy rather of
+admiration that the contempt it has received.
+
+Elsewhere, and beyond the sphere of Coventry's influence, we find him
+losing scruples and daily complying further with the age. When he began
+the Journal, he was a trifle prim and puritanic; merry enough, to be
+sure, over his private cups, and still remembering Magdalene ale and his
+acquaintance with Mrs. Ainsworth of Cambridge. But youth is a hot season
+with all; when a man smells April and May he is apt at times to stumble;
+and in spite of a disordered practice, Pepys's theory, the better things
+that he approved and followed after, we may even say were strict. Where
+there was "tag, rag, and bobtail, dancing, singing, and drinking," he
+felt "ashamed, and went away"; and when he slept in church he prayed God
+forgive him. In but a little while we find him with some ladies keeping
+each other awake "from spite," as though not to sleep in church were an
+obvious hardship; and yet later he calmly passes the time of service,
+looking about him, with a perspective-glass, on all the pretty women.
+His favourite ejaculation, "Lord!" occurs but once that I have observed
+in 1660, never in '61, twice in '62, and at least five times in '63;
+after which the "Lords" may be said to pullulate like herrings, with
+here and there a solitary "damned," as it were a whale among the shoal.
+He and his wife, once filled with dudgeon by some innocent freedoms at a
+marriage, are soon content to go pleasuring with my Lord Brouncker's
+mistress, who was not even, by his own account, the most discreet of
+mistresses. Tag, rag, and bobtail, dancing, singing, and drinking,
+become his natural element; actors and actresses and drunken, roaring
+courtiers are to be found in his society; until the man grew so involved
+with Saturnalian manners and companions that he was shot almost
+unconsciously into the grand domestic crash of 1668.
+
+That was the legitimate issue and punishment of years of staggering walk
+and conversation. The man who has smoked his pipe for half a century in
+a powder-magazine finds himself at last the author and the victim of a
+hideous disaster. So with our pleasant-minded Pepys and his
+peccadilloes. All of a sudden, as he still trips dexterously enough
+among the dangers of a double-faced career, thinking no great evil,
+humming to himself the trillo, Fate takes the further conduct of that
+matter from his hands, and brings him face to face with the consequences
+of his acts. For a man still, after so many years, the lover, although
+not the constant lover, of his wife,--for a man, besides, who was so
+greatly careful of appearances,--the revelation of his infidelities was
+a crushing blow. The tears that he shed, the indignities that he
+endured, are not to be measured. A vulgar woman, and now justly
+incensed, Mrs. Pepys spared him no detail of suffering. She was violent,
+threatening him with the tongs; she was careless of his honour, driving
+him to insult the mistress whom she had driven him to betray and to
+discard; worst of all, she was hopelessly inconsequent in word and
+thought and deed, now lulling him with reconciliations, and anon flaming
+forth again with the original anger. Pepys had not used his wife well;
+he had wearied her with jealousies, even while himself unfaithful; he
+had grudged her clothes and pleasures, while lavishing both upon
+himself; he had abused her in words; he had bent his fist at her in
+anger; he had once blacked her eye; and it is one of the oddest
+particulars in that odd Diary of his, that, while the injury is referred
+to once in passing, there is no hint as to the occasion or the manner of
+the blow. But now, when he is in the wrong, nothing can exceed the
+long-suffering affection of this impatient husband. While he was still
+sinning and still undiscovered, he seems not to have known a touch of
+penitence stronger than what might lead him to take his wife to the
+theatre, or for an airing, or to give her a new dress by way of
+compensation. Once found out, however, and he seems to himself to have
+lost all claim to decent usage. It is perhaps the strongest instance of
+his externality. His wife may do what she pleases, and though he may
+groan, it will never occur to him to blame her; he has no weapon left
+but tears and the most abject submission. We should perhaps have
+respected him more had he not given way so utterly--above all, had he
+refused to write, under his wife's dictation, an insulting letter to his
+unhappy fellow-culprit, Miss Willet; but somehow I believe we like him
+better as he was.
+
+The death of his wife, following so shortly after, must have stamped the
+impression of this episode upon his mind. For the remaining years of his
+long life we have no Diary to help us, and we have seen already how
+little stress is to be laid upon the tenor of his correspondence; but
+what with the recollection of the catastrophe of his married life, what
+with the natural influence of his advancing years and reputation, it
+seems not unlikely that the period of gallantry was at an end for Pepys;
+and it is beyond a doubt that he sat down at last to an honoured and
+agreeable old age among his books and music, the correspondent of Sir
+Isaac Newton, and, in one instance at least, the poetical counsellor of
+Dryden. Through all this period, that Diary which contained the secret
+memoirs of his life, with all its inconsistencies and escapades, had
+been religiously preserved; nor, when he came to die, does he appear to
+have provided for its destruction. So we may conceive him faithful to
+the end to all his dear and early memories; still mindful of Mrs. Hely
+in the woods at Epsom; still lighting at Islington for a cup of kindness
+to the dead; still, if he heard again that air that once so much
+disturbed him, thrilling at the recollection of the love that bound him
+to his wife.
+
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+  [59] H. R. Wheatley, "Samuel Pepys and the World he Lived in." 1880.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+JOHN KNOX AND HIS RELATIONS TO WOMEN
+
+
+  THE CONTROVERSY ABOUT FEMALE RULE
+
+When first the idea became widely spread among men that the Word of God,
+instead of being truly the foundation of all existing institutions, was
+rather a stone which the builders had rejected, it was but natural that
+the consequent havoc among received opinions should be accompanied by
+the generation of many new and lively hopes for the future. Somewhat as
+in the early days of the French Revolution, men must have looked for an
+immediate and universal improvement in their condition. Christianity, up
+to that time, had been somewhat of a failure politically. The reason was
+now obvious, the capital flaw was detected, the sickness of the body
+politic traced at last to its efficient cause. It was only necessary to
+put the Bible thoroughly into practice, to set themselves strenuously to
+realise in life the Holy Commonwealth, and all abuses and iniquities
+would surely pass away. Thus, in a pageant played at Geneva in the year
+1523, the world was represented as a sick man at the end of his wits for
+help, to whom his doctor recommends Lutheran specifics.[60]
+
+The Reformers themselves had set their affections in a different world,
+and professed to look for the finished result of their endeavours on the
+other side of death. They took no interest in politics as such; they
+even condemned political action as Antichristian: notably, Luther in the
+case of the Peasants' War. And yet, as the purely religious question
+was inseparably complicated with political difficulties, and they had to
+make opposition, from day to day, against principalities and powers,
+they were led, one after another, and again and again, to leave the
+sphere which was more strictly their own, and meddle, for good and evil,
+with the affairs of State. Not much was to be expected from interference
+in such a spirit. Whenever a minister found himself galled or hindered,
+he would be inclined to suppose some contravention of the Bible.
+Whenever Christian liberty was restrained (and Christian liberty for
+each individual would be about co-extensive with what he wished to do),
+it was obvious that the State was Antichristian. The great thing, and
+the one thing, was to push the Gospel and the Reformer's own
+interpretation of it. Whatever helped was good; whatever hindered was
+evil; and if this simple classification proved inapplicable over the
+whole field, it was no business of his to stop and reconcile
+incongruities. He had more pressing concerns on hand; he had to save
+souls; he had to be about his Father's business. This short-sighted view
+resulted in a doctrine that was actually Jesuitical in application. They
+had no serious ideas upon politics, and they were ready, nay, they
+seemed almost bound, to adopt and support whichever ensured for the
+moment the greatest benefit to the souls of their fellow-men. They were
+dishonest in all sincerity. Thus Labitte, in the introduction to a
+book[61] in which he exposes the hypocritical democracy of the Catholics
+under the League, steps aside for a moment to stigmatise the
+hypocritical democracy of the Protestants. And nowhere was this
+expediency in political questions more apparent than about the question
+of female sovereignty. So much was this the case that one James
+Thomasius, of Leipsic, wrote a little paper[62] about the religious
+partialities of those who took part in the controversy, in which some
+of these learned disputants cut a very sorry figure.
+
+Now Knox has been from the first a man well hated; and it is somewhat
+characteristic of his luck that he figures here in the very forefront of
+the list of partial scribes who trimmed their doctrine with the wind in
+all good conscience, and were political weathercocks out of conviction.
+Not only has Thomasius mentioned him, but Bayle has taken the hint from
+Thomasius, and dedicated a long note to the matter at the end of his
+article on the Scottish Reformer. This is a little less than fair. If
+any one among the evangelists of that period showed more serious
+political sense than another, it was assuredly Knox; and even in this
+very matter of female rule, although I do not suppose anyone nowadays
+will feel inclined to endorse his sentiments, I confess I can make great
+allowance for his conduct. The controversy, besides, has an interest of
+its own, in view of later controversies.
+
+John Knox, from 1556 to 1559, was resident in Geneva, as minister,
+jointly with Goodman, of a little church of English refugees. He and his
+congregation were banished from England by one woman, Mary Tudor, and
+proscribed in Scotland by another, the Regent Mary of Guise. The
+coincidence was tempting; here were many abuses centring about one
+abuse; here was Christ's Gospel persecuted in the two kingdoms by one
+anomalous power. He had not far to go to find the idea that female
+government was anomalous. It was an age, indeed, in which women, capable
+and incapable, played a conspicuous part upon the stage of European
+history; and yet their rule, whatever may have been the opinion of here
+and there a wise man or enthusiast, was regarded as an anomaly by the
+great bulk of their contemporaries. It was defended as an anomaly. It,
+and all that accompanied and sanctioned it, was set aside as a single
+exception; and no one thought of reasoning down from queens and
+extending their privileges to ordinary women. Great ladies, as we know,
+had the privilege of entering into monasteries and cloisters, otherwise
+forbidden to their sex. As with one thing, so with another. Thus,
+Margaret of Navarre wrote books with great acclamation, and no one,
+seemingly, saw fit to call her conduct in question; but Mademoiselle de
+Gournay, Montaigne's adopted daughter, was in a controversy with the
+world as to whether a woman might be an author without incongruity.
+Thus, too, we have Théodore Agrippa d'Aubigné writing to his daughters
+about the learned women of his century, and cautioning them, in
+conclusion, that the study of letters was unsuited to ladies of a
+middling station, and should be reserved for princesses.[63] And once
+more, if we desire to see the same principle carried to ludicrous
+extreme, we shall find that Reverend Father in God, the Abbot of
+Brantôme, claiming, on the authority of some lord of his acquaintance, a
+privilege, or rather a duty, of free love for great princesses, and
+carefully excluding other ladies from the same gallant dispensation.[64]
+One sees the spirit in which these immunities were granted; and how they
+were but the natural consequence of that awe for courts and kings that
+made the last writer tell us, with simple wonder, how Catherine de
+Medici would "laugh her fill just like another" over the humours of
+pantaloons and zanies. And such servility was, of all things, what would
+touch most nearly the republican spirit of Knox. It was not difficult
+for him to set aside this weak scruple of loyalty. The lantern of his
+analysis did not always shine with a very serviceable light; but he had
+the virtue, at least, to carry it into many places of fictitious
+holiness, and was not abashed by the tinsel divinity that hedged kings
+and queens from his contemporaries. And so he could put the proposition
+in the form already mentioned: there was Christ's Gospel persecuted in
+the two kingdoms by one anomalous power; plainly, then, the "regiment of
+women" was Antichristian. Early in 1558 he communicated this discovery
+to the world, by publishing at Geneva his notorious book--"The First
+Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women."[65]
+
+As a whole, it is a dull performance; but the preface, as is usual with
+Knox, is both interesting and morally fine. Knox was not one of those
+who are humble in the hour of triumph; he was aggressive even when
+things were at their worst. He had a grim reliance in himself, or rather
+in his mission; if he were not sure that he was a great man, he was at
+least sure that he was one set apart to do great things. And he judged
+simply that whatever passed in his mind, whatever moved him to flee from
+persecution instead of constantly facing it out, or, as here, to publish
+and withhold his name from the title-page of a critical work, would not
+fail to be of interest, perhaps of benefit, to the world. There may be
+something more finely sensitive in the modern humour, that tends more
+and more to withdraw a man's personality from the lessons he inculcates
+or the cause that he has espoused; but there is a loss herewith of
+wholesome responsibility; and when we find in the works of Knox, as in
+the Epistles of Paul, the man himself standing nakedly forward, courting
+and anticipating criticism, putting his character, as it were, in pledge
+for the sincerity of his doctrine, we had best waive the question of
+delicacy, and make our acknowledgments for a lesson of courage, not
+unnecessary in these days of anonymous criticism, and much light,
+otherwise unattainable, on the spirit in which great movements were
+initiated and carried forward. Knox's personal revelations are always
+interesting; and, in the case of the "First Blast," as I have said,
+there is no exception to the rule. He begins by stating the solemn
+responsibility of all who are watchmen over God's flock; and all are
+watchmen (he goes on to explain, with that fine breadth of spirit that
+characterises him even when, as here, he shows himself most narrow), all
+are watchmen "whose eyes God doth open, and whose conscience he
+pricketh to admonish the ungodly." And with the full consciousness of
+this great duty before him, he sets himself to answer the scruples of
+timorous or worldly-minded people. How can a man repent, he asks, unless
+the nature of his transgression is made plain to him? "And therefore I
+say," he continues, "that of necessity it is that this monstriferous
+empire of women (which among all enormities that this day do abound upon
+the face of the whole earth, is most detestable and damnable) be openly
+and plainly declared to the world, to the end that some may repent and
+be saved." To those who think the doctrine useless, because it cannot be
+expected to amend those princes whom it would dispossess if once
+accepted, he makes answer in a strain that shows him at his greatest.
+After having instanced how the rumour of Christ's censures found its way
+to Herod in his own court, "even so," he continues, "may the sound of
+our weak trumpet, by the support of some wind (blow it from the south,
+or blow it from the north, it is of no matter), come to the ears of the
+chief offenders. _But whether it do or not, yet dare we not cease to
+blow as God will give strength. For we are debtors to more than to
+princes, to wit, to the great multitude of our brethren_, of whom, no
+doubt, a great number have heretofore offended by error and ignorance."
+
+It is for the multitude, then, he writes; he does not greatly hope that
+his trumpet will be audible in palaces, or that crowned women will
+submissively discrown themselves at his appeal; what he does hope, in
+plain English, is to encourage and justify rebellion; and we shall see,
+before we have done, that he can put his purpose into words as roundly
+as I can put it for him. This he sees to be a matter of much hazard; he
+is not "altogether so brutish and insensible, but that he has laid his
+account what the finishing of the work may cost." He knows that he will
+find many adversaries, since "to the most part of men, lawful and godly
+appeareth whatsoever antiquity hath received." He looks for opposition,
+"not only of the ignorant multitude, but of the wise, politic, and
+quiet spirits of the earth." He will be called foolish, curious,
+despiteful, and a sower of sedition; and one day, perhaps, for all he is
+now nameless, he may be attainted of treason. Yet he has "determined to
+obey God, notwithstanding that the world shall rage thereat." Finally,
+he makes some excuse for the anonymous appearance of this first
+instalment: it is his purpose thrice to blow the trumpet in this matter,
+if God so permit; twice he intends to do it without name; but at the
+last blast to take the odium upon himself, that all others may be
+purged.
+
+Thus he ends the preface, and enters upon his argument with a secondary
+title: "The First Blast to awake Women degenerate." We are in the land
+of assertion without delay. That a woman should bear rule, superiority,
+dominion or empire over any realm, nation, or city, he tells us, is
+repugnant to nature, contumely to God, and a subversion of good order.
+Women are weak, frail, impatient, feeble, and foolish. God has denied to
+woman wisdom to consider, or providence to foresee, what is profitable
+to a commonwealth. Women have been very lightly esteemed; they have been
+denied the tutory of their own sons, and subjected to the unquestionable
+sway of their husbands; and surely it is irrational to give the greater
+where the less has been withheld, and suffer a woman to reign supreme
+over a great kingdom who would be allowed no authority by her own
+fireside. He appeals to the Bible; but though he makes much of the first
+transgression and certain strong texts in Genesis and Paul's Epistles,
+he does not appeal with entire success. The cases of Deborah and Huldah
+can be brought into no sort of harmony with his thesis. Indeed, I may
+say that, logically, he left his bones there; and that it is but the
+phantom of an argument that he parades thenceforward to the end. Well
+was it for Knox that he succeeded no better; it is under this very
+ambiguity about Deborah that we shall find him fain to creep for shelter
+before he is done with the regiment of women. After having thus
+exhausted Scripture, and formulated its teaching in the somewhat
+blasphemous maxim that the man is placed above the woman, even as God
+above the angels, he goes on triumphantly to adduce the testimonies of
+Tertullian, Augustine, Ambrose, Basil, Chrysostom, and the Pandects; and
+having gathered this little cloud of witnesses about him, like
+pursuivants about a herald, he solemnly proclaims all reigning women to
+be traitoresses and rebels against God; discharges all men thenceforward
+from holding any office under such monstrous regiment, and calls upon
+all the lieges with one consent to _"study to repress the inordinate
+pride and tyranny" of queens_. If this is not treasonable teaching, one
+would be glad to know what is; and yet, as if he feared he had not made
+the case plain enough against himself, he goes on to deduce the
+startling corollary that all oaths of allegiance must be incontinently
+broken. If it was sin thus to have sworn even in ignorance, it were
+obstinate sin to continue to respect them after fuller knowledge. Then
+comes the peroration, in which he cries aloud against the cruelties of
+that cursed Jezebel of England--that horrible monster Jezebel of
+England; and after having predicted sudden destruction to her rule and
+to the rule of all crowned women, and warned all men that if they
+presume to defend the same when any "noble heart" shall be raised up to
+vindicate the liberty of his country, they shall not fail to perish
+themselves in the ruin, he concludes with a last rhetorical flourish:
+"And therefore let all men be advertised, for THE TRUMPET HATH ONCE
+BLOWN."
+
+The capitals are his own. In writing, he probably felt the want of some
+such reverberation of the pulpit under strong hands as he was wont to
+emphasise his spoken utterances withal; there would seem to him a want
+of passion in the orderly lines of type; and I suppose we may take the
+capitals as a mere substitute for the great voice with which he would
+have given it forth, had we heard it from his own lips. Indeed, as it
+is, in this little strain of rhetoric about the trumpet, this current
+allusion to the fall of Jericho, that alone distinguishes his bitter and
+hasty production, he was probably right, according to all artistic
+canon, thus to support and accentuate in conclusion the sustained
+metaphor of a hostile proclamation. It is curious, by the way, to note
+how favourite an image the trumpet was with the Reformer. He returns to
+it again and again; it is the Alpha and Omega of his rhetoric; it is to
+him what a ship is to the stage sailor; and one would almost fancy he
+had begun the world as a trumpeter's apprentice. The partiality is
+surely characteristic. All his life long he was blowing summonses before
+various Jerichos, some of which fell duly, but not all. Wherever he
+appears in history his speech is loud, angry, and hostile; there is no
+peace in his life, and little tenderness; he is always sounding
+hopefully to the front for some rough enterprise. And as his voice had
+something of the trumpet's hardness, it had something also of the
+trumpet's warlike inspiration. So Randolph, possibly fresh from the
+sound of the Reformer's preaching, writes of him to Cecil: "Where your
+honour exhorteth us to stoutness, I assure you the voice of one man is
+able, in an hour, to put more life in us than six hundred trumpets
+continually blustering in our ears."[66]
+
+Thus was the proclamation made. Nor was it long in wakening all the
+echoes of Europe. What success might have attended it, had the question
+decided been a purely abstract question, it is difficult to say. As it
+was, it was to stand or fall not by logic, but by political needs and
+sympathies. Thus, in France, his doctrine was to have some future,
+because Protestants suffered there under the feeble and treacherous
+regency of Catherine de Medici; and thus it was to have no future
+anywhere else, because the Protestant interest was bound up with the
+prosperity of Queen Elizabeth. This stumbling-block lay at the very
+threshold of the matter; and Knox, in the text of the "First Blast," had
+set everybody the wrong example and gone to the ground himself. He
+finds occasion to regret "the blood of innocent Lady Jane Dudley." But
+Lady Jane Dudley, or Lady Jane Grey, as we call her, was a would-be
+traitoress and rebel against God, to use his own expressions. If,
+therefore, political and religious sympathy led Knox himself into so
+grave a partiality, what was he to expect from his disciples? If the
+trumpet gave so ambiguous a sound, who could heartily prepare himself
+for the battle? The question whether Lady Jane Dudley was an innocent
+martyr, or a traitoress against God, whose inordinate pride and tyranny
+had been effectually repressed, was thus left altogether in the wind;
+and it was not, perhaps, wonderful if many of Knox's readers concluded
+that all right and wrong in the matter turned upon the degree of the
+sovereign's orthodoxy and possible helpfulness to the Reformation. He
+should have been the more careful of such an ambiguity of meaning, as he
+must have known well the lukewarm indifference and dishonesty of his
+fellow-reformers in political matters. He had already, in 1556 or 1557,
+talked the matter over with his great master, Calvin, in "a private
+conversation"; and the interview[67] must have been truly distasteful to
+both parties. Calvin, indeed, went a far way with him in theory, and
+owned that the "government of women was a deviation from the original
+and proper order of nature, to be ranked, no less than slavery, among
+the punishments consequent upon the fall of man." But, in practice,
+their two roads separated. For the Man of Geneva saw difficulties in the
+way of the Scripture proof in the cases of Deborah and Huldah, and in
+the prophecy of Isaiah that queens should be the nursing mothers of the
+Church. And as the Bible was not decisive, he thought the subject should
+be let alone, because, "by custom and public consent and long practice,
+it has been established that realms and principalities may descend to
+females by hereditary right, and it would not be lawful to unsettle
+governments which are ordained by the peculiar providence of God." I
+imagine Knox's ears must have burned during this interview. Think of him
+listening dutifully to all this--how it would not do to meddle with
+anointed kings--how there was a peculiar providence in these great
+affairs; and then think of his own peroration, and the "noble heart"
+whom he looks for "to vindicate the liberty of his country"; or his
+answer to Queen Mary, when she asked him who he was, to interfere in the
+affairs of Scotland: "Madame, a subject born within the same!" Indeed,
+the two doctors who differed at this private conversation represented,
+at the moment, two principles of enormous import in the subsequent
+history of Europe. In Calvin we have represented that passive obedience,
+that toleration of injustice and absurdity, that holding back of the
+hand from political affairs as from something unclean, which lost
+France, if we are to believe M. Michelet, for the Reformation; a spirit
+necessarily fatal in the long-run to the existence of any sect that may
+profess it; a suicidal doctrine that survives among us to this day in
+narrow views of personal duty, and the low political morality of many
+virtuous men. In Knox, on the other hand, we see foreshadowed the whole
+Puritan Revolution and the scaffold of Charles I.
+
+There is little doubt in my mind that this interview was what caused
+Knox to print his book without a name.[68] It was a dangerous thing to
+contradict the Man of Geneva, and doubly so, surely, when one had had
+the advantage of correction from him in a private conversation; and Knox
+had his little flock of English refugees to consider. If they had fallen
+into bad odour at Geneva, where else was there left to flee to? It was
+printed, as I said, in 1558; and, by a singular _mal-à-propos_, in that
+same year Mary died, and Elizabeth succeeded to the throne of England.
+And just as the accession of Catholic Queen Mary had condemned female
+rule in the eyes of Knox, the accession of Protestant Queen Elizabeth
+justified it in the eyes of his colleagues. Female rule ceases to be an
+anomaly, not because Elizabeth can "reply to eight ambassadors in one
+day in their different languages," but because she represents for the
+moment the political future of the Reformation. The exiles troop back to
+England with songs of praise in their mouths. The bright occidental
+star, of which we have all read in the Preface to the Bible, has risen
+over the darkness of Europe. There is a thrill of hope through the
+persecuted Churches of the Continent. Calvin writes to Cecil, washing
+his hands of Knox and his political heresies. The sale of the "First
+Blast" is prohibited in Geneva; and along with it the bold book of
+Knox's colleague, Goodman--a book dear to Milton--where female rule was
+briefly characterised as a "monster in nature and disorder among
+men."[69] Any who may ever have doubted, or been for a moment led away
+by Knox or Goodman, or their own wicked imaginations, are now more than
+convinced. They have seen the occidental star. Aylmer, with his eye set
+greedily on a possible bishopric, and "the better to obtain the favour
+of the new Queen,"[70] sharpens his pen to confound Knox by logic. What
+need? He has been confounded by facts. "Thus what had been to the
+refugees of Geneva as the very word of God, no sooner were they back in
+England than, behold! it was the word of the devil."[71]
+
+Now, what of the real sentiments of these loyal subjects of Elizabeth?
+They professed a holy horror for Knox's position: let us see if their
+own would please a modern audience any better, or was, in substance,
+greatly different.
+
+John Aylmer, afterwards Bishop of London, published an answer to Knox,
+under the title of "An Harbour for Faithful and true Subjects against
+the late Blown Blast concerning the government of Women."[72] And
+certainly he was a thought more acute, a thought less precipitate and
+simple, than his adversary. He is not to be led away by such captious
+terms as _natural_ and _unnatural_. It is obvious to him that a woman's
+disability to rule is not natural in the same sense in which it is
+natural for a stone to fall or fire to burn. He is doubtful, on the
+whole, whether this disability be natural at all; nay, when he is laying
+it down that a woman should not be a priest, he shows some elementary
+conception of what many of us now hold to be the truth of the matter.
+"The bringing-up of women," he says, "is commonly such" that they cannot
+have the necessary qualifications, "for they are not brought up in
+learning in schools, nor trained in disputation." And even so, he can
+ask, "Are there not in England women, think you, that for learning and
+wisdom could tell their household and neighbours as good a tale as any
+Sir John there?" For all that, his advocacy is weak. If women's rule is
+not unnatural in a sense preclusive of its very existence, it is neither
+so convenient nor so profitable as the government of men. He holds
+England to be specially suitable for the government of women, because
+there the governor is more limited and restrained by the other members
+of the constitution than in other places; and this argument has kept his
+book from being altogether forgotten. It is only in hereditary
+monarchies that he will offer any defence of the anomaly. "If rulers
+were to be chosen by lot or suffrage, he would not that any women should
+stand in the election, but men only." The law of succession of crowns
+was a law to him, in the same sense as the law of evolution is a law to
+Mr. Herbert Spencer; and the one and the other counsels his readers, in
+a spirit suggestively alike, not to kick against the pricks or seek to
+be more wise than He who made them.[73] If God has put a female child
+into the direct line of inheritance, it is God's affair. His strength
+will be perfected in her weakness. He makes the Creator address the
+objectors in this not very flattering vein: "I, that could make Daniel,
+a sucking babe, to judge better than the wisest lawyers; a brute beast
+to reprehend the folly of a prophet; and poor fishers to confound the
+great clerks of the world--cannot I make a woman to be a good ruler over
+you?" This is the last word of his reasoning. Although he was not
+altogether without Puritanic leaven, shown particularly in what he says
+of the incomes of Bishops, yet it was rather loyalty to the old order of
+things than any generous belief in the capacity of women, that raised up
+for them this clerical champion. His courtly spirit contrasts singularly
+with the rude, bracing republicanism of Knox. "Thy knee shall bow," he
+says, "thy cap shall off, thy tongue shall speak reverently of thy
+sovereign." For himself, his tongue is even more than reverent. Nothing
+can stay the issue of his eloquent adulation. Again and again, "the
+remembrance of Elizabeth's virtues" carries him away; and he has to hark
+back again to find the scent of his argument. He is repressing his
+vehement adoration throughout, until when the end comes, and he feels
+his business at an end, he can indulge himself to his heart's content in
+indiscriminate laudation of his royal mistress. It is humorous to think
+that this illustrious lady, whom he here praises, among many other
+excellences, for the simplicity of her attire and the "marvellous
+meekness of her stomach," threatened him, years after, in no very meek
+terms, for a sermon against female vanity in dress, which she held as a
+reflection on herself.[74]
+
+Whatever was wanting here in respect for women generally, there was no
+want of respect for the Queen; and one cannot very greatly wonder if
+these devoted servants looked askance, not upon Knox only, but on his
+little flock, as they came back to England tainted with disloyal
+doctrine. For them, as for him, the occidental star rose somewhat red
+and angry. As for poor Knox, his position was the saddest of all. For
+the juncture seemed to him of the highest importance; it was the nick of
+time, the flood-water of opportunity. Not only was there an opening for
+him in Scotland, a smouldering brand of civil liberty and religious
+enthusiasm which it should be for him to kindle into flame with his
+powerful breath; but he had his eye seemingly on an object of even
+higher worth. For now, when religious sympathy ran so high that it could
+be set against national aversion, he wished to begin the fusion together
+of England and Scotland, and to begin it at the sore place. If once the
+open wound were closed at the Border, the work would be half done.
+Ministers placed at Berwick and such places might seek their converts
+equally on either side of the march; old enemies would sit together to
+hear the gospel of peace, and forget the inherited jealousies of many
+generations in the enthusiasm of a common faith; or--let us say
+better--a common heresy. For people are not most conscious of
+brotherhood when they continue languidly together in one creed, but
+when, with some doubt, with some danger perhaps, and certainly not
+without some reluctance, they violently break with the tradition of the
+past, and go forth from the sanctuary of their fathers to worship under
+the bare heaven. A new creed, like a new country, is an unhomely place
+of sojourn; but it makes men lean on one another and join hands. It was
+on this that Knox relied to begin the union of the English and the
+Scottish. And he had, perhaps, better means of judging than any even of
+his contemporaries. He knew the temper of both nations; and already
+during his two years' chaplaincy at Berwick, he had seen his scheme put
+to the proof. But whether practicable or not, the proposal does him much
+honour. That he should thus have sought to make a love-match of it
+between the two peoples, and tried to win their inclination towards a
+union instead of simply transferring them, like so many sheep, by a
+marriage, or testament, or private treaty, is thoroughly characteristic
+of what is best in the man. Nor was this all. He had, besides, to assure
+himself of English support, secret or avowed, for the Reformation party
+in Scotland; a delicate affair, trenching upon treason. And so he had
+plenty to say to Cecil, plenty that he did not care to "commit to paper
+neither yet to the knowledge of many." But his miserable publication had
+shut the doors of England in his face. Summoned to Edinburgh by the
+confederate lords, he waited at Dieppe, anxiously praying for leave to
+journey through England. The most dispiriting tidings reached him. His
+messengers, coming from so obnoxious a quarter, narrowly escape
+imprisonment. His old congregation are coldly received, and even begin
+to look back again to their place of exile with regret. "My First
+Blast," he writes ruefully, "has blown from me all my friends of
+England." And then he adds, with a snarl, "The Second Blast, I fear,
+shall sound somewhat more sharp, except men be more moderate than I hear
+they are."[75] But the threat is empty; there will never be a second
+blast--he has had enough of that trumpet. Nay, he begins to feel
+uneasily that, unless he is to be rendered useless for the rest of his
+life, unless he is to lose his right arm and go about his great work
+maimed and impotent, he must find some way of making his peace with
+England and the indignant Queen. The letter just quoted was written on
+the 6th of April, 1559; and on the 10th, after he had cooled his heels
+for four days more about the streets of Dieppe, he gave in altogether,
+and writes a letter of capitulation to Cecil. In this letter,[76] which
+he kept back until the 22nd, still hoping that things would come right
+of themselves, he censures the great secretary for having "followed the
+world in the way of perdition," characterises him as "worthy of hell,"
+and threatens him, if he be not found simple, sincere, and fervent in
+the cause of Christ's gospel, that he shall "taste of the same cup that
+politic heads have drunken in before him." This is all, I take it, out
+of respect for the Reformer's own position; if he is going to be
+humiliated, let others be humiliated first; like a child who will not
+take his medicine until he has made his nurse and his mother drink of it
+before him. "But I have, say you, written a treasonable book against the
+regiment and empire of women.... The writing of that book I will not
+deny; but prove it treasonable I think it shall be hard.... It is hinted
+that my book shall be written against. If so be, sir, I greatly doubt
+they shall rather hurt nor (than) mend the matter." And here come the
+terms of capitulation; for he does not surrender unconditionally, even
+in this sore strait: "And yet if any," he goes on, "think me enemy to
+the person, or yet to the regiment, of her whom God hath now promoted,
+they are utterly deceived in me, _for the miraculous work of God,
+comforting His afflicted by means of an infirm vessel, I do acknowledge,
+and the power of his most potent hand I will obey. More plainly to
+speak, if Queen Elizabeth shall confess, that the extraordinary
+dispensation of God's great mercy maketh that lawful unto her which both
+nature and God's law do deny to all women_, then shall none in England
+be more willing to maintain her lawful authority than I shall be. But if
+(God's wondrous work set aside) she ground (as God forbid) the justness
+of her title upon consuetude, laws, or ordinances of men, then"--Then
+Knox will denounce her? Not so; he is more politic nowadays--then, he
+"greatly fears" that her ingratitude to God will not go long without
+punishment.
+
+His letter to Elizabeth, written some few months later, was a mere
+amplification of the sentences quoted above. She must base her title
+entirely upon the extraordinary providence of God; but if she does this,
+"if thus, in God's presence, she humbles herself, so will he with tongue
+and pen justify her authority, as the Holy Ghost hath justified the
+same in Deborah, that blessed mother in Israel."[77] And so, you see,
+his consistency is preserved; he is merely applying the doctrine of the
+"First Blast." The argument goes thus: The regiment of women is, as
+before noted in our work, repugnant to nature, contumely to God, and a
+subversion of good order. It has nevertheless pleased God to raise up,
+as exceptions to this law, first Deborah, and afterward Elizabeth
+Tudor--whose regiment we shall proceed to celebrate.
+
+There is no evidence as to how the Reformer's explanations were
+received, and indeed it is most probable that the letter was never shown
+to Elizabeth at all. For it was sent under cover of another to Cecil,
+and as it was not of a very courtly conception throughout, and was, of
+all things, what would most excite the Queen's uneasy jealousy about her
+title, it is like enough that the secretary exercised his discretion (he
+had Knox's leave in this case, and did not always wait for that, it is
+reputed) to put the letter harmlessly away beside other valueless or
+unpresentable State Papers. I wonder very much if he did the same with
+another,[78] written two years later, after Mary had come into Scotland,
+in which Knox almost seeks to make Elizabeth an accomplice with him in
+the matter of the "First Blast." The Queen of Scotland is going to have
+that work refuted, he tells her; and "though it were but foolishness in
+him to prescribe unto her Majesty what is to be done," he would yet
+remind her that Mary is neither so much alarmed about her own security,
+nor so generously interested in Elizabeth's, "that she would take such
+pains, _unless her crafty counsel in so doing shot at a further mark_."
+There is something really ingenious in this letter; it showed Knox in
+the double capacity of the author of the "First Blast" and the faithful
+friend of Elizabeth; and he combines them there so naturally, that one
+would scarcely imagine the two to be incongruous.
+
+Twenty days later he was defending his intemperate publication to
+another queen--his own queen, Mary Stuart. This was on the first of
+those three interviews which he has preserved for us with so much
+dramatic vigour in the picturesque pages of his History. After he had
+avowed the authorship in his usual haughty style, Mary asked: "You
+think, then, that I have no just authority?" The question was evaded.
+"Please your Majesty," he answered, "that learned men in all ages have
+had their judgments free, and most commonly disagreeing from the common
+judgment of the world; such also have they published by pen and tongue;
+and yet notwithstanding they themselves have lived in the common society
+with others, and have borne patiently with the errors and imperfections
+which they could not amend." Thus did "Plato the philosopher": thus will
+do John Knox. "I have communicated my judgment to the world: if the
+realm finds no inconvenience from the regiment of a woman, that which
+they approve shall I not further disallow than within my own breast; but
+shall be as well content to live under your Grace as Paul was to live
+under Nero. And my hope is, that so long as ye defile not your hands
+with the blood of the saints of God, neither I nor my book shall hurt
+either you or your authority." All this is admirable in wisdom and
+moderation, and, except that he might have hit upon a comparison less
+offensive than that with Paul and Nero, hardly to be bettered. Having
+said thus much, he feels he needs say no more; and so, when he is
+further pressed, he closes that part of the discussion with an
+astonishing sally. If he has been content to let this matter sleep, he
+would recommend her Grace to follow his example with thankfulness of
+heart; it is grimly to be understood which of them has most to fear if
+the question should be reawakened. So the talk wandered to other
+subjects. Only, when the Queen was summoned at last to dinner ("for it
+was afternoon") Knox made his salutation in this form of words: "I pray
+God, Madam, that you may be as much blessed within the Commonwealth of
+Scotland, if it be the pleasure of God, as ever Deborah was in the
+Commonwealth of Israel."[79] Deborah again.
+
+But he was not yet done with the echoes of his own "First Blast." In
+1571, when he was already near his end, the old controversy was taken up
+in one of a series of anonymous libels against the Reformer, affixed,
+Sunday after Sunday, to the church door. The dilemma was fairly enough
+stated. Either his doctrine is false, in which case he is a "false
+doctor" and seditious; or, if it be true, why does he "avow and approve
+the contrare, I mean that regiment in the Queen of England's person;
+which he avoweth and approveth, not only praying for the maintenance of
+her estate, but also procuring her aid and support against his own
+native country?" Knox answered the libel, as his wont was, next Sunday,
+from the pulpit. He justified the "First Blast" with all the old
+arrogance; there is no drawing back there. The regiment of women is
+repugnant to nature, contumely to God, and a subversion of good order,
+as before. When he prays for the maintenance of Elizabeth's estate, he
+is only following the example of those prophets of God who warned and
+comforted the wicked kings of Israel; or of Jeremiah, who bade the Jews
+pray for the prosperity of Nebuchadnezzar. As for the Queen's aid, there
+is no harm in that: _quia_ (these are his own words) _quia omnia munda
+mundis_: because to the pure all things are pure. One thing, in
+conclusion, he "may not pretermit"; to give the lie in the throat to his
+accuser, where he charges him with seeking support against his native
+country. "What I have been to my country," said the old Reformer, "What
+I have been to my country, albeit this unthankful age will not know, yet
+the ages to come will be compelled to bear witness to the truth. And
+thus I cease, requiring of all men that have anything to oppone against
+me, that he may (they may) do it so plainly, as that I may make myself
+and all my doings manifest to the world. For to me it seemeth a thing
+unreasonable, that, in this my decrepit age, I shall be compelled to
+fight against shadows, and howlets that dare not abide the light."[80]
+
+Now, in this, which may be called his "Last Blast," there is as sharp
+speaking as any in the "First Blast" itself. He is of the same opinion
+to the end, you see, although he has been obliged to cloak and garble
+that opinion for political ends. He has been tacking indeed, and he has
+indeed been seeking the favour of a queen; but what man ever sought a
+queen's favour with a more virtuous purpose, or with as little courtly
+policy? The question of consistency is delicate, and must be made plain.
+Knox never changed his opinion about female rule, but lived to regret
+that he had published that opinion. Doubtless he had many thoughts so
+far out of the range of public sympathy, that he could only keep them to
+himself, and, in his own words, bear patiently with the errors and
+imperfections that he could not amend. For example, I make no doubt
+myself that, in his own heart, he did hold the shocking dogma attributed
+to him by more than one calumniator; and that, had the time been ripe,
+had there been aught to gain by it, instead of all to lose, he would
+have been the first to assert that Scotland was elective instead of
+hereditary--"elective as in the days of paganism," as one Thevet says in
+holy horror.[81] And yet, because the time was not ripe, I find no hint
+of such an idea in his collected works. Now, the regiment of women was
+another matter that he should have kept to himself; right or wrong, his
+opinion did not fit the moment; right or wrong, as Aylmer puts it, "the
+'Blast' was blown out of season." And this it was that he began to
+perceive after the accession of Elizabeth: not that he had been wrong,
+and that female rule was a good thing, for he had said from the first
+that "the felicity of some women in their empires" could not change the
+law of God and the nature of created things; not this, but that the
+regiment of women was one of those imperfections of society which must
+be borne with because yet they cannot be remedied. The thing had seemed
+so obvious to him, in his sense of unspeakable masculine superiority,
+and in his fine contempt for what is only sanctioned by antiquity and
+common consent, he had imagined that, at the first hint, men would arise
+and shake off the debasing tyranny. He found himself wrong, and he
+showed that he could be moderate in his own fashion, and understood the
+spirit of true compromise. He came round to Calvin's position, in fact,
+but by a different way. And it derogates nothing from the merit of this
+wise attitude that it was the consequence of a change of interest. We
+are all taught by interest; and if the interest be not merely selfish,
+there is no wiser preceptor under heaven, and perhaps no sterner.
+
+Such is the history of John Knox's connection with the controversy about
+female rule. In itself, this is obviously an incomplete study; not fully
+to be understood, without a knowledge of his private relations with the
+other sex, and what he thought of their position in domestic life. This
+shall be dealt with in another paper.
+
+
+  PRIVATE LIFE
+
+To those who know Knox by hearsay only, I believe the matter of this
+paper will be somewhat astonishing. For the hard energy of the man in
+all public matters has possessed the imagination of the world; he
+remains for posterity in certain traditional phrases, browbeating Queen
+Mary, or breaking beautiful carved work in abbeys and cathedrals, that
+had long smoked themselves out and were no more than sorry ruins, while
+he was still quietly teaching children in a country gentleman's family.
+It does not consist with the common acceptation of his character to
+fancy him much moved, except with anger. And yet the language of passion
+came to his pen as readily, whether it was a passion of denunciation
+against some of the abuses that vexed his righteous spirit, or of
+yearning for the society of an absent friend. He was vehement in
+affection, as in doctrine. I will not deny that there may have been,
+along with his vehemence, something shifty, and for the moment only;
+that, like many men, and many Scotsmen, he saw the world and his own
+heart, not so much under any very steady, equable light, as by extreme
+flashes of passion, true for the moment, but not true in the long-run.
+There does seem to me to be something of this traceable in the
+Reformer's utterances: precipitation and repentance, hardy speech and
+action somewhat circumspect, a strong tendency to see himself in a
+heroic light and to place a ready belief in the disposition of the
+moment. Withal he had considerable confidence in himself, and in the
+uprightness of his own disciplined emotions, underlying much sincere
+aspiration after spiritual humility. And it is this confidence that
+makes his intercourse with women so interesting to a modern. It would be
+easy, of course, to make fun of the whole affair, to picture him
+strutting vaingloriously among these inferior creatures, or compare a
+religious friendship in the sixteenth century with what was called, I
+think, a literary friendship in the eighteenth. But it is more just and
+profitable to recognise what there is sterling and human underneath all
+his theoretical affectations of superiority. Women, he has said in his
+"First Blast," are "weak, frail, impatient, feeble, and foolish"; and
+yet it does not appear that he was himself any less dependent than other
+men upon the sympathy and affection of these weak, frail, impatient,
+feeble, and foolish creatures; it seems even as if he had been rather
+more dependent than most.
+
+Of those who are to act influentially on their fellows, we should expect
+always something large and public in their way of life, something more
+or less urbane and comprehensive in their sentiment for others. We
+should not expect to see them spend their sympathy in idyls, however
+beautiful. We should not seek them among those who, if they have but a
+wife to their bosom, ask no more of womankind, just as they ask no more
+of their own sex, if they can find a friend or two for their immediate
+need. They will be quick to feel all the pleasures of our
+association--not the great ones alone, but all. They will know not love
+only, but all those other ways in which man and woman mutually make each
+other happy--by sympathy, by admiration, by the atmosphere they bear
+about them--down to the mere impersonal pleasure of passing happy faces
+in the street. For, through all this gradation, the difference of sex
+makes itself pleasurably felt. Down to the most lukewarm courtesies of
+life, there is a special chivalry due and a special pleasure received,
+when the two sexes are brought ever so lightly into contact. We love our
+mothers otherwise than we love our fathers; a sister is not as a brother
+to us; and friendship between man and woman, be it never so unalloyed
+and innocent, is not the same as friendship between man and man. Such
+friendship is not even possible for all. To conjoin tenderness for a
+woman that is not far short of passionate with such disinterestedness
+and beautiful gratuity of affection as there is between friends of the
+same sex, requires no ordinary disposition in the man. For either it
+would presuppose quite womanly delicacy of perception, and, as it were,
+a curiosity in shades of differing sentiment; or it would mean that he
+had accepted the large, simple divisions of society: a strong and
+positive spirit robustly virtuous, who has chosen a better part
+coarsely, and holds to it steadfastly, with all its consequences of pain
+to himself and others; as one who should go straight before him on a
+journey, neither tempted by wayside flowers nor very scrupulous of small
+lives under foot. It was in virtue of this latter disposition that Knox
+was capable of those intimacies with women that embellished his life;
+and we find him preserved for us in old letters as a man of many women
+friends; a man of some expansion toward the other sex; a man ever ready
+to comfort weeping women, and to weep along with them.
+
+Of such scraps and fragments of evidence as to his private life and more
+intimate thoughts as have survived to us from all the perils that
+environ written paper, an astonishingly large proportion is in the shape
+of letters to women of his familiarity. He was twice married, but that
+is not greatly to the purpose; for the Turk, who thinks even more meanly
+of women than John Knox, is none the less given to marrying. What is
+really significant is quite apart from marriage. For the man Knox was a
+true man, and woman, the _ewig-weibliche_, was as necessary to him, in
+spite of all low theories, as ever she was to Goethe. He came to her in
+a certain halo of his own, as the minister of truth, just as Goethe came
+to her in a glory of art; he made himself necessary to troubled hearts
+and minds exercised in the painful complications that naturally result
+from all changes in the world's way of thinking; and those whom he had
+thus helped became dear to him, and were made the chosen companions of
+his leisure if they were at hand, or encouraged and comforted by letter
+if they were afar.
+
+It must not be forgotten that Knox had been a presbyter of the old
+Church, and that the many women whom we shall see gathering around him,
+as he goes through life, had probably been accustomed, while still in
+the communion of Rome, to rely much upon some chosen spiritual director,
+so that the intimacies of which I propose to offer some account, while
+testifying to a good heart in the Reformer, testify also to a certain
+survival of the spirit of the confessional in the Reformed Church, and
+are not properly to be judged without this idea. There is no friendship
+so noble, but it is the product of the time; and a world of little
+finical observances, and little frail proprieties and fashions of the
+hour, go to make or to mar, to stint or to perfect, the union of
+spirits the most loving and the most intolerant of such interference.
+The trick of the country and the age steps in even between the mother
+and her child, counts out their caresses upon niggardly fingers, and
+says, in the voice of authority, that this one thing shall be a matter
+of confidence between them, and this other thing shall not. And thus it
+is that we must take into reckoning whatever tended to modify the social
+atmosphere in which Knox and his women friends met, and loved and
+trusted each other. To the man who had been their priest, and was now
+their minister, women would be able to speak with a confidence quite
+impossible in these latter days; the women would be able to speak, and
+the man to hear. It was a beaten road just then; and I daresay we should
+be no less scandalised at their plain speech than they, if they could
+come back to earth, would be offended at our waltzes and worldly
+fashions. This, then, was the footing on which Knox stood with his many
+women friends. The reader will see, as he goes on, how much of warmth,
+of interest, and of that happy mutual dependence which is the very gist
+of friendship, he contrived to ingraft upon this somewhat dry
+relationship of penitent and confessor.
+
+It must be understood that we know nothing of his intercourse with women
+(as indeed we know little at all about his life) until he came to
+Berwick in 1549, when he was already in the forty-fifth year of his age.
+At the same time it is just possible that some of a little group at
+Edinburgh, with whom he corresponded during his last absence, may have
+been friends of an older standing. Certainly they were, of all his
+female correspondents, the least personally favoured. He treats them
+throughout in a comprehensive sort of spirit that must at times have
+been a little wounding. Thus, he remits one of them to his former
+letters, "which I trust be common betwixt you and the rest of our
+sisters, for to me ye are all equal in Christ."[82] Another letter is a
+gem in this way. "Albeit," it begins, "albeit I have no particular
+matter to write unto you, beloved sister, yet I could not refrain to
+write these few lines to you in declaration of my remembrance of you.
+True it is that I have many whom I bear in equal remembrance before God
+with you, to whom at present I write nothing, either for that I esteem
+them stronger than you, and therefore they need the less my rude
+labours, or else because they have not provoked me by their writing to
+recompense their remembrance."[83] His "sisters in Edinburgh" had
+evidently to "provoke" his attention pretty constantly; nearly all his
+letters are, on the face of them, answers to questions, and the answers
+are given with a certain crudity that I do not find repeated when he
+writes to those he really cares for. So when they consult him about
+women's apparel (a subject on which his opinion may be pretty correctly
+imagined by the ingenious reader for himself) he takes occasion to
+anticipate some of the most offensive matter of the "First Blast" in a
+style of real brutality.[84] It is not merely that he tells them "the
+garments of women do declare their weakness and inability to execute the
+office of man," though that in itself is neither very wise nor very
+opportune in such a correspondence, one would think; but if the reader
+will take the trouble to wade through the long, tedious sermon for
+himself, he will see proof enough that Knox neither loved, nor very
+deeply respected, the women he was then addressing. In very truth, I
+believe these Edinburgh sisters simply bored him. He had a certain
+interest in them as his children in the Lord; they were continually
+"provoking him by their writing"; and, if they handed his letters about,
+writing to them was as good a form of publication as was then open to
+him in Scotland. There is one letter, however, in this budget, addressed
+to the wife of Clerk-Register Mackgil, which is worthy of some further
+mention. The Clerk-Register had not opened his heart, it would appear,
+to the preaching of the Gospel, and Mrs. Mackgil has written seeking
+the Reformer's prayers in his behalf. "Your husband," he answers, "is
+dear to me for that he is a man indued with some good gifts, but more
+dear for that he is your husband. Charity moveth me to thirst his
+illumination, both for his comfort and for the trouble which you sustain
+by his coldness, which justly may be called infidelity." He wishes her,
+however, not to hope too much; he can promise that his prayers will be
+earnest, but not that they will be effectual; it is possible that this
+is to be her "cross" in life; that "her head, appointed by God for her
+comfort, should be her enemy." And if this be so--well, there is nothing
+for it; "with patience she must abide God's merciful deliverance,"
+taking heed only that she does not "obey manifest iniquity for the
+pleasure of any mortal man."[85] I conceive this epistle would have
+given a very modified sort of pleasure to the Clerk-Register, had it
+chanced to fall into his hands. Compare its tenor--the dry resignation
+not without a hope of merciful deliverance therein recommended--with
+these words from another letter, written but the year before to two
+married women of London: "Call first for grace by Jesus, and thereafter
+communicate with your faithful husbands, and then shall God, I doubt
+not, conduct your footsteps, and direct your counsels to His glory."[86]
+Here the husbands are put in a very high place; we can recognise here
+the same hand that has written for our instruction how the man is set
+above the woman, even as God above the angels. But the point of the
+distinction is plain. For Clerk-Register Mackgil was not a faithful
+husband; displayed, indeed, towards religion, a "coldness which justly
+might be called infidelity." We shall see in more notable instances how
+much Knox's conception of the duty of wives varies according to the zeal
+and orthodoxy of the husband.
+
+As I have said, he may possibly have made the acquaintance of Mrs.
+Mackgil, Mrs. Guthrie, or some other, or all, of these Edinburgh friends
+while he was still Douglas of Longniddry's private tutor. But our
+certain knowledge begins in 1549. He was then but newly escaped from his
+captivity in France, after pulling an oar for nineteen months on the
+benches of the galley _Nostre Dame_; now up the rivers, holding stealthy
+intercourse with other Scottish prisoners in the castle of Rouen; now
+out in the North Sea, raising his sick head to catch a glimpse of the
+far-off steeples of St. Andrews. And now he was sent down by the English
+Privy Council as a preacher to Berwick-upon-Tweed; somewhat shaken in
+health by all his hardships, full of pains and agues, and tormented by
+gravel, that sorrow of great men; altogether, what with his romantic
+story, his weak health, and his great faculty of eloquence, a very
+natural object for the sympathy of devout women. At this happy juncture
+he fell into the company of a Mrs. Elizabeth Bowes, wife of Richard
+Bowes, of Aske, in Yorkshire, to whom she had borne twelve children. She
+was a religious hypochondriac, a very weariful woman, full of doubts and
+scruples, and giving no rest on earth either to herself or to those whom
+she honoured with her confidence. From the first time she heard Knox
+preach she formed a high opinion of him, and was solicitous ever after
+of his society.[87] Nor was Knox unresponsive. "I have always delighted
+in your company," he writes, "and when labours would permit, you know I
+have not spared hours to talk and commune with you." Often when they had
+met in depression he reminds her, "God hath sent great comfort unto
+both."[88] We can gather from such letters as are yet extant how close
+and continuous was their intercourse. "I think it best you remain till
+to-morrow," he writes once, "and so shall we commune at large at
+afternoon. This day you know to be the day of my study and prayer unto
+God; yet if your trouble be intolerable, or if you think my presence may
+release your pain, do as the Spirit shall move you.... Your messenger
+found me in bed, after a sore trouble and most dolorous night, and so
+dolour may complain to dolour when we two meet.... And this is more
+plain than ever I spoke, to let you know you have a companion in
+trouble."[89] Once we have the curtain raised for a moment, and can look
+at the two together for the length of a phrase. "After the writing of
+this preceding," writes Knox, "your brother and mine, Harrie Wycliffe,
+did advertise me by writing, that your adversary (the devil) took
+occasion to trouble you because that _I did start back from you
+rehearsing your infirmities. I remember myself so to have done, and that
+is my common consuetude when anything pierceth or toucheth my heart.
+Call to your mind what I did standing at the cupboard at Alnwick_. In
+very deed I thought that no creature had been tempted as I was; and when
+I heard proceed from your mouth the very same words that he troubles me
+with, I did wonder and from my heart lament your sore trouble, knowing
+in myself the dolour thereof."[90] Now intercourse of so very close a
+description, whether it be religious intercourse or not, is apt to
+displease and disquiet a husband; and we know incidentally from Knox
+himself that there was some little scandal about his intimacy with Mrs.
+Bowes. "The slander and fear of men," he writes, "has impeded me to
+exercise my pen so oft as I would; _yea, very shame hath holden me from
+your company, when I was most surely persuaded that God had appointed me
+at that time to comfort and feed your hungry and afflicted soul. God in
+His infinite mercy_," he goes on, "_remove not only from me all fear
+that tendeth not to godliness, but from others suspicion to judge of me
+otherwise than it becometh one member to judge of another_."[91] And the
+scandal, such as it was, would not be allayed by the dissension in which
+Mrs. Bowes seems to have lived with her family upon the matter of
+religion, and the countenance shown by Knox to her resistance. Talking
+of these conflicts, and her courage against "her own flesh and most
+inward affections, yea, against some of her most natural friends" he
+writes it, "to the praise of God, he has wondered at the bold constancy
+which he has found in her when his own heart was faint."[92]
+
+Now, perhaps in order to stop scandalous mouths, perhaps out of a desire
+to bind the much-loved evangelist nearer to her in the only manner
+possible, Mrs. Bowes conceived the scheme of marrying him to her fifth
+daughter, Marjorie; and the Reformer seems to have fallen in with it
+readily enough. It seems to have been believed in the family that the
+whole matter had been originally made up between these two, with no very
+spontaneous inclination on the part of the bride.[93] Knox's idea of
+marriage, as I have said, was not the same for all men; but on the
+whole, it was not lofty. We have a curious letter of his, written at the
+request of Queen Mary, to the Earl of Argyle, on very delicate household
+matters; which, as he tells us, "was not well accepted of the said
+Earl."[94] We may suppose, however, that his own home was regulated in a
+similar spirit. I can fancy that for such a man, emotional, and with a
+need, now and again, to exercise parsimony in emotions not strictly
+needful, something a little mechanical, something hard and fast and
+clearly understood, would enter into his ideal of a home. There were
+storms enough without, and equability was to be desired at the fireside
+even at a sacrifice of deeper pleasures. So, from a wife, of all women,
+he would not ask much. One letter to her which has come down to us is, I
+had almost said, conspicuous for coldness.[95] He calls her, as he
+called other female correspondents, "dearly beloved sister"; the epistle
+is doctrinal, and nearly the half of it bears, not upon her own case,
+but upon that of her mother. However, we know what Heine wrote in his
+wife's album; and there is, after all, one passage that may be held to
+intimate some tenderness, although even that admits of an amusingly
+opposite construction. "I think," he says, "I _think_ this be the first
+letter I ever wrote to you." This, if we are to take it literally, may
+pair off with the "two _or three_ children" whom Montaigne mentions
+having lost at nurse; the one is as eccentric in a lover as the other in
+a parent. Nevertheless, he displayed more energy in the course of his
+troubled wooing than might have been expected. The whole Bowes family,
+angry enough already at the influence he had obtained over the mother,
+set their faces obdurately against the match. And I daresay the
+opposition quickened his inclination. I find him writing to Mrs. Bowes
+that she need not further trouble herself about the marriage; it should
+now be his business altogether; it behoved him now to jeopard his life
+"for the comfort of his own flesh, both fear and friendship of all
+earthly creatures laid aside."[96] This is a wonderfully chivalrous
+utterance for a Reformer forty-eight years old; and it compares well
+with the leaden coquetries of Calvin, not much over thirty, taking this
+and that into consideration, weighing together dowries and religious
+qualifications and the instancy of friends, and exhibiting what M.
+Bungener calls "an honourable and Christian difficulty" of choice, in
+frigid indecisions and insincere proposals. But Knox's next letter is in
+a humbler tone; he has not found the negotiation so easy as he fancied;
+he despairs of the marriage altogether, and talks of leaving
+England,--regards not "what country consumes his wicked carcass." "You
+shall understand," he says, "that this sixth of November, I spoke with
+Sir Robert Bowes" (the head of the family, his bride's uncle) "in the
+matter you know, according to your request; whose disdainful, yea,
+despiteful, words hath so pierced my heart that my life is bitter to me.
+I bear a good countenance with a sore-troubled heart, because he that
+ought to consider matters with a deep judgment is become not only a
+despiser, but also a taunter of God's messengers--God be merciful unto
+him! Amongst others his most unpleasing words, while that I was about to
+have declared my heart in the whole matter, he said, 'Away with your
+rhetorical reasons! for I will not be persuaded with them.' God knows I
+did use no rhetoric nor coloured speech; but would have spoken the
+truth, and that in most simple manner. I am not a good orator in my own
+cause; but what he would not be content to hear of me, God shall declare
+to him one day to his displeasure, unless he repent."[97] Poor Knox, you
+see, is quite commoved. It has been a very unpleasant interview. And as
+it is the only sample that we have of how things went with him during
+his courtship, we may infer that the period was not as agreeable for
+Knox as it has been for some others.
+
+However, when once they were married, I imagine he and Marjorie Bowes
+hit it off together comfortably enough. The little we know of it may be
+brought together in a very short space. She bore him two sons. He seems
+to have kept her pretty busy, and depended on her to some degree in his
+work; so that when she fell ill, his papers got at once into
+disorder.[98] Certainly she sometimes wrote to his dictation; and, in
+this capacity, he calls her "his left hand."[99] In June, 1559, at the
+headiest moment of the Reformation in Scotland, he writes regretting the
+absence of his helpful colleague, Goodman, "whose presence" (this is the
+not very grammatical form of his lament) "whose presence I more thirst,
+than she that is my own flesh."[100] And this, considering the source
+and the circumstances, may be held as evidence of a very tender
+sentiment. He tells us himself in his History, on the occasion of a
+certain meeting at the Kirk of Field, that he was in no small heaviness
+by reason of the late death of his "dear bedfellow, Marjorie
+Bowes."[101] Calvin, condoling with him, speaks of her as "a wife whose
+like is not to be found everywhere" (that is very like Calvin), and
+again, as "the most delightful of wives." We know what Calvin thought
+desirable in a wife, "good humour, chastity, thrift, patience, and
+solicitude for her husband's health," and so we may suppose that the
+first Mrs. Knox fell not far short of this ideal.
+
+The actual date of the marriage is uncertain; but by the summer of 1554,
+at the latest, the Reformer was settled in Geneva with his wife. There
+is no fear either that he will be dull; even if the chaste, thrifty,
+patient Marjorie should not altogether occupy his mind, he need not go
+out of the house to seek more female sympathy; for behold! Mrs. Bowes is
+duly domesticated with the young couple. Dr. M'Crie imagined that
+Richard Bowes was now dead, and his widow, consequently, free to live
+where she would; and where could she go more naturally than to the house
+of a married daughter? This, however, is not the case. Richard Bowes did
+not die till at least two years later. It is impossible to believe that
+he approved of his wife's desertion, after so many years of marriage,
+after twelve children had been born to them; and accordingly we find in
+his will, dated 1558, no mention either of her or of Knox's wife.[102]
+This is plain sailing. It is easy enough to understand the anger of
+Bowes against this interloper, who had come into a quiet family, married
+the daughter in spite of the father's opposition, alienated the wife
+from the husband and the husband's religion, supported her in a long
+course of resistance and rebellion, and, after years of intimacy,
+already too close and tender for any jealous spirit to behold without
+resentment, carried her away with him at last into a foreign land. But
+it is not quite easy to understand how, except out of sheer weariness
+and disgust, he was ever brought to agree to the arrangement. Nor is it
+easy to square the Reformer's conduct with his public teaching. We have,
+for instance, a letter addressed by him, Craig, and Spottiswood, to the
+Archbishops of Canterbury and York, anent "a wicked and rebellious
+woman," one Anne Good, spouse to "John Barron, a minister of Christ
+Jesus, his evangel," who, "after great rebellion shown unto him, and
+divers admonitions given, as well by himself as by others in his name,
+that she should in no wise depart from this realm, nor from his house
+without his licence, hath not the less stubbornly and rebelliously
+departed, separated herself from his society, left his house, and
+withdrawn herself from this realm."[103] Perhaps some sort of licence
+was extorted, as I have said, from Richard Bowes, weary with years of
+domestic dissension; but setting that aside, the words employed with so
+much righteous indignation by Knox, Craig, and Spottiswood, to describe
+the conduct of that wicked and rebellious woman, Mrs. Barron, would
+describe nearly as exactly the conduct of the religious Mrs. Bowes. It
+is a little bewildering, until we recollect the distinction between
+faithful and unfaithful husbands; for Barron was "a minister of Christ
+Jesus, his evangel," while Richard Bowes, besides being own brother to a
+despiser and taunter of God's messengers, is shrewdly suspected to have
+been "a bigoted adherent of the Roman Catholic faith," or, as Knox
+himself would have expressed it, "a rotten Papist."
+
+You would have thought that Knox was now pretty well supplied with
+female society. But we are not yet at the end of the roll. The last year
+of his sojourn in England had been spent principally in London, where he
+was resident as one of the chaplains of Edward the Sixth; and here he
+boasts, although a stranger, he had, by God's grace, found favour before
+many.[104] The godly women of the metropolis made much of him; once he
+writes to Mrs. Bowes that her last letter had found him closeted with
+three, and he and the three women were all in tears.[105] Out of all,
+however, he had chosen two. "_God_," he writes to them, "_brought us in
+such familiar acquaintance, that your hearts were incensed and kindled
+with a special care over me, as a mother useth to be over her natural
+child_; and my heart was opened and compelled in your presence to be
+more plain than ever I was to any."[106] And out of the two even he had
+chosen one, Mrs. Anne Locke, wife to Mr. Harry Locke, merchant, nigh to
+Bow Kirk, Cheapside, in London, as the address runs. If one may venture
+to judge upon such imperfect evidence, this was the woman he loved best.
+I have a difficulty in quite forming to myself an idea of her character.
+She may have been one of the three tearful visitors before alluded to;
+she may even have been that one of them who was so profoundly moved by
+some passages of Mrs. Bowes's letter, which the Reformer opened, and
+read aloud to them before they went. "O would to God," cried this
+impressionable matron, "would to God that I might speak with that
+person, for I perceive there are more tempted than I."[107] This _may_
+have been Mrs. Locke, as I say; but even if it were, we must not
+conclude from this one fact that she was such another as Mrs. Bowes. All
+the evidence tends the other way. She was a woman of understanding,
+plainly, who followed political events with interest, and to whom Knox
+thought it worth while to write, in detail, the history of his trials
+and successes. She was religious, but without that morbid perversity of
+spirit that made religion so heavy a burden for the poor-hearted Mrs.
+Bowes. More of her I do not find, save testimony to the profound
+affection that united her to the Reformer. So we find him writing to her
+from Geneva, in such terms as these:--"You write that your desire is
+earnest to see me. _Dear sister, if I should express the thirst and
+languor which I have had for your presence, I should appear to pass
+measure.... Yea, I weep and rejoice in remembrance of you_; but that
+would evanish by the comfort of your presence, which I assure you is so
+dear to me, that if the charge of this little flock here, gathered
+together in Christ's name, did not impede me, my coming should prevent
+my letter."[108] I say that this was written from Geneva; and yet you
+will observe that it is no consideration for his wife or mother-in-law,
+only the charge of his little flock, that keeps him from setting out
+forthwith for London, to comfort himself with the dear presence of Mrs.
+Locke. Remember that was a certain plausible enough pretext for Mrs.
+Locke to come to Geneva--"the most perfect school of Christ that ever
+was on earth since the days of the Apostles"--for we are now under the
+reign of that "horrible monster Jezebel of England," when a lady of good
+orthodox sentiments was better out of London. It was doubtful, however,
+whether this was to be. She was detained in England, partly by
+circumstances unknown, "partly by empire of her head," Mr. Harry Locke,
+the Cheapside merchant. It is somewhat humorous to see Knox struggling
+for resignation, now that he has to do with a faithful husband (for Mr.
+Harry Locke was faithful). Had it been otherwise, "in my heart," he
+says, "I could have wished--yea," here he breaks out, "yea, and cannot
+cease to wish--that God would guide you to this place."[109] And after
+all, he had not long to wait, for whether Mr. Harry Locke died in the
+interval, or was wearied, he too, into giving permission, five months
+after the date of the letter last quoted, "Mrs. Anne Locke, Harry her
+son, and Anne her daughter, and Katharine her maid," arrived in that
+perfect school of Christ, the Presbyterian paradise, Geneva. So now, and
+for the next two years, the cup of Knox's happiness was surely full. Of
+an afternoon, when the bells rang out for the sermon, the shops closed,
+and the good folk gathered to the churches, psalm-book in hand, we can
+imagine him drawing near to the English chapel in quite patriarchal
+fashion, with Mrs. Knox and Mrs. Bowes and Mrs. Locke, James his
+servant, Patrick his pupil, and a due following of children and maids.
+He might be alone at work all morning in his study, for he wrote much
+during these two years; but at night, you may be sure there was a circle
+of admiring women, eager to hear the new paragraph, and not sparing of
+applause. And what work, among others, was he elaborating at this time,
+but the notorious "First Blast"? So that he may have rolled out in his
+big pulpit voice, how women were weak, frail, impatient, feeble,
+foolish, inconstant, variable, cruel, and lacking the spirit of counsel,
+and how men were above them, even as God is above the angels, in the
+ears of his own wife, and the two dearest friends on earth. But he had
+lost the sense of incongruity, and continued to despise in theory the
+sex he honoured so much in practice, of whom he chose his most intimate
+associates, and whose courage he was compelled to wonder at, when his
+own heart was faint.
+
+We may say that such a man was not worthy of his fortune; and so, as he
+would not learn, he was taken away from that agreeable school, and his
+fellowship of women was broken up, not to be reunited. Called into
+Scotland to take at last that strange position in history which is his
+best claim to commemoration, he was followed thither by his wife and his
+mother-in-law. The wife soon died. The death of her daughter did not
+altogether separate Mrs. Bowes from Knox, but she seems to have come and
+gone between his house and England. In 1562, however, we find him
+characterised as "a sole man by reason of the absence of his
+mother-in-law, Mrs. Bowes," and a passport is got for her, her man, a
+maid, and "three horses, whereof two shall return," as well as liberty
+to take all her own money with her into Scotland. This looks like a
+definite arrangement; but whether she died at Edinburgh, or went back to
+England yet again, I cannot find. With that great family of hers, unless
+in leaving her husband she had quarrelled with them all, there must have
+been frequent occasion for her presence, one would think. Knox at least
+survived her; and we possess his epigraph to their long intimacy, given
+to the world by him in an appendix to his latest publication. I have
+said in a former paper that Knox was not shy of personal revelations in
+his published works. And the trick seems to have grown on him. To this
+last tract, a controversial onslaught on a Scottish Jesuit, he prefixed
+a prayer, not very pertinent to the matter in hand, and containing
+references to his family which were the occasion of some wit in his
+adversary's answer; and appended what seems equally irrelevant, one of
+his devout letters to Mrs. Bowes, with an explanatory preface. To say
+truth, I believe he had always felt uneasily that the circumstances of
+this intimacy were very capable of misconstruction; and now, when he was
+an old man, taking "his good-night of all the faithful in both realms,"
+and only desirous "that without any notable sclander to the evangel of
+Jesus Christ, he might end his battle; for as the world was weary of
+him, so was he of it";--in such a spirit it was not, perhaps, unnatural
+that he should return to this old story, and seek to put it right in the
+eyes of all men, ere he died. "Because that God," he says, "because that
+God now in His mercy hath put an end to the battle of my dear mother,
+Mistress Elizabeth Bowes, before that He put an end to my wretched life,
+I could not cease but declare to the world what was the cause of our
+great familiarity and long acquaintance; which was neither flesh nor
+blood, but a troubled conscience upon her part, which never suffered her
+to rest but when she was in the company of the faithful, of whom (from
+the first hearing of the word at my mouth) she judged me to be one....
+Her company to me was comfortable (yea, honourable and profitable, for
+she was to me and mine a mother), but yet it was not without some cross;
+for besides trouble and fashery of body sustained for her, my mind was
+seldom quiet, for doing somewhat for the comfort of her troubled
+conscience."[110] He had written to her years before from his first
+exile in Dieppe, that "only God's hand" could withhold him from once
+more speaking with her face to face; and now, when God's hand has indeed
+interposed, when there lies between them, instead of the voyageable
+straits, that great gulf over which no man can pass, this is the spirit
+in which he can look back upon their long acquaintance. She was a
+religious hypochondriac, it appears, whom, not without some cross and
+fashery of mind and body, he was good enough to tend. He might have
+given a truer character of their friendship had he thought less of his
+own standing in public estimation, and more of the dead woman. But he
+was in all things, as Burke said of his son in that ever memorable
+passage, a public creature. He wished that even into this private place
+of his affections posterity should follow him with a complete approval;
+and he was willing, in order that this might be so, to exhibit the
+defects of his lost friend, and tell the world what weariness he had
+sustained through her unhappy disposition. There is something here that
+reminds one of Rousseau.
+
+I do not think he ever saw Mrs. Locke after he left Geneva; but his
+correspondence with her continued for three years. It may have continued
+longer, of course, but I think the last letters we possess read like the
+last that would be written. Perhaps Mrs. Locke was then re-married, for
+there is much obscurity over her subsequent history. For as long as
+their intimacy was kept up, at least, the human element remains in the
+Reformer's life. Here is one passage, for example, the most likable
+utterance of Knox's that I can quote:--Mrs. Locke has been upbraiding
+him as a bad correspondent. "My remembrance of you," he answers, "is not
+so dead, but I trust it shall be fresh enough, albeit it be renewed by
+no outward token for one year. _Of nature, I am churlish; yet one thing
+I ashame not to affirm, that familiarity once thoroughly contracted was
+never yet broken on my default. The cause may be that I have rather need
+of all, than that any have need of me._ However it (_that_) be, it
+cannot be, as I say, the corporal absence of one year or two that can
+quench in my heart that familiar acquaintance in Christ Jesus, which
+half a year did engender, and almost two years did nourish and confirm.
+And therefore, whether I write or no, be assuredly persuaded that I have
+you in such memory as becometh the faithful to have of the
+faithful."[111] This is the truest touch of personal humility that I can
+remember to have seen in all the five volumes of the Reformer's
+collected works: It is no small honour to Mrs. Locke that his affection
+for her should have brought home to him this unwonted feeling of
+dependence upon others. Everything else in the course of the
+correspondence testifies to a good, sound, downright sort of friendship
+between the two, less ecstatic than it was at first, perhaps, but
+serviceable and very equal. He gives her ample details as to the
+progress of the work of reformation; sends her the sheets of the
+"Confession of Faith," "in quairs," as he calls it; asks her to assist
+him with her prayers, to collect money for the good cause in Scotland,
+and to send him books for himself--books by Calvin especially, one on
+Isaiah, and a new revised edition of the "Institutes." "I must be bold
+on your liberality," he writes, "not only in that, but in greater things
+as I shall need."[112] On her part she applies to him for spiritual
+advice, not after the manner of the drooping Mrs. Bowes, but in a more
+positive spirit,--advice as to practical points, advice as to the Church
+of England, for instance, whose ritual he condemns as a
+"mingle-mangle."[113] Just at the end she ceases to write, sends him "a
+token, without writing." "I understand your impediment," he answers,
+"and therefore I cannot complain. Yet if you understood the variety of
+my temptations, I doubt not but you would have written somewhat."[114]
+One letter more, and then silence.
+
+And I think the best of the Reformer died out with that correspondence.
+It is after this, of course, that he wrote that ungenerous description
+of his intercourse with Mrs. Bowes. It is after this, also, that we come
+to the unlovely episode of his second marriage. He had been left a
+widower at the age of fifty-five. Three years after, it occurred
+apparently to yet another pious parent to sacrifice a child upon the
+altar of his respect for the Reformer. In January, 1563, Randolph writes
+to Cecil: "Your Honour will take it for a great wonder when I shall
+write unto you that Mr. Knox shall marry a very near kinswoman of the
+Duke's, a Lord's daughter, a young lass not above sixteen years of
+age."[115] He adds that he fears he will be laughed at for reporting so
+mad a story. And yet it was true; and on Palm Sunday, 1564, Margaret
+Stewart, daughter of Andrew Lord Stewart of Ochiltree, aged seventeen,
+was duly united to John Knox, Minister of St. Giles's Kirk, Edinburgh,
+aged fifty-nine,--to the great disgust of Queen Mary from family pride,
+and I would fain hope of many others for more humane considerations. "In
+this," as Randolph says, "I wish he had done otherwise." The Consistory
+of Geneva, "that most perfect school of Christ that ever was on earth
+since the days of the Apostles," were wont to forbid marriages on the
+ground of too great a disproportion in age. I cannot help wondering
+whether the old Reformer's conscience did not uneasily remind him, now
+and again, of this good custom of his religious metropolis, as he
+thought of the two-and-forty years that separated him from his poor
+bride. Fitly enough, we hear nothing of the second Mrs. Knox until she
+appears at her husband's deathbed, eight years after. She bore him three
+daughters in the interval; and I suppose the poor child's martyrdom was
+made as easy for her as might be. She was "extremely attentive to him"
+at the end, we read; and he seems to have spoken to her with some
+confidence. Moreover, and this is very characteristic, he had copied out
+for her use a little volume of his own devotional letters to other
+women.
+
+This is the end of the roll, unless we add to it Mrs. Adamson, who had
+delighted much in his company "by reason that she had a troubled
+conscience," and whose deathbed is commemorated at some length in the
+pages of his history.[116]
+
+And now, looking back, it cannot be said that Knox's intercourse with
+women was quite of the highest sort. It is characteristic that we find
+him more alarmed for his own reputation than for the reputation of the
+women with whom he was familiar. There was a fatal preponderance of self
+in all his intimacies: many women came to learn from him, but he never
+condescended to become a learner in his turn. And so there is not
+anything idyllic in these intimacies of his; and they were never so
+renovating to his spirit as they might have been. But I believe they
+were good enough for the women. I fancy the women knew what they were
+about when so many of them followed after Knox. It is not simply because
+a man is always fully persuaded that he knows the right from the wrong
+and sees his way plainly through the maze of life, great qualities as
+these are, that people will love and follow him, and write him letters
+full of their "earnest desire for him" when he is absent. It is not over
+a man, whose one characteristic is grim fixity of purpose, that the
+hearts of women are "incensed and kindled with a special care," as it
+were over their natural children. In the strong quiet patience of all
+his letters to the weariful Mrs. Bowes, we may perhaps see one cause of
+the fascination he possessed for these religious women. Here was one
+whom you could besiege all the year round with inconsistent scruples and
+complaints; you might write to him on Thursday that you were so elated
+it was plain the devil was deceiving you, and again on Friday that you
+were so depressed it was plain God had cast you off for ever; and he
+would read all this patiently and sympathetically, and give you an
+answer in the most reassuring polysyllables, and all divided into
+heads--who knows?--like a treatise on divinity. And then, those easy
+tears of his. There are some women who like to see men crying; and here
+was this great-voiced, bearded man of God, who might be seen beating the
+solid pulpit every Sunday, and casting abroad his clamorous
+denunciations to the terror of all, and who on the Monday would sit in
+their parlours by the hour, and weep with them over their manifold
+trials and temptations. Nowadays, he would have to drink a dish of tea
+with all these penitents.... It sounds a little vulgar, as the past will
+do, if we look into it too closely. We could not let these great folk of
+old into our drawing-rooms. Queen Elizabeth would positively not be
+eligible for a housemaid. The old manners and the old customs go sinking
+from grade to grade, until, if some mighty emperor revisited the
+glimpses of the moon, he would not find any one of his way of thinking,
+any one he could strike hands with and talk to freely and without
+offence, save perhaps the porter at the end of the street, or the
+fellow with his elbows out who loafs all day before the public-house. So
+that this little note of vulgarity is not a thing to be dwelt upon; it
+is to be put away from us, as we recall the fashion of these old
+intimacies; so that we may only remember Knox as one who was very
+long-suffering with women, kind to them in his own way, loving them in
+his own way--and that not the worst way, if it was not the best--and
+once at least, if not twice, moved to his heart of hearts by a woman,
+and giving expression to the yearning he had for her society in words
+that none of us need be ashamed to borrow.
+
+And let us bear in mind always that the period I have gone over in this
+essay begins when the Reformer was already beyond the middle age, and
+already broken in bodily health: it has been the story of an old man's
+friendships. This it is that makes Knox enviable. Unknown until past
+forty, he had then before him five-and-twenty years of splendid and
+influential life, passed through uncommon hardships to an uncommon
+degree of power, lived in his own country as a sort of king, and did
+what he would with the sound of his voice out of the pulpit. And besides
+all this, such a following of faithful women! One would take the first
+forty-two years gladly, if one could be sure of the last twenty-five.
+Most of us, even if, by reason of great strength and the dignity of grey
+hairs, we retain some degree of public respect in the latter days of our
+existence, will find a falling away of friends, and a solitude making
+itself round about us day by day, until we are left alone with the hired
+sick-nurse. For the attraction of a man's character is apt to be
+outlived, like the attraction of his body; and the power to love grows
+feeble in its turn, as well as the power to inspire love in others. It
+is only with a few rare natures that friendship is added to friendship,
+love to love, and the man keeps growing richer in affection--richer, I
+mean, as a bank maybe said to grow richer, both giving and receiving
+more--after his head is white and his back weary, and he prepares to go
+down into the dust of death.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [60] Gaberel's "Église de Genève," i. 88.
+
+  [61] "La Démocratie chez les Prédicateurs de la Ligue."
+
+  [62] "Historia affectuum se immiscentium controversiæ de
+    gynæcocratia." It is in his collected prefaces; Leipsic, 1683.
+
+  [63] "OEuvres de d'Aubigné," i. 449.
+
+  [64] "Dames Illustres," pp. 358-360.
+
+  [65] Works of John Knox, iv. 349.
+
+  [66] M'Crie's "Life of Knox," ii. 41.
+
+  [67] Described by Calvin in a letter to Cecil, Knox's Works, vol. iv.
+
+  [68] It was anonymously published, but no one seems to have been in
+    doubt about its authorship; he might as well have set his name to
+    it, for all the good he got by holding it back.
+
+  [69] Knox's Works, iv. 358.
+
+  [70] Strype's "Aylmer," p. 16.
+
+  [71] It may interest the reader to know that these (so says Thomasius)
+    are the "ipsissima verba Schlusselburgii."
+
+  [72] I am indebted for a sight of this book to the kindness of Mr.
+    David Laing, the editor of Knox's Works.
+
+  [73] "Social Statics," p. 64, etc.
+
+  [74] Hallam's "Const. Hist. of England," i. 225, note ^m.
+
+  [75] Knox to Mrs. Locke, 6th April, 1559.--Works, vi. 14.
+
+  [76] Knox to Sir William Cecil, 10th April, 1559.--Works, ii. 16, or
+    vi. 15.
+
+  [77] Knox to Queen Elizabeth, July 20th, 1559.--Works, vi. 47, or ii.
+    26.
+
+  [78] _Ibid._, August 6th, 1561.--Works, vi. 126.
+
+  [79] Knox's Works, ii. 278-280.
+
+  [80] Calderwood's "History of the Kirk of Scotland," edition of the
+    Wodrow Society, iii. 51-54.
+
+  [81] Bayle's "Historical Dictionary," art. KNOX, remark G.
+
+  [82] Works, iv. 244.
+
+  [83] Works, iv. 246.
+
+  [84] _Ibid._, iv. 225.
+
+  [85] Works, iv. 245.
+
+  [86] _Ibid._ iv. 221.
+
+  [87] Works, vi. 514.
+
+  [88] _Ibid._ iii. 334.
+
+  [89] Works, iii. 352, 353.
+
+  [90] _Ibid._ iii. 350.
+
+  [91] _Ibid._ iii. 390, 391.
+
+  [92] Works, iii. 142.
+
+  [93] _Ibid._ iii. 378.
+
+  [94] _Ibid._ ii. 379.
+
+  [95] _Ibid._ iii. 394.
+
+  [96] Works, iii. 376.
+
+  [97] Works, iii. 378.
+
+  [98] _Ibid._ vi. 104.
+
+  [99] _Ibid._ v. 5.
+
+  [100] _Ibid._ vi. 27.
+
+  [101] _Ibid._ ii. 138.
+
+  [102] Mr. Laing's preface to the sixth volume of Knox's Works, p. lxii.
+
+  [103] Works, vi. 534.
+
+  [104] _Ibid._ iv. 220.
+
+  [105] _Ibid._ iii. 380.
+
+  [106] _Ibid._ iv. 220.
+
+  [107] Works, iii. 380.
+
+  [108] _Ibid._ iv. 238.
+
+  [109] Works, iv. 240.
+
+  [110] Works, vi. 513, 514.
+
+  [111] Works, vi. 11.
+
+  [112] Works, vi. 21, 101, 108, 130.
+
+  [113] _Ibid._ vi. 83.
+
+  [114] _Ibid._ vi. 129.
+
+  [115] _Ibid._ vi. 532.
+
+  [116] Works, i. 246.
+
+
+
+
+THE BODY-SNATCHER
+
+
+
+
+THE BODY-SNATCHER
+
+
+Every night in the year, four of us sat in the small parlour of the
+George at Debenham--the undertaker, and the landlord, and Fettes, and
+myself. Sometimes there would be more; but blow high, blow low, come
+rain or snow or frost, we four would be each planted in his own
+particular armchair. Fettes was an old drunken Scotchman, a man of
+education obviously, and a man of some property, since he lived in
+idleness. He had come to Debenham years ago, while still young, and by a
+mere continuance of living had grown to be an adopted townsman. His blue
+camlet cloak was a local antiquity, like the church-spire. His place in
+the parlour at the George, his absence from church, his old, crapulous,
+disreputable vices, were all things of course in Debenham. He had some
+vague Radical opinions and some fleeting infidelities, which he would
+now and again set forth and emphasise with tottering slaps upon the
+table. He drank rum--five glasses regularly every evening; and for the
+greater portion of his nightly visit to the George sat, with his glass
+in his right hand, in a state of melancholy alcoholic saturation. We
+called him the Doctor, for he was supposed to have some special
+knowledge of medicine, and had been known, upon a pinch, to set a
+fracture or reduce a dislocation; but beyond these slight particulars,
+we had no knowledge of his character and antecedents.
+
+One dark winter night--it had struck nine some time before the landlord
+joined us--there was a sick man in the George, a great neighbouring
+proprietor suddenly struck down with apoplexy on his way to Parliament;
+and the great man's still greater London doctor had been telegraphed to
+his bedside. It was the first time that such a thing had happened in
+Debenham, for the railway was but newly open, and we were all
+proportionately moved by the occurrence.
+
+"He's come," said the landlord, after he had filled and lighted his
+pipe.
+
+"He?" said I. "Who?--not the doctor?"
+
+"Himself," replied our host.
+
+"What is his name?"
+
+"Doctor Macfarlane," said the landlord.
+
+Fettes was far through his third tumbler, stupidly fuddled, now nodding
+over, now staring mazily around him; but at the last word he seemed to
+awaken, and repeated the name "Macfarlane" twice, quietly enough the
+first time, but with sudden emotion at the second.
+
+"Yes," said the landlord, "that's his name, Doctor Wolfe Macfarlane."
+
+Fettes became instantly sober; his eyes awoke, his voice became clear,
+loud, and steady, his language forcible and earnest. We were all
+startled by the transformation, as if a man had risen from the dead.
+
+"I beg your pardon," he said, "I am afraid I have not been paying much
+attention to your talk. Who is this Wolfe Macfarlane?" And then, when he
+had heard the landlord out, "It cannot be, it cannot be," he added; "and
+yet I would like well to see him face to face."
+
+"Do you know him, Doctor?" asked the undertaker, with a gasp.
+
+"God forbid!" was the reply. "And yet the name is a strange one; it were
+too much to fancy two. Tell me, landlord, is he old?"
+
+"Well," said the host, "he's not a young man, to be sure, and his hair
+is white; but he looks younger than you."
+
+"He is older, though; years older. But," with a slap upon the table,
+"it's the rum you see in my face--rum and sin. This man, perhaps, may
+have an easy conscience and a good digestion. Conscience! Hear me
+speak. You would think I was some good, old, decent Christian, would
+you not? But no, not I; I never canted. Voltaire might have canted if
+he'd stood in my shoes; but the brains"--with a rattling fillip on his
+bald head--"the brains were clear and active, and I saw and made no
+deductions."
+
+"If you know this doctor," I ventured to remark, after a somewhat awful
+pause, "I should gather that you do not share the landlord's good
+opinion."
+
+Fettes paid no regard to me.
+
+"Yes," he said, with sudden decision, "I must see him face to face."
+
+There was another pause, and then a door was closed rather sharply on
+the first floor, and a step was heard upon the stair.
+
+"That's the doctor," cried the landlord. "Look sharp, and you can catch
+him."
+
+It was but two steps from the small parlour to the door of the old
+George Inn; the wide oak staircase landed almost in the street; there
+was room for a Turkey rug and nothing more between the threshold and the
+last round of the descent; but this little space was every evening
+brilliantly lit up, not only by the light upon the stair and the great
+signal lamp below the sign, but by the warm radiance of the bar-room
+window. The George thus brightly advertised itself to passers-by in the
+cold street. Fettes walked steadily to the spot, and we, who were
+hanging behind, beheld the two men meet, as one of them had phrased it,
+face to face. Dr. Macfarlane was alert and vigorous. His white hair set
+off his pale and placid, although energetic, countenance. He was richly
+dressed in the finest of broadcloth and the whitest of linen, with a
+great gold watch-chain, and studs and spectacles of the same precious
+material. He wore a broad-folded tie, white and speckled with lilac, and
+he carried on his arm a comfortable driving-coat of fur. There was no
+doubt but he became his years, breathing, as he did, of wealth and
+consideration; and it was a surprising contrast to see our parlour
+sot--bald, dirty, pimpled, and robed in his old camlet cloak--confront
+him at the bottom of the stairs.
+
+"Macfarlane!" he said somewhat loudly, more like a herald than a friend.
+
+The great doctor pulled up short on the fourth step, as though the
+familiarity of the address surprised and somewhat shocked his dignity.
+
+"Toddy Macfarlane!" repeated Fettes.
+
+The London man almost staggered. He stared for the swiftest of seconds
+at the man before him, glanced behind him with a sort of scare, and then
+in a startled whisper, "Fettes!" he said, "you!"
+
+"Ay," said the other, "me! Did you think I was dead too? We are not so
+easy shut of our acquaintance."
+
+"Hush, hush!" exclaimed the doctor. "Hush, hush! this meeting is so
+unexpected--I can see you are unmanned. I hardly knew you, I confess, at
+first; but I am overjoyed--overjoyed to have this opportunity. For the
+present it must be how-d'ye-do and good-bye in one, for my fly is
+waiting, and I must not fail the train; but you shall--let me
+see--yes--you shall give me your address, and you can count on early
+news of me. We must do something for you, Fettes. I fear you are out at
+elbows; but we must see to that for auld lang syne, as once we sang at
+suppers."
+
+"Money!" cried Fettes; "money from you! The money that I had from you is
+lying where I cast it in the rain."
+
+Dr. Macfarlane had talked himself into some measure of superiority and
+confidence, but the uncommon energy of this refusal cast him back into
+his first confusion.
+
+A horrible, ugly look came and went across his almost venerable
+countenance. "My dear fellow," he said, "be it as you please; my last
+thought is to offend you. I would intrude on none. I will leave you my
+address, however--"
+
+"I do not wish it--I do not wish to know the roof that shelters you,"
+interrupted the other. "I heard your name; I feared it might be you; I
+wished to know if, after all, there were a God; I know now that there is
+none. Begone!"
+
+He still stood in the middle of the rug, between the stair and doorway;
+and the great London physician, in order to escape, would be forced to
+step to one side. It was plain that he hesitated before the thought of
+this humiliation. White as he was, there was a dangerous glitter in his
+spectacles; but while he still paused uncertain, he became aware that
+the driver of his fly was peering in from the street at this unusual
+scene and caught a glimpse at the same time of our little body from the
+parlour, huddled by the corner of the bar. The presence of so many
+witnesses decided him at once to flee. He crouched together, brushing on
+the wainscot, and made a dart like a serpent, striking for the door. But
+his tribulation was not entirely at an end, for even as he was passing
+Fettes clutched him by the arm and these words came in a whisper, and
+yet painfully distinct, "Have you seen it again?"
+
+The great rich London doctor cried out aloud with a sharp, throttling
+cry; he dashed his questioner across the open space, and, with his hands
+over his head, fled out of the door like a detected thief. Before it had
+occurred to one of us to make a movement the fly was already rattling
+toward the station. The scene was over like a dream, but the dream had
+left proofs and traces of its passage. Next day the servant found the
+fine gold spectacles broken on the threshold, and that very night we
+were all standing breathless by the bar-room window, and Fettes at our
+side, sober, pale, and resolute in look.
+
+"God protect us, Mr. Fettes!" said the landlord, coming first into
+possession of his customary senses. "What in the universe is all this?
+These are strange things you have been saying."
+
+Fettes turned toward us; he looked us each in succession in the face.
+"See if you can hold your tongues," said he. "That man Macfarlane is
+not safe to cross; those that have done so already have repented it too
+late."
+
+And then, without so much as finishing his third glass, far less waiting
+for the other two, he bade us good-bye and went forth, under the lamp of
+the hotel, into the black night.
+
+We three turned to our places in the parlour, with the big red fire and
+four clear candles; and as we recapitulated what had passed, the first
+chill of our surprise soon changed into a glow of curiosity. We sat
+late; it was the latest session I have known in the old George. Each
+man, before we parted, had his theory that he was bound to prove; and
+none of us had any nearer business in this world than to track out the
+past of our condemned companion, and surprise the secret that he shared
+with the great London doctor. It is no great boast, but I believe I was
+a better hand at worming out a story than either of my fellows at the
+George; and perhaps there is now no other man alive who could narrate to
+you the following foul and unnatural events.
+
+In his young days Fettes studied medicine in the schools of Edinburgh.
+He had talent of a kind, the talent that picks up swiftly what it hears
+and readily retails it for its own. He worked little at home; but he was
+civil, attentive, and intelligent in the presence of his masters. They
+soon picked him out as a lad who listened closely and remembered well;
+nay, strange as it seemed to me when I first heard it, he was in those
+days well favoured, and pleased by his exterior. There was, at that
+period, a certain extramural teacher of anatomy, whom I shall here
+designate by the letter K. His name was subsequently too well known. The
+man who bore it skulked through the streets of Edinburgh in disguise,
+while the mob that applauded at the execution of Burke called loudly for
+the blood of his employer. But Mr. K---- was then at the top of his
+vogue; he enjoyed a popularity due partly to his own talent and address,
+partly to the incapacity of his rival, the university professor. The
+students, at least, swore by his name, and Fettes believed himself, and
+was believed by others, to have laid the foundations of success when he
+acquired the favour of this meteorically famous man. Mr. K---- was a
+_bon vivant_ as well as an accomplished teacher; he liked a sly illusion
+no less than a careful preparation. In both capacities Fettes enjoyed
+and deserved his notice, and by the second year of his attendance he
+held the half-regular position of second demonstrator, or sub-assistant
+in his class.
+
+In this capacity the charge of the theatre and lecture-room devolved in
+particular upon his shoulders. He had to answer for the cleanliness of
+the premises and the conduct of the other students, and it was a part of
+his duty to supply, receive, and divide the various subjects. It was
+with a view to this last--at that time very delicate--affair that he was
+lodged by Mr. K---- in the same wynd, and at last in the same building,
+with the dissecting-rooms. Here, after a night of turbulent pleasures,
+his hand still tottering, his sight still misty and confused, he would
+be called out of bed in the black hours before the winter dawn by the
+unclean and desperate interlopers who supplied the table. He would open
+the door to these men, since infamous throughout the land. He would help
+them with their tragic burden, pay them their sordid price, and remain
+alone, when they were gone, with the unfriendly relics of humanity. From
+such a scene he would return to snatch another hour or two of slumber,
+to repair the abuses of the night, and refresh himself for the labours
+of the day.
+
+Few lads could have been more insensible to the impressions of a life
+thus passed among the ensigns of mortality. His mind was closed against
+all general considerations. He was incapable of interest in the fate and
+fortunes of another, the slave of his own desires and low ambitions.
+Cold, light, and selfish in the last resort, he had that modicum of
+prudence, miscalled morality, which keeps a man from inconvenient
+drunkenness or punishable theft. He coveted, besides, a measure of
+consideration from his masters and his fellow-pupils, and he had no
+desire to fail conspicuously in the external parts of life. Thus he made
+it his pleasure to gain some distinction in his studies, and day after
+day rendered unimpeachable eye-service to his employer, Mr. K----. For
+his day of work he indemnified himself by nights of roaring,
+blackguardly enjoyment; and when that balance had been struck, the organ
+that he called his conscience declared itself content.
+
+The supply of subjects was a continual trouble to him as well as to his
+master. In that large and busy class, the raw material of the anatomist
+kept perpetually running out; and the business thus rendered necessary
+was not only unpleasant in itself, but threatened dangerous consequences
+to all who were concerned. It was the policy of Mr. K---- to ask no
+questions in his dealings with the trade. "They bring the body, and we
+pay the price," he used to say, dwelling on the alliteration--"_quid pro
+quo_." And, again, and somewhat profanely, "Ask no questions," he would
+tell his assistants, "for conscience' sake." There was no understanding
+that the subjects were provided by the crime of murder. Had that idea
+been broached to him in words, he would have recoiled in horror; but the
+lightness of his speech upon so grave a matter was, in itself, an
+offence against good manners, and a temptation to the men with whom he
+dealt. Fettes, for instance, had often remarked to himself upon the
+singular freshness of the bodies. He had been struck again and again by
+the hangdog, abominable looks of the ruffians who came to him before the
+dawn; and putting things together clearly in his private thoughts, he
+perhaps attributed a meaning too immoral and too categorical to the
+unguarded counsels of his master. He understood his duty, in short, to
+have three branches: to take what was brought, to pay the price, and to
+avert the eye from any evidence of crime.
+
+One November morning this policy of silence was put sharply to the test.
+He had been awake all night with a racking toothache--pacing his room
+like a caged beast or throwing himself in fury on his bed--and had
+fallen at last into that profound, uneasy slumber that so often follows
+on a night of pain, when he was awakened by the third or fourth angry
+repetition of the concerted signal. There was a thin, bright moonshine;
+it was bitter cold, windy, and frosty; the town had not yet awakened,
+but an indefinable stir already preluded the noise and business of the
+day. The ghouls had come later than usual, and they seemed more than
+usually eager to be gone. Fettes, sick with sleep, lighted them
+upstairs. He heard their grumbling Irish voices through a dream; and as
+they stripped the sack from their sad merchandise he leaned dozing, with
+his shoulder propped against the wall; he had to shake himself to find
+the men their money. As he did so his eyes lighted on the dead face. He
+started; he took two steps nearer, with the candle raised.
+
+"God Almighty!" he cried. "That is Jane Galbraith!"
+
+The men answered nothing, but they shuffled nearer the door.
+
+"I know her, I tell you," he continued. "She was alive and hearty
+yesterday. It's impossible she can be dead; it's impossible you should
+have got this body fairly."
+
+"Sure, sir, you're mistaken entirely," said one of the men.
+
+But the other looked Fettes darkly in the eyes, and demanded the money
+on the spot.
+
+It was impossible to misconceive the threat or to exaggerate the danger.
+The lad's heart failed him. He stammered some excuses, counted out the
+sum, and saw his hateful visitors depart. No sooner were they gone than
+he hastened to confirm his doubts. By a dozen unquestionable marks he
+identified the girl he had jested with the day before. He saw, with
+horror, marks upon her body that might well betoken violence. A panic
+seized him, and he took refuge in his room. There he reflected at
+length over the discovery that he had made; considered soberly the
+bearing of Mr. K----'s instructions and the danger to himself of
+interference in so serious a business, and at last, in sore perplexity,
+determined to wait for the advice of his immediate superior, the class
+assistant.
+
+This was a young doctor, Wolfe Macfarlane, a high favourite among all
+the reckless students, clever, dissipated, and unscrupulous to the last
+degree. He had travelled and studied abroad. His manners were agreeable
+and a little forward. He was an authority on the stage, skilful on the
+ice or the links with skate or golf-club; he dressed with nice audacity,
+and, to put the finishing touch upon his glory, he kept a gig and a
+strong trotting-horse. With Fettes he was on terms of intimacy; indeed,
+their relative positions called for some community of life; and when
+subjects were scarce the pair would drive far into the country in
+Macfarlane's gig, visit and desecrate some lonely graveyard, and return
+before dawn with their booty to the door of the dissecting-room.
+
+On that particular morning Macfarlane arrived somewhat earlier than his
+wont. Fettes heard him, and met him on the stairs, told him his story,
+and showed him the cause of his alarm, Macfarlane examined the marks on
+her body.
+
+"Yes," he said, with a nod, "it looks fishy."
+
+"Well, what should I do?" asked Fettes.
+
+"Do?" repeated the other. "Do you want to do anything? Least said
+soonest mended, I should say."
+
+"Some one else might recognise her," objected Fettes. "She was as well
+known as the Castle Rock."
+
+"We'll hope not," said Macfarlane, "and if anybody does--well, you
+didn't, don't you see, and there's an end. The fact is, this has been
+going on too long. Stir up the mud, and you'll get K---- into the most
+unholy trouble; you'll be in a shocking box yourself. So will I, if you
+come to that. I should like to know how any one of us would look, or
+what the devil we should have to say for ourselves, in any Christian
+witness-box. For me, you know there's one thing certain--that,
+practically speaking, all our subjects have been murdered."
+
+"Macfarlane!" cried Fettes.
+
+"Come now!" sneered the other. "As if you hadn't suspected it yourself!"
+
+"Suspecting is one thing----"
+
+"And proof another. Yes, I know; and I'm as sorry as you are this should
+have come here," tapping the body with his cane. "The next best thing
+for me is not to recognise it; and," he added coolly, "I don't. You may,
+if you please. I don't dictate, but I think a man of the world would do
+as I do; and I may add, I fancy that is what K---- would look for at our
+hands. The question is, Why did he choose us two for his assistants? And
+I answer, Because he didn't want old wives."
+
+This was the tone of all others to affect the mind of a lad like Fettes.
+He agreed to imitate Macfarlane. The body of the unfortunate girl was
+duly dissected, and no one remarked or appeared to recognise her.
+
+One afternoon, when his day's work was over, Fettes dropped into a
+popular tavern and found Macfarlane sitting with a stranger. This was a
+small man, very pale and dark, with coal-black eyes. The cut of his
+features gave a promise of intellect and refinement which was but feebly
+realised in his manners, for he proved, upon a nearer acquaintance,
+coarse, vulgar, and stupid. He exercised, however, a very remarkable
+control over Macfarlane; issued orders like the Great Bashaw; became
+inflamed at the least discussion or delay, and commented rudely on the
+servility with which he was obeyed. This most offensive person took a
+fancy to Fettes on the spot, plied him with drinks, and honoured him
+with unusual confidences on his past career. If a tenth part of what he
+confessed were true, he was a very loathsome rogue; and the lad's
+vanity was tickled by the attention of so experienced a man.
+
+"I'm a pretty bad fellow myself," the stranger remarked, "but Macfarlane
+is the boy--Toddy Macfarlane I call him. Toddy, order your friend
+another glass." Or it might be, "Toddy, you jump up and shut the door."
+"Toddy hates me," he said again. "Oh, yes, Toddy, you do!"
+
+"Don't you call me that confounded name," growled Macfarlane.
+
+"Hear him! Did you ever see the lads play knife? He would like to do
+that all over my body," remarked the stranger.
+
+"We medicals have a better way than that," said Fettes. "When we dislike
+a dead friend of ours, we dissect him."
+
+Macfarlane looked up sharply, as though this jest were scarcely to his
+mind.
+
+The afternoon passed. Gray, for that was the stranger's name, invited
+Fettes to join them at dinner, ordered a feast so sumptuous that the
+tavern was thrown into commotion, and when all was done commanded
+Macfarlane to settle the bill. It was late before they separated; the
+man Gray was incapably drunk. Macfarlane, sobered by his fury, chewed
+the cud of the money he had been forced to squander and the slights he
+had been obliged to swallow. Fettes, with various liquors singing in his
+head, returned home with devious footsteps and a mind entirely in
+abeyance. Next day Macfarlane was absent from the class, and Fettes
+smiled to himself as he imagined him still squiring the intolerable Gray
+from tavern to tavern. As soon as the hour of liberty had struck he
+posted from place to place in quest of his last night's companions. He
+could find them, however, nowhere; so returned early to his rooms, went
+early to bed, and slept the sleep of the just.
+
+At four in the morning he was awakened by the well-known signal.
+Descending to the door, he was filled with astonishment to find
+Macfarlane with his gig, and in the gig one of those long and ghastly
+packages with which he was so well acquainted.
+
+"What?" he cried. "Have you been out alone? How did you manage?"
+
+But Macfarlane silenced him roughly, bidding him turn to business. When
+they had got the body upstairs and laid it on the table, Macfarlane made
+at first as if he were going away. Then he paused and seemed to
+hesitate; and then, "You had better look at the face," said he, in tones
+of some constraint. "You had better," he repeated, as Fettes only stared
+at him in wonder.
+
+"But where, and how, and when did you come by it?" cried the other.
+
+"Look at the face," was the only answer.
+
+Fettes was staggered; strange doubts assailed him. He looked from the
+young doctor to the body, and then back again. At last, with a start, he
+did as he was bidden. He had almost expected the sight that met his
+eyes, and yet the shock was cruel. To see, fixed in the rigidity of
+death and naked on that coarse layer of sackcloth, the man whom he had
+left well clad and full of meat and sin upon the threshold of a tavern,
+awoke, even in the thoughtless Fettes, some of the terrors of the
+conscience. It was a _cras tibi_ which re-echoed in his soul, that two
+whom he had known should have come to lie upon these icy tables. Yet
+these were only secondary thoughts. His first concern regarded Wolfe.
+Unprepared for a challenge so momentous, he knew not how to look his
+comrade in the face. He durst not meet his eye, and he had neither words
+nor voice at his command.
+
+It was Macfarlane himself who made the first advance. He came up quietly
+behind and laid his hand gently but firmly on the other's shoulder.
+
+"Richardson," said he, "may have the head."
+
+Now Richardson was a student who had long been anxious for that portion
+of the human subject to dissect. There was no answer, and the murderer
+resumed: "Talking of business, you must pay me; your accounts, you see,
+must tally."
+
+Fettes found a voice, the ghost of his own: "Pay you!" he cried. "Pay
+you for that?"
+
+"Why, yes, of course you must. By all means and on every possible
+account, you must," returned the other. "I dare not give it for nothing,
+you dare not take it for nothing; it would compromise us both. This is
+another case like Jane Galbraith's. The more things are wrong the more
+we must act as if all were right. Where does old K---- keep his money?"
+
+"There," answered Fettes hoarsely, pointing to a cupboard in the corner.
+
+"Give me the key, then," said the other calmly, holding out his hand.
+
+There was an instant's hesitation, and the die was cast. Macfarlane
+could not suppress a nervous twitch, the infinitesimal mark of an
+immense relief, as he felt the key between his fingers. He opened the
+cupboard, brought out pen and ink and a paper-book that stood in one
+compartment, and separated from the funds in a drawer a sum suitable to
+the occasion.
+
+"Now, look here," he said, "there is the payment made--first proof of
+your good faith: first step to your security. You have now to clinch it
+by a second. Enter the payment in your book, and then you for your part
+may defy the devil."
+
+The next few seconds were for Fettes an agony of thought; but in
+balancing his terrors it was the most immediate that triumphed. Any
+future difficulty seemed almost welcome if he could avoid a present
+quarrel with Macfarlane. He set down the candle which he had been
+carrying all this time, and with a steady hand entered the date, the
+nature, and the amount of the transaction.
+
+"And now," said Macfarlane, "it's only fair that you should pocket the
+lucre. I've had my share already. By-the-bye, when a man of the world
+falls into a bit of luck, has a few shillings extra in his pocket--I'm
+ashamed to speak of it, but there's a rule of conduct in the case. No
+treating, no purchase of expensive class-books, no squaring of old
+debts; borrow, don't lend."
+
+"Macfarlane," began Fettes, still somewhat hoarsely, "I have put my neck
+in a halter to oblige you."
+
+"To oblige me?" cried Wolfe. "Oh, come! You did, as near as I can see
+the matter, what you downright had to do in self-defence. Suppose I got
+into trouble, where would you be? This second little matter flows
+clearly from the first. Mr. Gray is the continuation of Miss Galbraith.
+You can't begin and then stop. If you begin, you must keep on beginning;
+that's the truth. No rest for the wicked."
+
+A horrible sense of blackness and the treachery of fate seized hold upon
+the soul of the unhappy student.
+
+"My God!" he cried, "but what have I done? and when did I begin? To be
+made a class assistant--in the name of reason, where's the harm in that?
+Service wanted the position; Service might have got it. Would _he_ have
+been where _I_ am now!"
+
+"My dear fellow," said Macfarlane, "what a boy you are! What harm _has_
+come to you? What harm _can_ come to you if you hold your tongue? Why,
+man, do you know what this life is? There are two squads of us--the
+lions and the lambs. If you're a lamb, you'll come to lie upon these
+tables like Gray or Jane Galbraith; if you're a lion, you'll live and
+drive a horse like me, like K----, like all the world with any wit or
+courage. You're staggered at the first. But look at K----! My dear
+fellow, you're clever, you have pluck. I like you, and K---- likes you.
+You were born to lead the hunt; and I tell you, on my honour and my
+experience of life, three days from now you'll laugh at all these
+scarecrows like a High School boy at a farce."
+
+And with that Macfarlane took his departure and drove off up the wynd
+in his gig to get under cover before daylight. Fettes was thus left
+alone with his regrets. He saw the miserable peril in which he stood
+involved. He saw, with inexpressible dismay, that there was no limit to
+his weakness, and that, from concession to concession, he had fallen
+from the arbiter of Macfarlane's destiny to his paid and helpless
+accomplice. He would have given the world to have been a little braver
+at the time, but it did not occur to him that he might still be brave.
+The secret of Jane Galbraith and the cursed entry in the day-book closed
+his mouth.
+
+Hours passed; the class began to arrive; the members of the unhappy Gray
+were dealt out to one and to another, and received without remark.
+Richardson was made happy with the head; and before the hour of freedom
+rang Fettes trembled with exultation to perceive how far they had
+already gone toward safety.
+
+For two days he continued to watch, with increasing joy, the dreadful
+process of disguise.
+
+On the third day Macfarlane made his appearance. He had been ill, he
+said; but he made up for lost time by the energy with which he directed
+the students. To Richardson in particular he extended the most valuable
+assistance and advice, and that student, encouraged by the praise of the
+demonstrator, burned high with ambitious hopes, and saw the medal
+already in his grasp.
+
+Before the week was out Macfarlane's prophecy had been fulfilled. Fettes
+had outlived his terrors and had forgotten his baseness. He began to
+plume himself upon his courage, and had so arranged the story in his
+mind that he could look back on these events with an unhealthy pride. Of
+his accomplice he saw but little. They met, of course, in the business
+of the class; they received their orders together from Mr. K----. At
+times they had a word or two in private, and Macfarlane was from first
+to last particularly kind and jovial. But it was plain that he avoided
+any reference to their common secret; and even when Fettes whispered to
+him that he had cast in his lot with the lions and forsworn the lambs,
+he only signed to him smilingly to hold his peace.
+
+At length an occasion arose which threw the pair once more into a closer
+union. Mr. K---- was again short of subjects; pupils were eager, and it
+was a part of this teacher's pretensions to be always well supplied. At
+the same time there came the news of a burial in the rustic graveyard of
+Glencorse. Time has little changed the place in question. It stood then,
+as now, upon a cross road, out of call of human habitations, and buried
+fathom deep in the foliage of six cedar trees. The cries of the sheep
+upon the neighbouring hills, the streamlets upon either hand, one loudly
+singing among pebbles, the other dripping furtively from pond to pond,
+the stir of the wind in mountainous old flowering chestnuts, and once in
+seven days the voice of the bell and the old tunes of the precentor,
+were the only sounds that disturbed the silence around the rural church.
+The Resurrection Man--to use a by-name of the period--was not to be
+deterred by any of the sanctities of customary piety. It was part of his
+trade to despise and desecrate the scrolls and trumpets of old tombs,
+the paths worn by the feet of worshippers and mourners, and the
+offerings and the inscriptions of bereaved affection. To rustic
+neighbourhoods, where love is more than commonly tenacious, and where
+some bonds of blood or fellowship unite the entire society of a parish,
+the body-snatcher, far from being repelled by natural respect, was
+attracted by the ease and safety of the task. To bodies that had been
+laid in earth, in joyful expectation of a far different awakening, there
+came that hasty, lamp-lit, terror-haunted resurrection of the spade and
+mattock. The coffin was forced, the cerements torn, and the melancholy
+relics, clad in sackcloth, after being rattled for hours on moonless
+byways, were at length exposed to uttermost indignities before a class
+of gaping boys.
+
+Somewhat as two vultures may swoop upon a dying lamb, Fettes and
+Macfarlane were to be let loose upon a grave in that green and quiet
+resting-place. The wife of a farmer, a woman who had lived for sixty
+years, and been known for nothing but good butter and a godly
+conversation, was to be rooted from her grave at midnight and carried,
+dead and naked, to that far-away city that she had always honoured with
+her Sunday's best; the place beside her family was to be empty till the
+crack of doom; her innocent and almost venerable members to be exposed
+to that last curiosity of the anatomist.
+
+Late one afternoon the pair set forth, well wrapped in cloaks and
+furnished with a formidable bottle. It rained without remission--a cold,
+dense, lashing rain. Now and again there blew a puff of wind, but these
+sheets of falling water kept it down. Bottle and all, it was a sad and
+silent drive as far as Penicuik, where they were to spend the evening.
+They stopped once, to hide their implements in a thick bush not far from
+the churchyard, and once again at the Fisher's Tryst, to have a toast
+before the kitchen fire and vary their nips of whisky with a glass of
+ale. When they reached their journey's end the gig was housed, the horse
+was fed and comforted, and the two young doctors in a private room sat
+down to the best dinner and the best wine the house afforded. The
+lights, the fire, the beating rain upon the window, the cold,
+incongruous work that lay before them, added zest to their enjoyment of
+the meal. With every glass their cordiality increased. Soon Macfarlane
+handed a little pile of gold to his companion.
+
+"A compliment," he said. "Between friends these little d----d
+accommodations ought to fly like pipe-lights."
+
+Fettes pocketed the money, and applauded the sentiment to the echo. "You
+are a philosopher," he cried. "I was an ass till I knew you. You and
+K---- between you, by the Lord Harry! but you'll make a man of me."
+
+"Of course we shall," applauded Macfarlane. "A man? I tell you, it
+required a man to back me up the other morning. There are some big,
+brawling, forty-year-old cowards who would have turned sick at the look
+of the d----d thing; but not you--you kept your head. I watched you."
+
+"Well, and why not?" Fettes thus vaunted himself. "It was no affair of
+mine. There was nothing to gain on the one side but disturbance, and on
+the other I could count on your gratitude, don't you see?" And he
+slapped his pocket till the gold pieces rang.
+
+Macfarlane somehow felt a certain touch of alarm at these unpleasant
+words. He may have regretted that he had taught his young companion so
+successfully, but he had no time to interfere, for the other noisily
+continued in this boastful strain:--
+
+"The great thing is not to be afraid. Now, between you and me, I don't
+want to hang--that's practical; but for all cant, Macfarlane, I was born
+with a contempt. Hell, God, Devil, right, wrong, sin, crime, and all the
+old gallery of curiosities--they may frighten boys, but men of the
+world, like you and me, despise them. Here's to the memory of Gray!"
+
+It was by this time growing somewhat late. The gig, according to order,
+was brought round to the door with both lamps brightly shining, and the
+young men had to pay their bill and take the road. They announced that
+they were bound for Peebles, and drove in that direction till they were
+clear of the last houses of the town; then, extinguishing the lamps,
+returned upon their course, and followed a by-road toward Glencorse.
+There was no sound but that of their own passage, and the incessant,
+strident pouring of the rain. It was pitch dark; here and there a white
+gate or a white stone in the wall guided them for a short space across
+the night; but for the most part it was at a foot pace, and almost
+groping, that they picked their way through that resonant blackness to
+their solemn and isolated destination. In the sunken woods that traverse
+the neighbourhood of the burying-ground the last glimmer failed them,
+and it became necessary to kindle a match and re-illumine one of the
+lanterns of the gig. Thus, under the dripping trees, and environed by
+huge and moving shadows, they reached the scene of their unhallowed
+labours.
+
+They were both experienced in such affairs, and powerful with the spade;
+and they had scarce been twenty minutes at their task before they were
+rewarded by a dull rattle on the coffin lid. At the same moment,
+Macfarlane, having hurt his hand upon a stone, flung it carelessly above
+his head. The grave, in which they now stood almost to the shoulders,
+was close to the edge of the plateau of the graveyard; and the gig lamp
+had been propped, the better to illuminate their labours, against a
+tree, and on the immediate verge of the steep bank descending to the
+stream. Chance had taken a sure aim with the stone. Then came a clang of
+broken glass; night fell upon them; sounds alternately dull and ringing
+announced the bounding of the lantern down the bank, and its occasional
+collision with the trees. A stone or two, which it had dislodged in its
+descent, rattled behind it into the profundities of the glen; and then
+silence, like night, resumed its sway; and they might bend their hearing
+to its utmost pitch, but naught was to be heard except the rain, now
+marching to the wind, now steadily falling over miles of open country.
+
+They were so nearly at an end of their abhorred task that they judged it
+wisest to complete it in the dark. The coffin was exhumed and broken
+open; the body inserted in the dripping sack and carried between them to
+the gig; one mounted to keep it in its place, and the other, taking the
+horse by the mouth, groped along by wall and bush until they reached the
+wider road by the Fisher's Tryst. Here was a faint, diffused radiancy,
+which they hailed like daylight; by that they pushed the horse to a good
+pace and began to rattle along merrily in the direction of the town.
+
+They had both been wetted to the skin during their operations, and now,
+as the gig jumped among the deep ruts, the thing that stood propped
+between them fell now upon one and now upon the other. At every
+repetition of the horrid contact each instinctively repelled it with the
+greater haste; and the process, natural although it was, began to tell
+upon the nerves of the companions. Macfarlane made some ill-favoured
+jest about the farmer's wife, but it came hollowly from his lips, and
+was allowed to drop in silence. Still their unnatural burden bumped from
+side to side; and now the head would be laid, as if in confidence, upon
+their shoulders, and now the drenching sackcloth would flap icily about
+their faces. A creeping chill began to possess the soul of Fettes. He
+peered at the bundle, and it seemed somehow larger than at first. All
+over the country-side, and from every degree of distance, the farm dogs
+accompanied their passage with tragic ululations; and it grew and grew
+upon his mind that some unnatural miracle had been accomplished, that
+some nameless change had befallen the dead body, and that it was in fear
+of their unholy burden that the dogs were howling.
+
+"For God's sake," said he, making a great effort to arrive at speech,
+"for God's sake, let's have a light!"
+
+Seemingly Macfarlane was affected in the same direction; for, though he
+made no reply, he stopped the horse, passed the reins to his companion,
+got down, and proceeded to kindle the remaining lamp. They had by that
+time got no farther than the cross-road down to Auchenclinny. The rain
+still poured as though the deluge were returning, and it was no easy
+matter to make a light in such a world of wet and darkness. When at last
+the flickering blue flame had been transferred to the wick and began to
+expand and clarify, and shed a wide circle of misty brightness round the
+gig, it became possible for the two young men to see each other and the
+thing they had along with them. The rain had moulded the rough sacking
+to the outlines of the body underneath; the head was distinct from the
+trunk, the shoulders plainly modelled; something at once spectral and
+human riveted their eyes upon the ghastly comrade of their drive.
+
+For some time Macfarlane stood motionless, holding up the lamp. A
+nameless dread was swathed, like a wet sheet, about the body, and
+tightened the white skin upon the face of Fettes; a fear that was
+meaningless, a horror of what could not be, kept mounting to his brain.
+Another beat of the watch, and he had spoken. But his comrade
+forestalled him.
+
+"That is not a woman," said Macfarlane, in a hushed voice.
+
+"It was a woman when we put her in," whispered Fettes.
+
+"Hold that lamp," said the other. "I must see her face."
+
+And as Fettes took the lamp his companion untied the fastenings of the
+sack and drew down the cover from the head. The light fell very clear
+upon the dark, well-moulded features and smooth-shaven cheeks of a too
+familiar countenance, often beheld in dreams of both of these young men.
+A wild yell rang up into the night; each leaped from his own side into
+the roadway: the lamp fell, broke, and was extinguished; and the horse,
+terrified by this unusual commotion, bounded and went oft toward
+Edinburgh at a gallop, bearing along with it, sole occupant of the gig,
+the body of the dead and long-dissected Gray.
+
+
+
+
+END OF VOL. III
+
+
+PRINTED BY CASSELL AND COMPANY, LIMITED, LA BELLE SAUVAGE, LONDON, E.C.
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