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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Views and Reviews, by Henry James
+
+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: Views and Reviews
+
+Author: Henry James
+
+Contributor: Le Roy Phillips
+
+Release Date: September 14, 2011 [EBook #37424]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VIEWS AND REVIEWS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was
+produced from scanned images of public domain material
+from the Google Print project.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+VIEWS AND REVIEWS
+
+
+
+
+VIEWS
+AND REVIEWS
+
+BY
+HENRY JAMES
+
+NOW FIRST COLLECTED
+
+INTRODUCTION BY
+LE ROY PHILLIPS
+
+COMPILER OF
+"A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE WRITINGS
+OF HENRY JAMES"
+
+BOSTON
+THE BALL PUBLISHING COMPANY
+1908
+
+_Copyright, 1908_
+BY THE BALL PUBLISHING CO.
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+_Those whose palates are accustomed to the subtle flavours of the wines
+of the Rhine and Moselle can smack their lips and name the vintage at
+the first taste. Likewise any one fairly familiar with the work of Mr.
+James during his forty years of literary activity can, after the reading
+of a single page taken at random, judge with a remarkable accuracy the
+date of its composition. Yet the transition has not been abrupt and the
+styles of writing which the author has adopted, early, middle and late,
+have blended in such a way that he has been bringing many of his earlier
+readers, though some have fallen by the wayside, along with him to a
+genuine appreciation of his present work._
+
+_It is not unnatural but disappointing that those of the present
+generation who chance to meet Mr. James in one of the later novels are
+not as likely to seek a second volume as those who read_ Daisy Miller
+_some thirty years ago when that study first appeared, so fresh in its
+note of charm and pathos, in the now almost unfindable brown wrappers
+of Harper's Half Hour Series, for they may forever miss a rare
+enjoyment._
+
+_In the critical papers which make up the contents of this book, the
+characteristics of the author's later style are wholly absent. Without
+the date of the original appearance of these essays in periodical form
+being indicated, the chronological setting of this work is apparent. No
+sentences with marvelously intricate complications of construction and
+with expressions involved are in the author's method at this time, while
+for clearness and charm these views and reviews are admirable specimens,
+showing qualities which brought Mr. James his early readers and first
+made his name an essential feature of the announcements of publishers of
+the more discriminating periodicals forty years ago._
+
+_The earliest authenticated magazine article by Mr. James--printed when
+he was twenty-one--is a critical notice of Nassau W. Senior's_ Essays on
+Fiction _in_ The North American Review _for October, 1864. From this
+time until the appearance of his first volume_--A Passionate Pilgrim and
+Other Tales, _Boston: 1875--as many as one hundred and twenty-five
+serious literary notices contributed to periodicals can be traced to
+him_.
+
+_During this period it must also be remembered that Mr. James was
+equally employed in writing short stories, art criticism and notes of
+travel, both at home and abroad, and that these were also distinctive
+features of the widely scattered journals in which they appeared._
+
+_In_ The North American Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The Galaxy,
+Lippincott's Magazine, The New York Tribune, The Independent _and some
+other periodicals, the authorship of such work was attributed to Mr.
+James on the publication of the articles or in regularly issued
+indexes._
+
+_The articles in_ The Nation _are seldom signed, and there is no
+published index showing the contributors to its files. In preparing a
+recent[*] Bibliography of the writings of Henry James I had access to a
+record which the late Wendell Phillips Garrison, who was Mr. Godkin's
+associate from the founding of the paper and after 1881 editor in charge
+until June 28, 1906, had carefully kept of every author's work which his
+paper had published since its first issue. The amount of matter which
+Mr. James had provided, and the variety of interests concerning which he
+wrote, made an amazing array of notes. It is from the early issues of_
+The Nation _that much of the contents of this volume is reprinted. Of
+Mr. James's contributions to periodicals those to this paper were
+perhaps the most notable as well as the most frequent. He was
+represented in its first number--July 6, 1865--by some critical notes on
+Henry W. Kingsley's novel_, "The Hillyars and the Bartons: A Story of
+Two Families," _under the title_, "The Noble School of Fiction," _and
+the name "Henry James" appears in the publisher's announced list of
+contributors to the early volumes. Many of these papers which first
+appeared in_ The Nation _have been reprinted, but few readers at this
+distance can realize how much the esteem in which that journal was
+immediately held under the editorial supervision of Mr. Godkin was due
+to perhaps its youngest regular contributor._
+
+    [*] _A Bibliography of the Writings of Henry James. Boston and
+         New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1906_.
+
+_Volumes of the collected critical papers have already
+appeared_,--French Poets and Novelists, London: _1878, and_ Partial
+Portraits, _London: 1888, are the more notable,--but by far the greater
+part of these contemporary Essays on the literature of the late sixties
+and the seventies are now almost lost in the files of old or extinct
+periodicals._
+
+_We are accustomed these later years to think of Mr. James as novelist
+rather than literary essayist and he has been cited by a recent writer
+as an author of fiction who becomes a critic on occasion and, he also
+adds, that his analytical system of novel writing excellently fits him
+for the office of critic; but, on the contrary, the papers in this
+volume seem to show that his early self-training as a critic has been
+the preparation for the creation of his characters in fiction._
+
+_The true lover of Mr. James's work feels the same delightful sense of
+intimate discovery in touching these early papers that an artist does in
+finding a portfolio of early sketches by a beloved master whose
+developed power and strength is known to him. There is the recognition
+of the characteristic touch even here--the insight, the thought within a
+thought, (more lately the despair of privileged psychologic athletes),
+the mystery of seeing--not what is apparent to the outward eye but what
+we fancied we concealed successfully within our inmost selves. There is
+the extraordinary sense of his having put on paper what we really
+thought--what we now think--that gives us more faith than ever in our
+artist who is expression for us who feel, but who are yet dumb._
+
+_LE ROY PHILLIPS._
+
+_Boston, April 10, 1908._
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                     PAGE
+
+    THE NOVELS OF GEORGE ELIOT                          1
+
+    ON A DRAMA OF ROBERT BROWNING                      41
+
+    SWINBURNE'S ESSAYS                                 51
+
+    THE POETRY OF WILLIAM MORRIS
+      I. THE LIFE AND DEATH OF JASON                   63
+      II. THE EARTHLY PARADISE                         71
+
+    MATTHEW ARNOLD'S ESSAYS                            83
+
+    MR. WALT WHITMAN                                  101
+
+    THE POETRY OF GEORGE ELIOT
+      I. THE SPANISH GYPSY                            113
+      II. THE LEGEND OF JUBAL                         138
+
+    THE LIMITATIONS OF DICKENS                        153
+
+    TENNYSON'S DRAMA
+      I. QUEEN MARY                                   165
+      II. HAROLD                                      196
+
+    CONTEMPORARY NOTES ON WHISTLER VS. RUSKIN
+      I. THE SUIT FOR LIBEL                           207
+      II. MR. WHISTLER'S REJOINDER                    211
+
+    A NOTE ON JOHN BURROUGHS                          217
+
+    MR. KIPLING'S EARLY STORIES                       225
+
+
+
+
+THE NOVELS OF GEORGE ELIOT
+
+
+     Originally published in _The Atlantic Monthly_, October, 1866.
+
+     This essay was written in 1866 before _Middlemarch_ or _Daniel
+     Deronda_ had appeared. The former work was published in 1871-72 and
+     the latter book in 1876. It was afterwards discussed at length by
+     Mr. James in "Daniel Deronda: a Conversation," originally
+     contributed to the _Atlantic Monthly_, December, 1876, and
+     reprinted in 1888 in _Partial Portraits_.
+
+
+
+
+VIEWS AND REVIEWS
+
+
+
+
+THE NOVELS OF GEORGE ELIOT
+
+
+The critic's first duty in the presence of an
+author's collective works is to seek out some
+key to his method, some utterance of his literary
+convictions, some indication of his ruling theory.
+The amount of labour involved in an inquiry of
+this kind will depend very much upon the author.
+In some cases the critic will find express declarations;
+in other cases he will have to content himself
+with conscientious inductions. In a writer so fond
+of digressions as George Eliot, he has reason to
+expect that broad evidences of artistic faith will
+not be wanting. He finds in _Adam Bede_ the following
+passage:--
+
+"Paint us an angel if you can, with a floating
+violet robe and a face paled by the celestial light;
+paint us yet oftener a Madonna, turning her mild
+face upward, and opening her arms to welcome the
+divine glory; but do not impose on us any æsthetic
+rules which shall banish from the region of art
+those old women scraping carrots with their work-worn
+hands,--those heavy clowns taking holiday
+in a dingy pot-house,--those rounded backs and
+stupid weather-beaten faces that have bent over the
+spade and done the rough work of the world,--those
+homes with their tin cans, their brown
+pitchers, their rough curs, and their clusters of
+onions. In this world there are so many of these
+common, coarse people, who have no picturesque,
+sentimental wretchedness. It is so needful we
+should remember their existence, else we may happen
+to leave them quite out of our religion and philosophy,
+and frame lofty theories which only fit
+a world of extremes....
+
+"There are few prophets in the world,--few sublimely
+beautiful women,--few heroes. I can't
+afford to give all my love and reverence to such
+rarities; I want a great deal of those feelings for
+my every-day fellowmen, especially for the few
+in the foreground of the great multitude, whose
+faces I know, whose hands I touch, for whom I
+have to make way with kindly courtesy....
+
+"I herewith discharge my conscience," our author
+continues, "and declare that I have had quite
+enthusiastic movements of admiration toward old
+gentlemen who spoke the worst English, who were
+occasionally fretful in their temper, and who had
+never moved in a higher sphere of influence than
+that of parish overseer; and that the way in which
+I have come to the conclusion that human nature
+is loveable--the way I have learnt something of
+its deep pathos, its sublime mysteries--has been
+by living a great deal among people more or less
+commonplace and vulgar, of whom you would perhaps
+hear nothing very surprising if you were to
+inquire about them in the neighbourhoods where
+they dwelt."
+
+But even in the absence of any such avowed
+predilections as these, a brief glance over the principal
+figures of her different works would assure
+us that our author's sympathies are with common
+people. Silas Marner is a linen-weaver, Adam
+Bede is a carpenter, Maggie Tulliver is a miller's
+daughter, Felix Holt is a watchmaker, Dinah Morris
+works in a factory, and Hetty Sorrel is a dairy-maid.
+Esther Lyon, indeed, is a daily governess;
+but Tito Melema alone is a scholar. In the _Scenes
+of Clerical Life_, the author is constantly slipping
+down from the clergymen, her heroes, to the most
+ignorant and obscure of their parishioners. Even
+in _Romola_ she consecrates page after page to the
+conversation of the Florentine populace. She is as
+unmistakably a painter of _bourgeois_ life as Thackeray
+was a painter of the life of drawing-rooms.
+
+Her opportunities for the study of the manners
+of the solid lower classes have evidently been very
+great. We have her word for it that she has lived
+much among the farmers, mechanics, and small
+traders of that central region of England which
+she has made known to us under the name of Loamshire.
+The conditions of the popular life in this
+district in that already distant period to which
+she refers the action of most of her stories--the
+end of the last century and the beginning of the
+present--were so different from any that have been
+seen in America, that an American, in treating
+of her books, must be satisfied not to touch upon
+the question of their accuracy and fidelity as pictures
+of manners and customs. He can only say
+that they bear strong internal evidence of truthfulness.
+
+If he is a great admirer of George Eliot, he
+will indeed be tempted to affirm that they must
+be true. They offer a completeness, a rich density
+of detail, which could be the fruit only of a long
+term of conscious contact,--such as would make
+it much more difficult for the author to fall into
+the perversion and suppression of facts, than to
+set them down literally. It is very probable that
+her colours are a little too bright, and her shadows
+of too mild a gray, that the sky of her landscapes
+is too sunny, and their atmosphere too redolent of
+peace and abundance. Local affection may be accountable
+for half of this excess of brilliancy; the
+author's native optimism is accountable for the
+other half.
+
+I do not remember, in all her novels, an instance
+of gross misery of any kind not directly
+caused by the folly of the sufferer. There are no
+pictures of vice or poverty or squalor. There are
+no rags, no gin, no brutal passions. That average
+humanity which she favours is very _borné_ in intellect,
+but very genial in heart, as a glance at
+its representatives in her pages will convince us.
+In _Adam Bede_, there is Mr. Irwine, the vicar,
+with avowedly no qualification for his profession,
+placidly playing chess with his mother, stroking his
+dogs, and dipping into Greek tragedies; there is
+the excellent Martin Poyser at the Farm, good-natured
+and rubicund; there is his wife, somewhat
+too sharply voluble, but only in behalf of cleanliness
+and honesty and order; there is Captain Donnithorne
+at the Hall, who does a poor girl a mortal
+wrong, but who is, after all, such a nice, good-looking
+fellow; there are Adam and Seth Bede, the
+carpenter's sons, the strongest, purest, most discreet
+of young rustics. The same broad felicity
+prevails in _The Mill on the Floss_. Mr. Tulliver,
+indeed, fails in business; but his failure only serves
+as an offset to the general integrity and prosperity.
+His son is obstinate and wilful; but it is
+all on the side of virtue. His daughter is somewhat
+sentimental and erratic; but she is more conscientious
+yet.
+
+Conscience, in the classes from which George
+Eliot recruits her figures, is a universal gift. Decency
+and plenty and good-humour follow contentedly
+in its train. The word which sums up
+the common traits of our author's various groups
+is the word _respectable_. Adam Bede is pre-eminently
+a respectable young man; so is Arthur Donnithorne;
+so, although he will persist in going without
+a cravat, is Felix Holt. So, with perhaps the
+exception of Maggie Tulliver and Stephen Guest,
+is every important character to be found in our
+author's writings. They all share this fundamental
+trait,--that in each of them passion proves
+itself feebler than conscience.
+
+The first work which made the name of George
+Eliot generally known, contains, to my perception,
+only a small number of the germs of her future
+power. From the _Scenes of Clerical Life_ to _Adam
+Bede_ she made not so much a step as a leap. Of
+the three tales contained in the former work, I
+think the first is much the best. It is short,
+broadly descriptive, humourous, and exceedingly
+pathetic. "The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend
+Amos Barton" are fortunes which clever story-tellers
+with a turn for pathos, from Oliver Goldsmith
+downward, have found of very good account,--the
+fortunes of a hapless clergyman of the
+Church of England in daily contention with the
+problem how upon eighty pounds a year to support
+a wife and six children in all due ecclesiastical gentility.
+
+"Mr. Gilfil's Love-Story," the second of the
+tales in question, I cannot hesitate to pronounce
+a failure. George Eliot's pictures of drawing-room
+life are only interesting when they are linked
+or related to scenes in the tavern parlour, the dairy,
+and the cottage. Mr. Gilfil's love-story is enacted
+entirely in the drawing-room, and in consequence
+it is singularly deficient in force and reality. Not
+that it is vulgar,--for our author's good taste never
+forsakes her,--but it is thin, flat, and trivial. But
+for a certain family likeness in the use of language
+and the rhythm of the style, it would be
+hard to believe that these pages are by the same
+hand as _Silas Marner_.
+
+In "Janet's Repentance," the last and longest
+of the three clerical stories, we return to middle
+life,--the life represented by the Dodsons in _The
+Mill on the Floss_. The subject of this tale might
+almost be qualified by the French epithet _scabreux_.
+It would be difficult for what is called _realism_ to
+go further than in the adoption of a heroine stained
+with the vice of intemperance. The theme is unpleasant;
+the author chose it at her peril. It must
+be added, however, that Janet Dempster has many
+provocations. Married to a brutal drunkard, she
+takes refuge in drink against his ill-usage; and
+the story deals less with her lapse into disgrace than
+with her redemption, through the kind offices of
+the Reverend Edgar Tryan,--by virtue of which,
+indeed, it takes its place in the clerical series. I
+cannot help thinking that the stern and tragical
+character of the subject has been enfeebled by the
+over-diffuseness of the narrative and the excess of
+local touches. The abundance of the author's recollections
+and observations of village life clogs the
+dramatic movement, over which she has as yet a
+comparatively slight control. In her subsequent
+works the stouter fabric of the story is better able
+to support this heavy drapery of humour and digression.
+
+To a certain extent, I think _Silas Marner_ holds
+a higher place than any of the author's works.
+It is more nearly a masterpiece; it has more of
+that simple, rounded, consummate aspect, that
+absence of loose ends and gaping issues, which
+marks a classical work. What was attempted in
+it, indeed, was within more immediate reach than
+the heart-trials of Adam Bede and Maggie Tulliver.
+A poor, dull-witted, disappointed Methodist cloth-weaver;
+a little golden-haired foundling child; a
+well-meaning, irresolute country squire, and his
+patient, childless wife;--these, with a chorus of
+simple, beer-loving villagers, make up the _dramatis
+personae_. More than any of its brother-works,
+_Silas Marner_, I think, leaves upon the mind a deep
+impression of the grossly material life of agricultural
+England in the last days of the old _régime_,--the
+days of full-orbed Toryism, of Trafalgar
+and of Waterloo, when the invasive spirit of
+French domination threw England back upon a
+sense of her own insular solidity, and made her
+for the time doubly, brutally, morbidly English.
+Perhaps the best pages in the work are the first
+thirty, telling the story of poor Marner's disappointments
+in friendship and in love, his unmerited
+disgrace, and his long, lonely twilight-life at Raveloe,
+with the sole companionship of his loom, in
+which his muscles moved "with such even repetition,
+that their pause seemed almost as much a
+constraint as the holding of his breath."
+
+Here, as in all George Eliot's books, there is
+a middle life and a low life; and here, as usual,
+I prefer the low life. In _Silas Marner_, in my opinion,
+she has come nearest the mildly rich tints of
+brown and gray, the mellow lights and the undreadful
+corner-shadows of the Dutch masters
+whom she emulates. One of the chapters contains
+a scene in a pot-house, which frequent reference
+has made famous. Never was a group of honest,
+garrulous village simpletons more kindly and humanely
+handled. After a long and somewhat
+chilling silence, amid the pipes and beer, the landlord
+opens the conversation "by saying in a doubtful
+tone to his cousin the butcher:--
+
+"'Some folks 'ud say that was a fine beast you
+druv in yesterday, Bob?'
+
+"The butcher, a jolly, smiling, red-haired man,
+was not disposed to answer rashly. He gave a
+few puffs before he spat, and replied, 'And they
+wouldn't be fur wrong, John.'
+
+"After this feeble, delusive thaw, silence set in
+as severely as before.
+
+"'Was it a red Durham?' said the farrier, taking
+up the thread of discourse after the lapse of
+a few minutes.
+
+"The farrier looked at the landlord, and the
+landlord looked at the butcher, as the person who
+must take the responsibility of answering.
+
+"'Red it was,' said the butcher, in his good-humoured
+husky treble,--'and a Durham it was.'
+
+"'Then you needn't tell me who you bought it
+of,' said the farrier, looking round with some
+triumph; 'I know who it is has got the red Durhams
+o' this country-side. And she'd a white star
+on her brow, I'll bet a penny?'
+
+"'Well; yes--she might,' said the butcher,
+slowly, considering that he was giving a decided
+affirmation. 'I don't say contrairy.'
+
+"'I knew that very well,' said the farrier, throwing
+himself back defiantly; 'if I don't know Mr.
+Lammeter's cows, I should like to know who does,--that's
+all. And as for the cow you bought, bargain
+or no bargain, I've been at the drenching of
+her,--contradick me who will.'
+
+"The farrier looked fierce, and the mild
+butcher's conversational spirit was roused a little.
+
+"'I'm not for contradicking no man,' he said;
+'I'm for peace and quietness. Some are for cutting
+long ribs. I'm for cutting 'em short myself;
+but _I_ don't quarrel with 'em. All I say is, it's a
+lovely carkiss,--and anybody as was reasonable,
+it'ud bring tears into their eyes to look at it.'
+
+"'Well, it's the cow as I drenched, whatever it
+is,' pursued the farrier, angrily; 'and it was Mr.
+Lammeter's cow, else you told a lie when you said
+it was a red Durham.'
+
+"'I tell no lies,' said the butcher, with the same
+mild huskiness as before; 'and I contradick none,--not
+if a man was to swear himself black; he's
+no meat of mine, nor none of my bargains. All I
+say is, it's a lovely carkiss. And what I say I'll
+stick to; but I'll quarrel wi' no man.'
+
+"'No,' said the farrier, with bitter sarcasm,
+looking at the company generally; 'and p'rhaps
+you didn't say the cow was a red Durham; and
+p'rhaps you didn't say she'd got a star on her
+brow,--stick to that, now you are at it.'"
+
+Matters having come to this point, the landlord
+interferes _ex officio_ to preserve order. The Lammeter
+family having come up, he discreetly invites
+Mr. Macey, the parish clerk and tailor, to favour
+the company with his recollections on the subject.
+Mr. Macey, however, "smiled pityingly in answer
+to the landlord's appeal, and said: 'Ay, ay; I
+know, I know: but I let other folks talk. I've laid
+by now, and gev up to the young uns. Ask them
+as have been to school at Tarley: they've learn't
+pernouncing; that's came up since my day.'"
+
+Mr. Macey is nevertheless persuaded to dribble
+out his narrative; proceeding by instalments, and
+questioned from point to point, in a kind of Socratic
+manner, by the landlord. He at last arrives
+at Mr. Lammeter's marriage, and how the clergyman,
+when he came to put the questions, inadvertently
+transposed the position of the two essential
+names, and asked, "Wilt thou have this man
+to be thy wedded wife?" etc.
+
+"'But the partic'larest thing of all,' pursues
+Mr. Macey, 'is, as nobody took any notice on it
+but me, and they answered straight off "Yes,"
+like as if it had been me saying "Amen" i' the
+right place, without listening to what went before.'
+
+"'But _you_ knew what was going on well enough,
+didn't you, Mr. Macey? You were live enough,
+eh?' said the butcher.
+
+"'Yes, bless you!' said Mr. Macey, pausing,
+and smiling in pity at the impatience of his
+hearer's imagination,--'why, I was all of a tremble;
+it was as if I'd been a coat pulled by two
+tails, like; for I couldn't stop the parson, I couldn't
+take upon me to do that; and yet I said to myself,
+I says, "Suppose they shouldn't be fast married,"
+'cause the words are contrairy, and my head
+went working like a mill, for I was always uncommon
+for turning things over and seeing all round
+'em; and I says to myself, "Is't the meaning or
+the words as makes folks fast i' wedlock?" For
+the parson meant right, and the bride and bride-groom
+meant right. But then, when I came to
+think on it, meaning goes but a little way i' most
+things, for you may mean to stick things together
+and your glue may be bad, and then where are
+you?'"
+
+Mr. Macey's doubts, however, are set at rest by
+the parson after the service, who assures him that
+what does the business is neither the meaning nor
+the words, but the register. Mr. Macey then arrives
+at the chapter--or rather is gently inducted
+thereunto by his hearers--of the ghosts who frequent
+certain of the Lammeter stables. But
+ghosts threatening to prove as pregnant a theme
+of contention as Durham cows, the landlord again
+meditates: "'There's folks i' my opinion, they
+can't see ghos'es, not if they stood as plain as
+a pikestaff before 'em. And there's reason i' that.
+For there's my wife, now, can't smell, not if
+she'd the strongest o' cheese under her nose. I
+never seed a ghost myself, but then I says to myself,
+"Very like I haven't the smell for 'em." I
+mean, putting a ghost for a smell or else contrairiways.
+And so I'm for holding with both sides....
+For the smell's what I go by.'"
+
+The best drawn of the village worthies in _Silas
+Marner_ are Mr. Macey, of the scene just quoted,
+and good Dolly Winthrop, Marner's kindly patroness.
+I have room for only one more specimen
+of Mr. Macey. He is looking on at a New Year's
+dance at Squire Cass's, beside Ben Winthrop,
+Dolly's husband.
+
+"'The Squire's pretty springy, considering his
+weight,' said Mr. Macey, 'and he stamps uncommon
+well. But Mr. Lammeter beats 'em all for
+shapes; you see he holds his head like a sodger,
+and he isn't so cushiony as most o' the oldish
+gentlefolks,--they run fat in gineral;--and he's
+got a fine leg. The parson's nimble enough, but
+he hasn't got much of a leg: it is a bit too thick
+downward, and his knees might be a bit nearer
+without damage; but he might do worse, he might
+do worse. Though he hasn't that grand way o'
+waving his hand as the Squire has.'
+
+"'Talk o' nimbleness, look at Mrs. Osgood,' said
+Ben Winthrop.... 'She's the finest made
+woman as is, let the next be where she will.'
+
+"'I don't heed how the women are made,' said
+Mr. Macey, with some contempt. 'They wear nayther
+coat nor breeches; you can't make much out o'
+their shapes!'"
+
+Mrs. Winthrop, the wheelwright's wife who, out
+of the fullness of her charity, comes to comfort
+Silas in the season of his distress, is in her way one
+of the most truthfully sketched of the author's
+figures. "She was in all respects a woman of
+scrupulous conscience, so eager for duties that life
+seemed to offer them too scantily unless she rose
+at half past four, though this threw a scarcity of
+work over the more advanced hours of the morning,
+which it was a constant problem for her to
+remove.... She was a very mild, patient
+woman, whose nature it was to seek out all the
+sadder and more serious elements of life and pasture
+her mind upon them." She stamps I. H. S.
+on her cakes and loaves without knowing what the
+letters mean, or indeed without knowing that they
+are letters, being very much surprised that Marner
+can "read 'em off,"--chiefly because they are
+on the pulpit cloth at church. She touches upon
+religions themes in a manner to make the superficial
+reader apprehend that she cultivates some
+polytheistic form of faith,--extremes meet. She
+urges Marner to go to church, and describes the
+satisfaction which she herself derives from the performance
+of her religious duties.
+
+"If you've niver had no church, there 's no
+telling what good it'll do you. For I feel as set
+up and comfortable as niver was, when I've been
+and heard the prayers and the singing to the praise
+and glory o' God, as Mr. Macey gives out,--and
+Mr. Crackenthorp saying good words and more
+partic'lar on Sacramen' day; and if a bit o' trouble
+comes, I feel as I can put up wi' it, for I've looked
+for help i' the right quarter, and giv myself up
+to Them as we must all give ourselves up to at
+the last: and if we've done our part, it isn't to be
+believed as Them as are above us 'ud be worse nor
+we are, and come short o' Theirn."
+
+"The plural pronoun," says the author, "was
+no heresy of Dolly's, but only her way of avoiding
+a presumptuous familiarity." I imagine that there
+is in no other English novel a figure so simple in
+its elements as this of Dolly Winthrop, which is
+so real without being contemptible, and so quaint
+without being ridiculous.
+
+In all those of our author's books which have
+borne the name of the hero or heroine,--_Adam
+Bede_, _Silas Marner_, _Romola_, and _Felix Holt_,--the
+person so put forward has really played a subordinate
+part. The author may have set out with
+the intention of maintaining him supreme; but
+her material has become rebellious in her hands,
+and the technical hero has been eclipsed by the
+real one. Tito is the leading figure in _Romola_.
+The story deals predominantly, not with Romola
+as affected by Tito's faults, but with Tito's faults
+as affecting first himself, and incidentally his wife.
+Godfrey Cass, with his lifelong secret, is by right
+the hero of _Silas Marner_. Felix Holt, in the work
+which bears his name, is little more than an occasional
+apparition; and indeed the novel has no
+hero, but only a heroine.
+
+The same remark applies to _Adam Bede_, as the
+work stands. The central figure of the book, by
+virtue of her great misfortune, is Hetty Sorrel.
+In the presence of that misfortune no one else,
+assuredly, has a right to claim dramatic pre-eminence.
+The one person for whom an approach to
+equality may be claimed is, not Adam Bede, but
+Arthur Donnithorne. If the story had ended, as
+I should have infinitely preferred to see it end,
+with Hetty's execution, or even with her reprieve,
+and if Adam had been left to his grief, and Dinah
+Morris to the enjoyment of that distinguished celibacy
+for which she was so well suited, then I
+think Adam might have shared the honours of pre-eminence
+with his hapless sweetheart. But as it
+is, the continuance of the book in his interest is
+fatal to him. His sorrow at Hetty's misfortune
+is not a _sufficient_ sorrow for the situation. That
+his marriage at some future time was quite possible,
+and even natural, I readily admit; but that
+was matter for a new story.
+
+This point illustrates, I think, the great advantage
+of the much-censured method, introduced by
+Balzac, of continuing his heroes' adventures from
+tale to tale. Or, admitting that the author was indisposed
+to undertake, or even to conceive, in its
+completeness, a new tale, in which Adam, healed
+of his wound by time, should address himself to
+another woman, I yet hold that it would be possible
+tacitly to foreshadow some such event at the
+close of the tale which we are supposing to end
+with Hetty's death,--to make it the logical consequence
+of Adam's final state of mind. Of course
+circumstances would have much to do with bringing
+it to pass, and these circumstances could not
+be foreshadowed; but apart from the action of
+circumstances would stand the fact that, to begin
+with, the event was _possible_.
+
+The assurance of this possibility is what I should
+have desired the author to place the sympathetic
+reader at a stand-point to deduce for himself. In
+every novel the work is divided between the writer
+and the reader; but the writer makes the reader
+very much as he makes his characters. When he
+makes him ill, that is, makes him different, he
+does no work; the writer does all. When he makes
+him well, that is, makes him interested, then the
+reader does quite half the labour. In making such
+a deduction as I have just indicated, the reader
+would be doing but his share of the task; the grand
+point is to get him to make it. I hold that there
+is a way. It is perhaps a secret; but until it is
+found out, I think that the art of story-telling
+cannot be said to have approached perfection.
+
+When you re-read coldly and critically a book
+which in former years you have read warmly and
+carelessly, you are surprised to see how it changes
+its proportions. It falls away in those parts which
+have been pre-eminent in your memory, and it increases
+in the small portions. Until I lately read
+_Adam Bede_ for a second time, Mrs. Poyser was
+in my mind its representative figure; for I remembered
+a number of her epigrammatic sallies. But
+now, after a second reading, Mrs. Poyser is the
+last figure I think of, and a fresh perusal of her
+witticisms has considerably diminished their classical
+flavour. And if I must tell the truth, Adam
+himself is next to the last, and sweet Dinah Morris
+third from the last. The person immediately
+evoked by the title of the work is poor Hetty
+Sorrel.
+
+Mrs. Poyser is _too_ epigrammatic; her wisdom
+smells of the lamp. I do not mean to say that
+she is not natural, and that women of her class
+are not often gifted with her homely fluency, her
+penetration, and her turn for forcible analogies.
+But she is too sustained; her morality is too shrill,--too
+much in _staccato_; she too seldom subsides
+into the commonplace. Yet it cannot be denied
+that she puts things very happily. Remonstrating
+with Dinah Morris on the undue disinterestedness
+of her religious notions, "But for the matter o'
+that," she cries, "if everybody was to do like you,
+the world must come to a stand-still; for if everybody
+tried to do without house and home and eating
+and drinking, and was always talking as we
+must despise the things o' the world, as you say,
+I should like to know where the pick of the stock,
+and the corn, and the best new milk-cheeses 'ud
+have to go? _Everybody 'ud be wanting to make
+bread o' tail ends_, and everybody 'ud be running
+after everybody else to preach to 'em, i'stead o'
+bringing up their families and laying by against
+a bad harvest." And when Hetty comes home late
+from the Chase, and alleges in excuse that the
+clock at home is so much earlier than the clock
+at the great house: "What, you'd be wanting the
+clock set by gentlefolks' time, would you? an' sit
+up burning candle, and lie a-bed wi' the sun
+a-bakin' you, like a cowcumber i' the frame?"
+Mrs. Poyser has something almost of Yankee
+shrewdness and angularity; but the figure of a
+New England rural housewife would lack a whole
+range of Mrs. Poyser's feelings, which, whatever
+may be its effect in real life, gives its subject in
+a novel at least a very picturesque richness of
+colour; the constant sense, namely, of a superincumbent
+layer of "gentlefolks," whom she and her
+companions can never raise their heads unduly
+without hitting.
+
+My chief complaint with Adam Bede himself
+is that he is too good. He is meant, I conceive,
+to be every inch a man; but, to my mind, there
+are several inches wanting. He lacks spontaneity
+and sensibility, he is too stiff-backed. He lacks
+that supreme quality without which a man can
+never be interesting to men,--the capacity to be
+tempted. His nature is without richness or responsiveness.
+I doubt not that such men as he
+exist, especially in the author's thrice-English
+Loamshire; she has partially described them as
+a class, with a felicity which carries conviction.
+She claims for her hero that, although a plain
+man, he was as little an ordinary man as he was
+a genius.
+
+"He was not an average man. Yet such men
+as he are reared here and there in every generation
+of our peasant artisans, with an inheritance of affections
+nurtured by a simple family life of common
+need and common industry, and an inheritance
+of faculties trained in skillful, courageous
+labour; they make their way upward, rarely as
+geniuses, most commonly as painstaking, honest
+men, with the skill and conscience to do well the
+tasks that lie before them. Their lives have no
+discernible echo beyond the neighbourhood where
+they dwelt; but you are almost sure to find there
+some good piece of road, some building, some application
+of mineral produce, some improvement
+in farming practice, some reform of parish abuses,
+with which their names are associated by one or
+two generations after them. Their employers were
+the richer for them; the work of their hands has
+worn well, and the work of their brains has guided
+well the hands of other men."
+
+One cannot help feeling thankful to the kindly
+writer who attempts to perpetuate their memories
+beyond the generations which profit immediately
+by their toil. If she is not a great dramatist,
+she is at least an exquisite describer. But one
+can as little help feeling that it is no more than a
+strictly logical retribution, that in her hour of
+need (dramatically speaking) she should find them
+indifferent to their duties as heroes. I profoundly
+doubt whether the central object of a novel may
+successfully be a passionless creature. The ultimate
+eclipse, both of Adam Bede and of Felix Holt
+would seem to justify my question. Tom Tulliver
+is passionless, and Tom Tulliver lives gratefully in
+the memory; but this, I take it, is because he is
+strictly a subordinate figure, and awakens no reaction
+of feeling on the reader's part by usurping
+a position which he is not the man to fill.
+
+Dinah Morris is apparently a study from life;
+and it is warm praise to say, that, in spite of the
+high key in which she is conceived, morally, she
+retains many of the warm colours of life. But
+I confess that it is hard to conceive of a woman
+so exalted by religious fervour remaining so cool-headed
+and so temperate. There is in Dinah Morris
+too close an agreement between her distinguished
+natural disposition and the action of her
+religious faith. If by nature she had been passionate,
+rebellious, selfish, I could better understand
+her actual self-abnegation. I would look
+upon it as the logical fruit of a profound religious
+experience. But as she stands, heart and soul go
+easily hand in hand. I believe it to be very uncommon
+for what is called a religious conversion
+merely to intensify and consecrate pre-existing inclinations.
+It is usually a change, a wrench; and
+the new life is apt to be the more sincere as the
+old one had less in common with it. But, as I
+have said, Dinah Morris bears so many indications
+of being a reflection of facts well known to the
+author,--and the phenomena of Methodism, from
+the frequency with which their existence is referred
+to in her pages, appear to be so familiar to her,--that
+I hesitate to do anything but thankfully
+accept her portrait.
+
+About Hetty Sorrel I shall have no hesitation
+whatever: I accept her with all my heart. Of all
+George Eliot's female figures she is the least ambitious,
+and on the whole, I think, the most successful.
+The part of the story which concerns her is
+much the most forcible; and there is something infinitely
+tragic in the reader's sense of the contrast
+between the sternly prosaic life of the good people
+about her, their wholesome decency and their noon-day
+probity, and the dusky sylvan path along which
+poor Hetty is tripping, light-footed, to her ruin.
+Hetty's conduct throughout seems to me to be
+thoroughly consistent. The author has escaped the
+easy error of representing her as in any degree
+made serious by suffering. She is vain and superficial
+by nature; and she remains so to the end.
+
+As for Arthur Donnithorne, I would rather have
+had him either better or worse. I would rather
+have had a little more premeditation before his
+fault, or a little more repentance after it; that is,
+while repentance could still be of use. Not that,
+all things considered, he is not a very fair image
+of a frank-hearted, well-meaning, careless, self-indulgent
+young gentleman; but the author has in
+his case committed the error which in Hetty's she
+avoided,--the error of showing him as redeemed by
+suffering. I cannot but think that he was as weak
+as she. A weak woman, indeed, is weaker than a
+weak man; but Arthur Donnithorne was a superficial
+fellow, a person emphatically not to be moved
+by a shock of conscience into a really interesting
+and dignified attitude, such as he is made to assume
+at the close of the book. Why not see things
+in their nakedness? the impatient reader is tempted
+to ask. Why not let passions and foibles play
+themselves out?
+
+It is as a picture, or rather as a series of pictures,
+that I find _Adam Bede_ most valuable. The
+author succeeds better in drawing attitudes of feeling
+than in drawing movements of feeling. Indeed,
+the only attempt at development of character
+or of purpose in the book occurs in the case of
+Arthur Donnithorne, where the materials are of
+the simplest kind. Hetty's lapse into disgrace is
+not gradual, it is immediate: it is without struggle
+and without passion. Adam himself has arrived
+at perfect righteousness when the book opens; and
+it is impossible to go beyond that. In his case too,
+therefore, there is no dramatic progression. The
+same remark applies to Dinah Morris.
+
+It is not in her conceptions nor her composition
+that George Eliot is strongest: it is in her _touches_.
+In these she is quite original. She is a good deal
+of a humourist, and something of a satirist; but she
+is neither Dickens nor Thackeray. She has over
+them the great advantage that she is also a good
+deal of a philosopher; and it is to this union of
+the keenest observation with the ripest reflection,
+that her style owes its essential force. She is a
+thinker,--not, perhaps, a passionate thinker, but
+at least a serious one; and the term can be applied
+with either adjective neither to Dickens nor
+Thackeray. The constant play of lively and vigourous
+thought about the objects furnished by her
+observation animates these latter with a surprising
+richness of colour and a truly human interest. It
+gives to the author's style, moreover, that lingering,
+affectionate, comprehensive quality which
+is its chief distinction; and perhaps occasionally it
+makes her tedious. George Eliot is so little tedious,
+however, because, if, on the one hand, her reflection
+never flags, so, on the other, her observation never
+ceases to supply it with material. Her observation,
+I think, is decidedly of the feminine kind: it deals,
+in preference, with small things. This fact may
+be held to explain the excellence of what I have
+called her pictures, and the comparative feebleness
+of her dramatic movement.
+
+The contrast here indicated, strong in _Adam
+Bede_, is most striking in _Felix Holt, the Radical_.
+The latter work is an admirable tissue of details;
+but it seems to me quite without character as a
+composition. It leaves upon the mind no single
+impression. Felix Holt's radicalism, the pretended
+motive of the story, is utterly choked
+amidst a mass of subordinate interests. No representation
+is attempted of the growth of his opinions,
+or of their action upon his character; he is
+marked by the same singular rigidity of outline
+and fixedness of posture which characterized Adam
+Bede,--except, perhaps, that there is a certain inclination
+towards poetry in Holt's attitude. But
+if the general outline is timid and undecided in
+_Felix Holt_, the different parts are even richer than
+in former works. There is no person in the book
+who attains to triumphant vitality; but there is
+not a single figure, of however little importance,
+that has not caught from without a certain reflection
+of life. There is a little old waiting-woman
+to a great lady,--Mrs. Denner by name,--who does
+not occupy five pages in the story, but who leaves
+upon the mind a most vivid impression of decent,
+contented, intelligent, half-stoical servility.
+
+"There were different orders of beings,--so ran
+Denner's creed,--and she belonged to another
+order than that to which her mistress belonged.
+She had a mind as sharp as a needle, and would
+have seen through and through the ridiculous pretensions
+of a born servant who did not submissively
+accept the rigid fate which had given her
+born superiors. She would have called such pretensions
+the wrigglings of a worm that tried to
+walk on its tail.... She was a hard-headed,
+godless little woman, but with a character to be
+reckoned on as you reckon on the qualities of
+iron."
+
+"I'm afraid of ever expecting anything good
+again," her mistress says to her in a moment of
+depression.
+
+"'That's weakness, madam. Things don't happen
+because they are bad or good, else all eggs
+would be addled or none at all, and at the most it
+is but six to the dozen. There's good chances and
+bad chances, and nobody's luck is pulled only by
+one string.... There's a good deal of pleasure
+in life for you yet.'
+
+"'Nonsense! There's no pleasure for old
+women.... What are your pleasures, Denner,
+besides being a slave to me?'
+
+"O, there's pleasure in knowing one is not a
+fool, like half the people one sees about. And
+managing one's husband is some pleasure, and
+doing one's business well. Why, if I've only got
+some orange-flowers to candy, I shouldn't like to
+die till I see them all right. Then there's the sunshine
+now and then; I like that, as the cats do.
+I look upon it life is like our game at whist, when
+Banks and his wife come to the still-room of an
+evening. I don't enjoy the game much, but I like
+to play my cards well, and see what will be the
+end of it; and I want to see you make the best of
+your hand, madam, for your luck has been mine
+these forty years now."
+
+And, on another occasion, when her mistress exclaims,
+in a fit of distress, that "God was cruel
+when he made women," the author says:--
+
+"The waiting-woman had none of that awe
+which could be turned into defiance; the sacred
+grove was a common thicket to her.
+
+"'It mayn't be good luck to be a woman,' she
+said. 'But one begins with it from a baby; one
+gets used to it. And I shouldn't like to be a
+man,--to cough so loud, and stand straddling about
+on a wet day, and be so wasteful with meat and
+drink. _They're a coarse lot, I think._'"
+
+I should think they were, beside Mrs. Denner.
+
+This glimpse of her is made up of what I
+have called the author's _touches_. She excels in
+the portrayal of homely stationary figures for
+which her well-stored memory furnishes her with
+types. Here is another touch, in which satire predominates.
+Harold Transome makes a speech to
+the electors at Treby.
+
+"Harold's only interruption came from his own
+party. The oratorical clerk at the Factory, acting
+as the tribune of the dissenting interest, and feeling
+bound to put questions, might have been
+troublesome; _but his voice being unpleasantly
+sharp, while Harold's was full and penetrating,
+the questioning was cried down_."
+
+Of the four English stories, _The Mill on the
+Floss_ seems to me to have most dramatic continuity,
+in distinction from that descriptive, discursive
+method of narration which I have attempted to
+indicate. After Hetty Sorrel, I think Maggie Tulliver
+the most successful of the author's young
+women, and after Tito Melema, Tom Tulliver the
+best of her young men. English novels abound in
+pictures of childhood; but I know of none more
+truthful and touching than the early pages of this
+work. Poor erratic Maggie is worth a hundred
+of her positive brother, and yet on the very
+threshold of life she is compelled to accept him
+as her master. He falls naturally into the man's
+privilege of always being in the right. The following
+scene is more than a reminiscence; it is
+a real retrospect. Tom and Maggie are sitting
+upon the bough of an elder-tree, eating jam-puffs.
+At last only one remains, and Tom undertakes to
+divide it.
+
+"The knife descended on the puff, and it was
+in two; but the result was not satisfactory to
+Tom, for he still eyed the halves doubtfully. At
+last he said, 'Shut your eyes, Maggie.'
+
+"'What for?'
+
+"'You never mind what for,--shut 'em when I
+tell you.'
+
+"Maggie obeyed.
+
+"'Now, which'll you have, Maggie, right hand
+or left?'
+
+"'I'll have that one with the jam run out,' said
+Maggie, keeping her eyes shut to please Tom.
+
+"'Why, you don't like that, you silly. You
+may have it if it comes to you fair, but I sha'n't
+give it to you without. Right or left,--you choose
+now. Ha-a-a!' said Tom, in a tone of exasperation,
+as Maggie peeped. 'You keep your eyes
+shut now, else you sha'n't have any.'
+
+"Maggie's power of sacrifice did not extend so
+far; indeed, I fear she cared less that Tom should
+enjoy the utmost possible amount of puff, than that
+he should be pleased with her for giving him the
+best bit. So she shut her eyes quite close until
+Tom told her to 'say which,' and then she said,
+'Left hand.'
+
+"'You've got it,' said Tom, in rather a bitter
+tone.
+
+"'What! the bit with the jam run out?'
+
+"'No; here, take it,' said Tom, firmly, handing
+decidedly the best piece to Maggie.
+
+"'O, please, Tom, have it; I don't mind,--I
+like the other; please take this.'
+
+"'No, I sha'n't,' said Tom, almost crossly, beginning
+on his own inferior piece.
+
+"Maggie, thinking it was of no use to contend
+further, began too, and ate up her half puff with
+considerable relish as well as rapidity. But Tom
+had finished first, and had to look on while Maggie
+ate her last morsel or two, feeling in himself a
+capacity for more. _Maggie didn't know Tom was
+looking at her: she was see-sawing on the elder-bough,
+lost to everything but a vague sense of jam
+and idleness._
+
+"'O, you greedy thing!' said Tom, when she
+had swallowed the last morsel."
+
+The portions of the story which bear upon the
+Dodson family are in their way not unworthy of
+Balzac; only that, while our author has treated
+its peculiarities humourously, Balzac would have
+treated them seriously, almost solemnly. We are
+reminded of him by the attempt to classify the
+Dodsons socially in a scientific manner, and to
+accumulate small examples of their idiosyncrasies,
+I do not mean to say that the resemblance is very
+deep.
+
+The chief defect--indeed, the only serious one--in
+_The Mill on the Floss_ is its conclusion. Such
+a conclusion is in itself assuredly not illegitimate,
+and there is nothing in the fact of the flood, to my
+knowledge, essentially unnatural: what I object to
+is its relation to the preceding part of the story.
+The story is told as if it were destined to have, if
+not a strictly happy termination, at least one within
+ordinary probabilities. As it stands, the _dénouement_
+shocks the reader most painfully. Nothing
+has prepared him for it; the story does not move
+towards it; it casts no shadow before it. Did
+such a _dénouement_ lie within the author's intentions
+from the first, or was it a tardy expedient
+for the solution of Maggie's difficulties? This
+question the reader asks himself, but of course he
+asks it in vain.
+
+For my part, although, as long as humanity is
+subject to floods and earthquakes, I have no objection
+to see them made use of in novels, I would
+in this particular case have infinitely preferred
+that Maggie should have been left to her own devices.
+I understand the author's scruples, and
+to a certain degree I respect them. A lonely spinsterhood
+seemed but a dismal consummation of
+her generous life; and yet, as the author conceives,
+it was unlikely that she would return to Stephen
+Guest. I respect Maggie profoundly; but nevertheless
+I ask, Was this after all so unlikely? I
+will not try to answer the question. I have shown
+enough courage in asking it. But one thing is
+certain: a _dénouement_ by which Maggie should
+have called Stephen back would have been extremely
+interesting, and would have had far more
+in its favour than can be put to confusion by a
+mere exclamation of horror.
+
+I have come to the end of my space without
+speaking of _Romola_, which, as the most important
+of George Eliot's works, I had kept in reserve. I
+have only room to say that on the whole I think
+it _is_ decidedly the most important,--not the most
+entertaining nor the most readable, but the one in
+which the largest things are attempted and
+grasped. The figure of Savonarola, subordinate
+though it is, is a figure on a larger scale than
+any which George Eliot has elsewhere undertaken;
+and in the career of Tito Melema there is a fuller
+representation of the development of a character.
+
+Considerable as are our author's qualities as an
+artist, and largely as they are displayed in
+"Romola," the book strikes me less as a work of
+art than as a work of morals. Like all of George
+Eliot's works, its dramatic construction is feeble;
+the story drags and halts,--the setting is too large
+for the picture; but I remember that, the first
+time I read it, I declared to myself that much
+should be forgiven it for the sake of its generous
+feeling and its elevated morality. I still recognize
+this latter fact, but I think I find it more on a
+level than I at first found it with the artistic
+conditions of the book.
+
+"Our deeds determine us," George Eliot says
+somewhere in _Adam Bede_, "as much as we determine
+our deeds." This is the moral lesson of _Romola_.
+A man has no associate so intimate as his own
+character, his own career,--his present and his past;
+and if he builds up his career of timid and base
+actions, they cling to him like evil companions,
+to sophisticate, to corrupt, and to damn him. As
+in Maggie Tulliver we had a picture of the elevation
+of the moral tone by honesty and generosity,
+so that when the mind found itself face to face
+with the need for a strong muscular effort, it was
+competent to perform it; so in Tito we have a picture
+of that depression of the moral tone by falsity
+and self-indulgence, which gradually evokes on
+every side of the subject some implacable claim,
+to be avoided or propitiated. At last all his unpaid
+debts join issue before him, and he finds the
+path of life a hideous blind alley.
+
+Can any argument be more plain? Can any
+lesson be more salutary? "Under every guilty
+secret," writes the author, with her usual felicity,
+"there is a hidden brood of guilty wishes, whose
+unwholesome, infecting life is cherished by the
+darkness. The contaminating effect of deeds often
+lies less in the commission than in the consequent
+adjustment of our desires,--the enlistment of self-interest
+on the side of falsity; as, on the other hand,
+the purifying influence of public confession springs
+from the fact, that by it the hope in lies is forever
+swept away, _and the soul recovers the noble attitude
+of simplicity_." And again: "Tito was experiencing
+that inexorable law of human souls, that
+we prepare ourselves for sudden deeds by the reiterated
+choice of good or evil that gradually determines
+character." Somewhere else I think she
+says, in purport, that our deeds are like our children;
+we beget them, and rear them and cherish
+them, and they grow up and turn against us and
+misuse us.
+
+The fact that has led me to a belief in the fundamental
+equality between the worth of _Romola_
+as a moral argument and its value as a work of
+art, is the fact that in each character it seems
+to me essentially prosaic. The excellence both of
+the spirit and of the execution of the book is emphatically
+an obvious excellence. They make no
+demand upon the imagination of the reader. It
+is true of both of them that he who runs may read
+them. It may excite surprise that I should intimate
+that George Eliot is deficient in imagination;
+but I believe that I am right in so doing. Very
+readable novels have been written without imagination;
+and as compared with writers who, like Mr.
+Trollope, are totally destitute of the faculty,
+George Eliot may be said to be richly endowed
+with it. But as compared with writers whom we
+are tempted to call decidedly imaginative, she
+must, in my opinion, content herself with the very
+solid distinction of being exclusively an observer.
+In confirmation of this I would suggest a comparison
+of those chapters in _Adam Bede_ which treat
+of Hetty's flight and wanderings, and those of
+Miss Bronté's _Jane Eyre_ which describe the heroine's
+escape from Rochester's house and subsequent
+perambulations. The former are throughout admirable
+prose; the latter are in portions very good
+poetry.
+
+One word more. Of all the impressions--and
+they are numerous--which a reperusal of George
+Eliot's writings has given me, I find the strongest
+to be this: that (with all deference to _Felix Holt,
+the Radical_) the author is in morals and æsthetics
+essentially a conservative. In morals her problems
+are still the old, passive problems. I use the
+word "old" with all respect. What moves her
+most is the idea of a conscience harassed by the
+memory of slighted obligations. Unless in the case
+of Savonarola, she has made no attempt to depict
+a conscience taking upon itself great and novel
+responsibilities. In her last work, assuredly such
+an attempt was--considering the title--conspicuous
+by its absence.
+
+Of a corresponding tendency in the second department
+of her literary character,--or perhaps
+I should say in a certain middle field where morals
+and æsthetics move in concert,--it is very difficult
+to give an example. A tolerably good one is furnished
+by her inclination to compromise with the
+old tradition--and here I use the word "old"
+_without_ respect--which exacts that a serious story
+of manners shall close with the factitious happiness
+of a fairy-tale. I know few things more irritating
+in a literary way than each of her final chapters,--for
+even in _The Mill on the Floss_ there is a
+fatal "Conclusion." Both as an artist and a
+thinker, in other words, our author is an optimist;
+and although a conservative is not necessarily an
+optimist, I think an optimist is pretty likely to
+be a conservative.
+
+
+
+
+ON A DRAMA OF MR. BROWNING
+
+
+     A review of _The Inn Album_, by Robert Browning, London, Smith &
+     Elder; Boston, J. R. Osgood & Co. 1875. Originally published in
+     _The Nation_, January 20, 1876.
+
+
+
+
+ON A DRAMA OF MR. BROWNING
+
+
+This is a decidedly irritating and displeasing
+performance. It is growing more difficult
+every year for Mr. Browning's old friends to fight
+his battles for him, and many of them will feel that
+on this occasion the cause is really too hopeless,
+and the great poet must himself be answerable for
+his indiscretions.
+
+Nothing that Mr. Browning writes, of course,
+can be vapid; if this were possible, it would be a
+much simpler affair. If it were a case of a writer
+"running thin," as the phrase is, there would be
+no need for criticism; there would be nothing in
+the way of matter to criticise, and old readers
+would have no heart to reproach. But it may be
+said of Mr. Browning that he runs thick rather
+than thin, and he need claim none of the tenderness
+granted to those who have used themselves up
+in the service of their admirers. He is robust and
+vigorous; more so now, even, than heretofore, and
+he is more prolific than in the earlier part of his
+career. But his wantonness, his wilfulness, his
+crudity, his inexplicable want of secondary thought,
+as we may call it, of the stage of reflection that
+follows upon the first outburst of the idea, and
+smooths, shapes, and adjusts it--all this alloy of
+his great genius is more sensible now than ever.
+
+_The Inn Album_ reads like a series of rough notes
+for a poem--of hasty hieroglyphics and symbols,
+decipherable only to the author himself. A great
+poem might perhaps have been made of it, but
+assuredly it is not a great poem, nor any poem
+whatsoever. It is hard to say very coherently
+what it is. Up to a certain point, like everything
+of Mr. Browning's, it is highly dramatic and vivid
+and beyond that point, like all its companions, it
+is as little dramatic as possible. It is not narrative,
+for there is not a line of comprehensible, consecutive
+statement in the two hundred and eleven
+pages of the volume. It is not lyrical, for there is
+not a phrase which in any degree does the office of
+the poetry that comes lawfully into the world--chants
+itself, images itself, or lingers in the memory.
+
+"That bard's a Browning; he neglects the
+form!" one of the characters exclaims with irresponsible
+frankness. That Mr. Browning knows
+he "neglects the form," and does not particularly
+care, does not very much help matters; it only
+deepens the reader's sense of the graceless and
+thankless and altogether unavailable character of
+the poem. And when we say unavailable, we make
+the only reproach which is worth addressing to a
+writer of Mr. Browning's intellectual power. A
+poem with so many presumptions in its favour as
+such an authorship carries with it is a thing to make
+some intellectual use of, to care for, to remember,
+to return to, to linger over, to become intimate with.
+But we can as little imagine a reader (who has not
+the misfortune to be a reviewer) addressing himself
+more than once to the perusal of _The Inn Album_,
+as we fancy cultivating for conversational
+purposes the society of a person afflicted with a
+grievous impediment of speech.
+
+Two gentlemen have been playing cards all night
+in an inn-parlour, and the peep of day finds one
+of them ten thousand pounds in debt to the other.
+The tables have been turned, and the victim is the
+actual victor. The elder man is a dissolute and
+penniless nobleman, who has undertaken the social
+education of the aspiring young heir of a great
+commercial fortune, and has taught him so well
+that the once ingenuous lad knows more than his
+clever master. The young man has come down
+into the country to see his cousin, who lives, hard
+by at the Hall, with her aunt, and with whom his
+aristocratic preceptor recommends him, for good
+worldly reasons, to make a match.
+
+Infinite discourse, of that formidable full-charged
+sort that issues from the lips of all Mr.
+Browning's characters, follows the play, and as
+the morning advances the two gentlemen leave the
+inn and go for a walk. Lord K. has meanwhile
+related to his young companion the history of one
+of his own earlier loves--how he had seduced a
+magnificent young woman, and she had fairly
+frightened him into offering her marriage. On
+learning that he had meant to go free if he could,
+her scorn for him becomes such that she rejects
+his offer of reparation (a very fine stroke) and enters
+into wedlock with a "smug, crop-haired,
+smooth-chinned sort of curate-creature." The
+young man replies that he himself was once in
+love with a person that quite answers to this description,
+and then the companions separate--the
+pupil to call at the Hall, and the preceptor to catch
+the train for London.
+
+The reader is then carried back to the inn-parlour,
+into which, on the departure of the gentlemen,
+two ladies have been ushered. One of them
+is the young man's cousin, who is playing at cross-purposes
+with her suitor; the other is her intimate
+friend, arrived on a flying visit. The intimate
+friend is of course the ex-victim of Lord K. The
+ladies have much conversation--all of it rather
+more ingeniously inscrutable than that of their
+predecessors; it terminates in the exit of the cousin
+and the entrance of the young man. He recognizes
+the curate's wife as the object of his own
+stifled affection, and the two have, as the French
+say, an _intime_ conversation.
+
+At last Lord K. comes back, having missed his
+train, and finds himself confronted with his
+stormy mistress. Very stormy she proves to be,
+and her outburst of renewed indignation and irony
+contains perhaps the most successful writing in the
+poem. Touched by the lady's eloquence, the
+younger man, who has hitherto professed an almost
+passionate admiration for his companion, begins to
+see him in a less interesting light, and in fact
+promptly turns and reviles him. The situation is
+here extremely dramatic. Lord K. is a cynic of a
+sneaking pattern, but he is at any rate a man of
+ideas. He holds the destiny of his adversaries in
+his hands, and, snatching up the inn album (which
+has been knocking about the table during the foregoing
+portions of the narrative), he scrawls upon
+it his ultimatum. Let the lady now bestow her
+affection on his companion, and let the latter accept
+this boon as a vicarious payment of the gambling
+debt, otherwise Lord K. will enlighten the
+lady's husband as to the extent of her acquaintance
+with himself.
+
+He presents the open page to the heroine, who
+reads it aloud, and for an answer her younger and
+more disinterested lover, "with a tiger-flash yell,
+spring, and scream," throws himself on the insulter,
+half an hour since, his guide, philosopher,
+and friend, and, by some means undescribed by
+Mr. Browning puts an end to his life. This incident
+is related in two pregnant lines, which,
+judged by the general standard of style of the _Inn
+Album_, must be considered fine:
+
+"A tiger-flash, yell, spring and scream: halloo!
+Death's out and on him, has and holds him--ugh!"
+
+The effect is of course augmented if the reader is careful to make the
+"ugh!" rhyme correctly with the "halloo!" The lady takes poison, which
+she carries on her person and which operates instantaneously, and the
+young man's cousin, re-entering the room, has a sufficiently tremendous
+surprise.
+
+The whole picture indefinably appeals to the imagination. There is
+something very curious about it and even rather arbitrary, and the
+reader wonders how it came, in the poet's mind, to take exactly that
+shape. It is very much as if he had worked backwards, had seen his
+dénouement first, as a mere picture--the two corpses in the inn-parlour,
+and the young man and his cousin confronted above them--and then had
+traced back the possible motives and sources. In looking for these Mr.
+Browning has of course encountered a vast number of deep discriminations
+and powerful touches of portraitures. He deals with human character as a
+chemist with his acids and alkalies, and while he mixes his coloured
+fluids in a way that surprises the profane, knows perfectly well what he
+is about. But there is too apt to be in his style that hiss and sputter
+and evil aroma which characterise the proceedings of the laboratory. The
+idea, with Mr. Browning, always tumbles out into the world in some
+grotesque hind-foremost manner; it is like an unruly horse backing out
+of his stall, and stamping and plunging as he comes. His thought knows
+no simple stage--at the very moment of its birth it is a terribly
+complicated affair.
+
+We frankly confess, at the risk of being accused of deplorable levity of
+mind, that we have found this want of clearness of explanation, of
+continuity, of at least superficial verisimilitude, of the smooth, the
+easy, the agreeable, quite fatal to our enjoyment of _The Inn Album_. It
+is all too argumentative, too curious and recondite. The people talk too
+much in long set speeches, at a moment's notice, and the anomaly so
+common in Browning, that the talk of the women is even more rugged and
+insoluble than that of the men, is here greatly exaggerated. We are
+reading neither prose nor poetry; it is too real for the ideal, and too
+ideal for the real. The author of _The Inn Album_ is not a writer to
+whom we care to pay trivial compliments, and, it is not a trivial
+complaint to say that his book is only barely comprehensible. Of a
+successful dramatic poem one ought to be able to say more.
+
+
+
+
+SWINBURNE'S ESSAYS
+
+
+     A review of _Essays and Studies_, by Algernon Charles Swinburne.
+     London: Chatto & Windus, 1875. Originally published in _The
+     Nation_, July 29, 1875.
+
+
+
+
+SWINBURNE'S ESSAYS
+
+
+Mr. Swinburne has by this time impressed upon the general public a
+tolerably vivid image of his literary personality. His line is a
+definite one; his note is familiar, and we know what to expect from him.
+He was at pains, indeed, a year ago to quicken the apprehension of
+American readers by an effusion directed more or less explicitly to
+themselves. This piece of literature was brief, but it was very
+remarkable. Mr. Emerson had had occasion to speak of Mr. Swinburne with
+qualified admiration and this circumstance, coming to Mr. Swinburne's
+ears, had prompted him to uncork on the spot the vials of his wrath. He
+addressed to a newspaper a letter of which it is but a colourless
+account to say that it embodied the very hysterics of gross
+vituperation.
+
+Mr. Swinburne has some extremely just remarks about Byron's
+unamenableness to quotation, his having to be taken in the gross. This
+is almost equally true of our author himself; he must be judged by all
+he has done, and we must allow, in our judgment, the weight he would
+obviously claim for it to his elaborate tribute to the genius of Mr.
+Emerson. His tone has two distinct notes--the note of measureless praise
+and the note of furious denunciation. Each is in need of a correction,
+but we confess that, with all its faults, we prefer the former. That Mr.
+Swinburne has a kindness for his more restrictive strain is, however,
+very obvious. He is over-ready to sound it, and he is not particular
+about his pretext.
+
+Some people, he says, for instance, affirm that a writer may have a very
+effective style, yet have nothing of value to express with it. Mr.
+Swinburne demands that they prove their assertion. "This flattering
+unction the very foolishest of malignants will hardly, in this case
+(that of Mr. D. G. Rossetti), be able to lay upon the corrosive sore
+which he calls his soul; the ulcer of ill-will must rot unrelieved by
+the rancid ointment of such fiction." In Mr. W. M. Rossetti's edition of
+Shelley there is in a certain line, an interpolation of the word
+"autumn." "For the conception of this atrocity the editor is not
+responsible; for its adoption he is. A thousand years of purgatorial
+fire would be insufficient expiation for the criminal on whose deaf and
+desperate head must rest the original guilt of defacing the text of
+Shelley with this most damnable corruption."
+
+The essays before us are upon Victor Hugo, D. G. Rossetti, William
+Morris, Matthew Arnold as a poet, Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, and John
+Ford. To these are added two papers upon pictures--the drawings of the
+old masters at Florence and the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1868. Mr.
+Swinburne, in writing of poets, cannot fail to say a great many
+felicitous things. His own insight into the poetic mystery is so deep,
+his perception in matters of language so refined, his power of
+appreciation so large and active, his imagination, especially, so
+sympathetic and flexible, that we constantly feel him to be one who has
+a valid right to judge and pass sentence. The variety of his sympathies
+in poetry is especially remarkable, and is in itself a pledge of
+criticism of a liberal kind. Victor Hugo is his divinity--a divinity
+whom indeed, to our sense, he effectually conceals and obliterates in
+the suffocating fumes of his rhetoric. On the other hand, one of the
+best papers in the volume is a disquisition on the poetry of Mr. Matthew
+Arnold, of which his relish seems hardly less intense and for whom he
+states the case with no less prodigious a redundancy of phrase.
+
+Matthew Arnold's canons of style, we should have said, are a positive
+negation of those of Mr. Swinburne's, and it is to the credit of the
+latter's breadth of taste that he should have entered into an
+intellectual temperament which is so little his own. The other articles
+contain similar examples of his vivacity and energy of perception, and
+offer a number of happy judgments and suggestive observations. His
+estimate of Byron as a poet (not in the least as a man--on this point
+his utterances are consummately futile) is singularly discriminating;
+his measurement of Shelley's lyric force is eloquently adequate; his
+closing words upon John Ford are worth quoting as a specimen of strong
+apprehension and solid statement. Mr. Swinburne is by no means always
+solid, and this passage represents him at his best:--
+
+"No poet is less forgettable than Ford; none fastens (as it were) the
+fangs of his genius and his will more deeply in your memory. You cannot
+shake hands with him and pass him by; you cannot fall in with him and
+out again at pleasure; if he touch you once he takes you, and what he
+takes he keeps his hold of; his work becomes a part of your thought and
+parcel of your spiritual furniture for ever; he signs himself upon you
+as with a seal of deliberate and decisive power. His force is never the
+force of accident; the casual divinity of beauty which falls, as though
+direct from heaven, upon stray lines and phrases of some poets, fails
+never by any such heavenly chance on his; his strength of impulse is
+matched by his strength of will; he never works more by instinct than by
+resolution; he knows what he would have and what he will do, and gains
+his end and does his work with full conscience of purpose and insistence
+of design. By the might of a great will seconded by the force of a
+great hand he won the place he holds against all odds of rivalry in a
+race of rival giants."
+
+On the other hand, Mr. Swinburne is constantly liable on this same line
+to lapse into flagrant levity and perversity of taste; as in saying that
+he cannot consider Wordsworth "as mere poet" equal to Coleridge as mere
+poet; in speaking of Alfred de Musset as "the female page or attendant
+dwarf" of Byron, and his poems as "decoctions of watered Byronism"; or
+in alluding jauntily and _en passant_ to Gautier's _Mademoiselle de
+Maupin_ as "the most perfect and exquisite book of modern times."
+
+To note, however, the points at which Mr. Swinburne's judgment hits the
+mark, or the points at which it misses it, is comparatively superfluous,
+inasmuch as both of these cases seem to us essentially accidental. His
+book is not at all a book of judgment; it is a book of pure imagination.
+His genius is for style simply, and not in the least for thought nor for
+real analysis; he goes through the motions of criticism, and makes a
+considerable show of logic and philosophy, but with deep appreciation
+his writing seems to us to have very little to do.
+
+He is an imaginative commentator, often of a very splendid kind, but he
+is never a real interpreter and rarely a trustworthy guide. He is a
+writer, and a writer in constant quest of a theme. He has an inordinate
+sense of the picturesque, and he finds his theme in those subjects and
+those writers which gratify it. When they gratify it highly, he
+conceives a boundless relish for them; they give him his chance, and he
+turns-on the deluge of his exorbitant homage. His imagination kindles,
+he abounds in their own sense, when they give him an inch he takes an
+ell, and quite loses sight of the subject in the entertainment he finds
+in his own word-spinning. In this respect he is extraordinarily
+accomplished: he very narrowly misses having a magnificent style. On the
+imaginative side, his style is almost complete, and seems capable of
+doing everything that picturesqueness demands. There are few writers of
+our day who could have produced this description of a thunderstorm at
+sea. Mr. Swinburne gives it to us as the likeness of Victor Hugo's
+genius:--
+
+"About midnight, the thundercloud was full overhead, full of incessant
+sound and fire, lightening and darkening so rapidly that it seemed to
+have life, and a delight in its life. At the same hour, the sky was
+clear to the west, and all along the sea-line there sprang and sank as
+to music a restless dance or chase of summer lightnings across the lower
+sky: a race and riot of lights, beautiful and rapid as a course of
+shining Oceanides along the tremulous floor of the sea. Eastward, at the
+same moment, the space of clear sky was higher and wider, a splendid
+semicircle of too intense purity to be called blue; it was of no colour
+nameable by man; and midway in it, between the stars and the sea, hung
+the motionless full moon; Artemis watching with serene splendour of
+scorn the battle of Titans and the revel of nymphs from her stainless
+and Olympian summit of divine indifferent light. Underneath and about
+us, the sea was paved with flame; the whole water trembled and hissed
+with phosphoric fire; even through the wind and thunder I could hear the
+crackling and sputtering of the water-sparks. In the same heaven and in
+the same hour there shone at once the three contrasted glories, golden
+and fiery and white, of moonlight, and of the double lightning, forked
+and sheet; and under all this miraculous heaven lay a flaming floor of
+water."
+
+But with this extravagant development of the imagination there is no
+commensurate development either of the reason or of the moral sense. One
+of these defects is, to our mind, fatal to Mr. Swinburne's style; the
+other is fatal to his tone, to his temper, to his critical pretensions.
+His style is without measure, without discretion, without sense of what
+to take and what to leave; after a few pages, it becomes intolerably
+fatiguing. It is always listening to itself--always turning its head
+over its shoulders to see its train flowing behind it. The train
+shimmers and tumbles in a very gorgeous fashion, but the rustle of its
+embroidery is fatally importunate.
+
+Mr. Swinburne is a dozen times too verbose; at least one-half of his
+phrases are what the French call phrases in the air. One-half of his
+sentence is always a repetition, for mere fancy's sake and nothing more,
+of the meaning of the other half--a play upon its words, an echo, a
+reflection, a duplication. This trick, of course, makes a writer
+formidably prolix. What we have called the absence of the moral sense of
+the writer of these essays is, however, their most disagreeable feature.
+By this we do not mean that Mr. Swinburne is not didactic, nor edifying,
+nor devoted to pleading the cause of virtue. We mean simply that his
+moral plummet does not sink at all, and that when he pretends to drop it
+he is simply dabbling in the relatively very shallow pool of the
+picturesque.
+
+A sense of the picturesque so refined as Mr. Swinburne's will take one a
+great way, but it will by no means, in dealing with things whose great
+value is in what they tell us of human character, take one all the way.
+One breaks down with it (if one treats it as one's sole support) sooner
+or later in æsthetics; one breaks down with it very soon indeed in
+psychology.
+
+We do not remember in this whole volume a single instance of delicate
+moral discrimination--a single case in which the moral note has been
+struck, in which the idea betrays the smallest acquaintance with the
+conscience. The moral realm for Mr. Swinburne is simply a brilliant
+chiaroscuro of costume and posture. This makes all Mr. Swinburne's
+magnificent talk about Victor Hugo's great criminals and monstrosities,
+about Shelley's Count Cenci, and Browning's Guido Franchesini, and about
+dramatic figures generally, quite worthless as anything but amusing
+fantasy. As psychology it is, to our sense, extremely puerile; for we do
+not mean simply to say that the author does not understand morality--a
+charge to which he would be probably quite indifferent; but that he does
+not at all understand immorality. Such a passage as his rhapsody upon
+Victor Hugo's Josiane ("such a pantheress may be such a poetess," etc.)
+means absolutely nothing. It is entertaining as pictorial
+writing--though even in this respect as we have said, thanks to excess
+and redundancy, it is the picturesque spoiled rather than achieved; but
+as an attempt at serious analysis it seems to us, like many of its
+companions, simply ghastly--ghastly in its poverty of insight and its
+pretension to make mere lurid imagery do duty as thought.
+
+
+
+
+THE POETRY OF WILLIAM MORRIS
+
+
+     I. A review of _The Life and Death of Jason_: A poem. By William
+     Morris, Boston: Roberts Brothers. 1867. Originally published in
+     _North American Review_, October, 1867.
+
+     II. A review of _The Earthly Paradise_: A poem. By William Morris,
+     Boston: Roberts Bros. 1868. Originally published in _The Nation_,
+     July 9, 1868.
+
+     _The Earthly Paradise; Parts I and II_ as originally published in
+     London by F. S. Ellis in 1868, is in one volume, and was issued the
+     same year in Boston by Roberts Brothers. Parts III and IV were
+     issued as volumes II and III under the same title, in London in
+     1870, and in Boston in 1870-71.
+
+
+
+
+THE POETRY OF WILLIAM MORRIS
+
+
+I. THE LIFE AND DEATH Of JASON
+
+In this poetical history of the fortunate--the unfortunate--Jason, Mr.
+Morris has written a book of real value. It is some time since we have
+met with a work of imagination of so thoroughly satisfactory a
+character,--a work read with an enjoyment so unalloyed and so untempered
+by the desire to protest and to criticise. The poetical firmament within
+these recent years has been all alive with unprophesied comets and
+meteors, many of them of extraordinary brilliancy, but most of them very
+rapid in their passage. Mr. Morris gives us the comfort of feeling that
+he is a fixed star, and that his radiance is not likely to be
+extinguished in a draught of wind,--after the fashion of Mr. Alexander
+Smith, Mr. Swinburne and Miss Ingelow.
+
+Mr. Morris's poem is ushered into the world with a very florid birthday
+speech from the pen of the author of the too famous _Poems and
+Ballads_,--a circumstance, we apprehend, in no small degree prejudicial
+to its success. But we hasten to assure all persons whom the knowledge
+of Mr. Swinburne's enthusiasm may have led to mistrust the character of
+the work, that it has to our perception nothing in common with this
+gentleman's own productions, and that his article proves very little
+more than that his sympathies are wiser than his performance. If Mr.
+Morris's poem may be said to remind us of the manner of any other
+writer, it is simply of that of Chaucer; and to resemble Chaucer is a
+great safeguard against resembling Swinburne.
+
+_The Life and Death of Jason_, then, is a narrative poem on a Greek
+subject, written in a genuine English style. With the subject all
+reading people are familiar, and we have no need to retrace its details.
+But it is perhaps not amiss to transcribe the few pregnant lines of
+prose into which, at the outset, Mr. Morris has condensed the argument
+of his poem:--
+
+"Jason the son of Æson, king of Iolchos, having come to man's estate,
+demanded of Pelias his father's kingdom, which he held wrongfully. But
+Pelias answered, that if he would bring from Colchis the golden fleece
+of the ram that had carried Phryxus thither, he would yield him his
+right. Whereon Jason sailed to Colchis in the ship Argo, with other
+heroes, and by means of Medea, the king's daughter, won the fleece; and
+carried off also Medea; and so, after many troubles, came back to
+Iolchos again. There, by Medea's wiles, was Pelias slain; but Jason went
+to Corinth, and lived with Medea happily, till he was taken with the
+love of Glauce, the king's daughter of Corinth, and must needs wed her;
+whom also Medea destroyed, and fled to Ægeus at Athens; and not long
+after Jason died strangely."
+
+The style of this little fragment of prose is not an unapt measure of
+the author's poetical style,--quaint, but not too quaint, more
+Anglo-Saxon than Latin, and decidedly laconic. For in spite of the great
+length of his work, his manner is by no means diffuse. His story is a
+long one, and he wishes to do it justice; but the movement is rapid and
+business-like, and the poet is quite guiltless of any wanton lingering
+along the margin of the subject matter,--after the manner, for instance,
+of Keats,--to whom, individually, however, we make this tendency no
+reproach. Mr. Morris's subject is immensely rich,--heavy with its
+richness,--and in the highest degree romantic and poetical. For the most
+part, of course, he found not only the great _contours_, but the various
+incidents and episodes, ready drawn to his hand; but still there was
+enough wanting to make a most exhaustive drain upon his ingenuity and
+his imagination. And not only these faculties have been brought into
+severe exercise, but the strictest good taste and good sense were called
+into play, together with a certain final gift which we hardly know how
+to name, and which is by no means common, even among very clever
+poets,--a comprehensive sense of form, of proportion, and of real
+completeness, without which the most brilliant efforts of the
+imagination are a mere agglomeration of ill-reconciled beauties. The
+legend of Jason is full of strangely constructed marvels and elaborate
+prodigies and horrors, calculated to task heavily an author's
+adroitness.
+
+We have so pampered and petted our sense of the ludicrous of late years,
+that it is quite the spoiled child of the house, and without its leave
+no guest can be honourably entertained. It is very true that the
+atmosphere of Grecian mythology is so entirely an artificial one, that
+we are seldom tempted to refer its weird anomalous denizens to our
+standard of truth and beauty. Truth, indeed, is at once put out of the
+question; but one would say beforehand, that many of the creations of
+Greek fancy were wanting even in beauty, or at least in that ease and
+simplicity which has been acquired in modern times by force of culture.
+But habit and tradition have reconciled us to these things in their
+native forms, and Mr. Morris's skill reconciles us to them in his modern
+and composite English.
+
+The idea, for instance, of a _flying ram_, seems, to an undisciplined
+fancy, a not especially happy creation, nor a very promising theme for
+poetry; but Mr. Morris, without diminishing its native oddity, has given
+it an ample romantic dignity. So, again, the sowing of the dragon's
+teeth at Colchis, and the springing up of mutually opposed armed men,
+seems too complex and recondite a scene to be vividly and gracefully
+realized; but as it stands, it is one of the finest passages in Mr.
+Morris's poem. His great stumbling-block, however, we take it, was the
+necessity of maintaining throughout the dignity and prominence of his
+hero. From the moment that Medea comes into the poem, Jason falls into
+the second place, and keeps it to the end. She is the all-wise and
+all-brave helper and counsellor at Colchis, and the guardian angel of
+the returning journey. She saves her companions from the Circean
+enchantments, and she withholds them from the embraces of the Sirens.
+She effects the death of Pelias, and assures the successful return of
+the Argonauts. And finally--as a last claim upon her interest--she is
+slighted and abandoned by the man of her love. Without question, then,
+she is the central figure of the poem,--a powerful and enchanting
+figure,--a creature of barbarous arts, and of exquisite human passions.
+Jason accordingly possesses only that indirect hold upon our attention
+which belongs to the Virgilian Æneas; although Mr. Morris has avoided
+Virgil's error of now and then allowing his hero to be contemptible.
+
+A large number, however, of far greater drawbacks than any we are able
+to mention could not materially diminish the powerful beauty of this
+fantastic legend. It is as rich in adventure as the Odyssey, and very
+much simpler. Its prime elements are of the most poetical and delightful
+kind. What can be more thrilling than the idea of a great boatful of
+warriors embarking upon dreadful seas, not for pleasure, nor for
+conquest, nor for any material advantage, but for the simple discovery
+of a jealously watched, magically guarded relic? There is in the
+character of the object of their quest something heroically
+unmarketable, or at least unavailable.
+
+But of course the story owes a vast deal to its episodes, and these have
+lost nothing in Mr. Morris's hands. One of the most beautiful--the well
+known adventure of Hylas--occurs at the very outset. The beautiful young
+man, during a halt of the ship, wanders inland through the forest, and,
+passing beside a sylvan stream, is espied and incontinently loved by the
+water nymphs, who forthwith "detach" one of their number to work his
+seduction. This young lady assumes the disguise and speech of a Northern
+princess, clad in furs, and in this character sings to her victim "a
+sweet song, sung not yet to any man." Very sweet and truly lyrical it is
+like all the songs scattered through Mr. Morris's narrative. We are,
+indeed, almost in doubt whether the most beautiful passages in the poem
+do not occur in the series of songs in the fourteenth book.
+
+The ship has already touched at the island of Circe, and the sailors,
+thanks to the earnest warnings of Medea, have abstained from setting
+foot on the fatal shore; while Medea has, in turn, been warned by the
+enchantress against the allurements of the Sirens. As soon as the ship
+draws nigh, these fair beings begin to utter their irresistible notes.
+All eyes are turned lovingly on the shore, the rowers' charmed muscles
+relax, and the ship drifts landward. But Medea exhorts and entreats her
+companions to preserve their course. Jason himself is not untouched, as
+Mr. Morris delicately tells us,--"a moment Jason gazed." But Orpheus
+smites his lyre before it is too late, and stirs the languid blood of
+his comrades. The Sirens strike their harps amain, and a conflict of
+song arises. The Sirens sing of the cold, the glittering, the idle
+delights of their submarine homes; while Orpheus tells of the warm and
+pastoral landscapes of Greece. We have no space for quotation; of course
+Orpheus carries the day. But the finest and most delicate practical
+sense is shown in the alternation of the two lyrical arguments,--the
+soulless sweetness of the one, and the deep human richness of the other.
+
+There is throughout Mr. Morris's poem a great unity and evenness of
+excellence, which make selection and quotation difficult; but of
+impressive touches in our reading we noticed a very great number. We
+content ourselves with mentioning a single one. When Jason has sown his
+bag of dragon's teeth at Colchis, and the armed fighters have sprung up
+along the furrows, and under the spell contrived by Medea have torn each
+other to death:--
+
+    "One man was left alive, but wounded sore,
+    Who, staring round about and seeing no more
+    His brothers' spears against him, fixed his eyes
+    Upon the queller of those mysteries.
+    Then dreadfully they gleamed, and with no word,
+    He tottered towards him with uplifted sword.
+    But scarce he made three paces down the field,
+    Ere chill death seized his heart, and on his shield
+    Clattering he fell."
+
+We have not spoken of Mr. Morris's versification nor of his vocabulary.
+We have only room to say that, to our perception, the first in its
+facility and harmony, and the second in its abundance and studied
+simplicity, leave nothing to be desired. There are of course faults and
+errors in his poem, but there are none that are not trivial and easily
+pardoned in the light of the fact that he has given us a work of
+consummate art and of genuine beauty. He has foraged in a
+treasure-house; he has visited the ancient world, and come back with a
+massive cup of living Greek wine. His project was no light task, but he
+has honourably fulfilled it. He has enriched the language with a
+narrative poem which we are sure that the public will not suffer to fall
+into the ranks of honoured but uncherished works,--objects of vague and
+sapient reference,--but will continue to read and to enjoy. In spite of
+its length, the interest of the story never flags, and as a work of art
+it never ceases to be pure. To the jaded intellects of the present
+moment, distracted with the strife of creeds and the conflict of
+theories, it opens a glimpse into a world where they will be called upon
+neither to choose, to criticise, nor to believe, but simply to feel, to
+look, and to listen.
+
+
+II. THE EARTHLY PARADISE
+
+This new volume of Mr. Morris is, we think, a book for all time; but it
+is especially a book for these ripening summer days. To sit in the open
+shade, inhaling the heated air, and, while you read these perfect fairy
+tales, these rich and pathetic human traditions to glance up from your
+page at the clouds and the trees, is to do as pleasant a thing as the
+heart of man can desire. Mr. Morris's book abounds in all the sounds and
+sights and sensations of nature, in the warmth of the sunshine, the
+murmur of forests, and the breath of ocean-scented breezes. The fullness
+of physical existence which belongs to climates where life is spent in
+the open air, is largely diffused through its pages:
+
+      ... "Hot July was drawing to an end,
+      And August came the fainting year to mend
+    With fruit and grain; so 'neath the trellises,
+      Nigh blossomless, did they lie well at ease,
+      And watched the poppies burn across the grass,
+    And o'er the bindweed's bells the brown bee pass,
+      Still murmuring of his gains: windless and bright
+      The morn had been, to help their dear delight.
+    ... Then a light wind arose
+      That shook the light stems of that flowery close,
+    And made men sigh for pleasure."
+
+This is a random specimen. As you read, the fictitious universe of the
+poem seems to expand and advance out of its remoteness, to surge
+musically about your senses, and merge itself utterly in the universe
+which surrounds you. The summer brightness of the real world goes
+halfway to meet it; and the beautiful figures which throb with life in
+Mr. Morris's stories pass lightly to and fro between the realm of poetry
+and the mild atmosphere of fact. This quality was half the charm of the
+author's former poem, _The Life and Death of Jason_, published last
+summer. We seemed really to follow, beneath the changing sky, the
+fantastic boatload of wanderers in their circuit of the ancient world.
+For people compelled to stay at home, the perusal of the book in a
+couple of mornings was very nearly as good as a fortnight's holiday. The
+poem appeared to reflect so clearly and forcibly the poet's natural
+sympathies with the external world, and his joy in personal contact with
+it, that the reader obtained something very like a sense of physical
+transposition, without either physical or intellectual weariness.
+
+This ample and direct presentment of the joys of action and locomotion
+seems to us to impart to these two works a truly national and English
+tone. They taste not perhaps of the English soil, but of those strong
+English sensibilities which the great insular race carry with them
+through their wanderings, which they preserve and apply with such energy
+in every terrestrial clime, and which make them such incomparable
+travellers. We heartily recommend such persons as have a desire to
+accommodate their reading to the season--as are vexed with a delicate
+longing to place themselves intellectually in relation with the genius
+of the summer--to take this _Earthly Paradise_ with them to the country.
+
+The book is a collection of tales in verse--found, without exception, we
+take it, rather than imagined, and linked together, somewhat loosely, by
+a narrative prologue. The following is the "argument" of the
+prologue--already often enough quoted, but pretty enough, in its
+ingenious prose, to quote again:--
+
+"Certain gentlemen and mariners of Norway, having considered all that
+they had heard of the Earthly Paradise, set sail to find it, and, after
+many troubles and the lapse of many years, came old men to some western
+land, of which they had never before heard: there they died, when they
+had dwelt there certain years, much honoured of the strange people."
+
+The adventures of these wanderers, told by one of their number, Rolf the
+Norseman, born at Byzantium--a happy origin for the teller of a heroic
+tale, as the author doubtless felt--make, to begin with, a poem of
+considerable length, and of a beauty superior perhaps to that of the
+succeeding tales. An admirable romance of adventure has Mr. Morris
+unfolded in the melodious energy of this half-hurrying, half-lingering
+narrative--a romance to make old hearts beat again with the boyish
+longing for transmarine mysteries, and to plunge boys themselves into a
+delicious agony of unrest.
+
+The story is a tragedy, or very near it--as what story of the search for
+an Earthly Paradise could fail to be? Fate reserves for the poor
+storm-tossed adventurers a sort of fantastic compromise between their
+actual misery and their ideal bliss, whereby a kindly warmth is infused
+into the autumn of their days, and to the reader, at least, a very
+tolerable Earthly Paradise is laid open. The elders and civic worthies
+of the western land which finally sheltered them summon them every month
+to a feast, where, when all grosser desires have been duly pacified,
+the company sit at their ease and listen to the recital of stories. Mr.
+Morris gives in this volume the stories of the six midmonths of the
+year, two tales being allotted to each month--one from the Greek
+Mythology, and one, to express it broadly, of a Gothic quality. He
+announces a second series in which, we infer, he will in the same manner
+give us the stories rehearsed at the winter fireside.
+
+The Greek stories are the various histories of Atalanta, of Perseus, of
+Cupid and Psyche, of Alcestis, of Atys, the hapless son of Croesus,
+and of Pygmalion. The companion pieces, which always serve excellently
+well to place in relief the perfect pagan character of their elder
+mates, deal of course with elements less generally known.
+
+"Atalanta's Race," the first of Mr. Morris's Greek legends, is to our
+mind almost the best. There is something wonderfully simple and
+childlike in the story, and the author has given it ample dignity, at
+the same time that he has preserved this quality.
+
+Most vividly does he present the mild invincibility of his fleet-footed
+heroine and the half-boyish simplicity of her demeanour--a perfect model
+of a _belle inhumaine_. But the most beautiful passage in the poem is
+the description of the vigil of the love-sick Milanion in the lonely
+sea-side temple of Venus. The author has conveyed with exquisite art
+the sense of devout stillness and of pagan sanctity which invests this
+remote and prayerful spot. The yellow torch-light,
+
+    "Wherein with fluttering gown and half-bared limb
+    The temple damsels sung their evening hymn;"
+
+the sound of the shallow flowing sea without, the young man's restless
+sleep on the pavement, besprinkled with the ocean spray, the apparition
+of the goddess with the early dawn, bearing the golden apple--all these
+delicate points are presented in the light of true poetry.
+
+The narrative of the adventures of Danaë and of Perseus and Andromeda
+is, with the exception of the tale of Cupid and Psyche which follows it,
+the longest piece in the volume. Of the two, we think we prefer the
+latter. Unutterably touching is the career of the tender and helpless
+Psyche, and most impressive the terrible hostility of Venus. The author,
+we think, throughout manages this lady extremely well. She appears to us
+in a sort of rosy dimness, through which she looms as formidable as she
+is beautiful, and gazing with "gentle eyes and unmoved smiles,"
+
+    "Such as in Cyprus, the fair blossomed isle,
+    When on the altar in the summer night
+    They pile the roses up for her delight,
+    Men see within their hearts."
+
+"The Love of Alcestis" is the beautiful story of the excellent wife who,
+when her husband was ill, gave up her life, so that he might recover and
+live for ever. Half the interest here, however, lies in the servitude of
+Apollo in disguise, and in the touching picture of the radiant god doing
+in perfection the homely work of his office, and yet from time to time
+emitting flashes, as it were, of genius and deity, while the good
+Admetus observes him half in kindness and half in awe.
+
+The story of the "Son of Croesus," the poor young man who is slain by
+his best friend because the gods had foredoomed it, is simple, pathetic,
+and brief. The finest and sweetest poem in the volume, to our taste, is
+the tale of "Pygmalion and the Image." The merit of execution is perhaps
+not appreciably greater here than in the other pieces, but the legend is
+so unutterably charming that it claims precedence of its companions. As
+beautiful as anything in all our later poetry, we think, is the
+description of the growth and dominance in the poor sculptor's heart of
+his marvellous passion for the stony daughter of his hands. Borne along
+on the steady, changing flow of his large and limpid verse, the author
+glides into the situation with an ease and grace and fullness of
+sympathy worthy of a great master. Here, as elsewhere, there is no sign
+of effort or of strain. In spite of the studied and _recherché_
+character of his diction, there is not a symptom of affectation in
+thought or speech. We seem in this tale of "Pygmalion" truly to inhabit
+the bright and silent workroom of a great Greek artist, and, standing
+among shapes and forms of perfect beauty, to breathe the incense-tainted
+air in which lovely statues were conceived and shining stones chiselled
+into immortality.
+
+Mr. Morris is indubitably a sensuous poet, to his credit be it said; his
+senses are constantly proffering their testimony and crying out their
+delight. But while they take their freedom, they employ it in no degree
+to their own debasement. Just as there is modesty of temperament we
+conceive there is modesty of imagination, and Mr. Morris possesses the
+latter distinction. The total absence of it is, doubtless, the long and
+short of Mr. Swinburne's various troubles. We may imagine Mr. Swinburne
+making a very clever poem of this story of "Pygmalion," but we cannot
+fancy him making it anything less than utterly disagreeable. The
+thoroughly agreeable way in which Mr. Morris tells it is what especially
+strikes us. We feel that his imagination is equally fearless and
+irreproachable, and that while he tells us what we may call a sensuous
+story in all its breadth, he likewise tells it in all its purity. It
+has, doubtless, an impure side; but of the two he prefers the other.
+While Pygmalion is all aglow with his unanswered passion, he one day
+sits down before his image:
+
+    "And at the last drew forth a book of rhymes,
+    Wherein were writ the tales of many climes,
+    And read aloud the sweetness hid therein
+    Of lovers' sorrows and their tangled sin."
+
+He reads aloud to his marble torment: would Mr. Swinburne have touched
+that note?
+
+We have left ourselves no space to describe in detail the other series
+of tales--"The Man born to be King," "The Proud King," "The Writing on
+the Image," "The Lady of the Land," "The Watching of the Falcon," and
+"Ogier the Dane."
+
+The author in his _Jason_ identified himself with the successful
+treatment of Greek subjects to such a degree as to make it easy to
+suppose that these matters were the specialty of his genius. But in
+these romantic modern stories the same easy power is revealed, the same
+admirable union of natural gifts and cultivated perceptions. Mr. Morris
+is evidently a poet in the broad sense of the word--a singer of human
+joys and sorrows, whenever and wherever found. His somewhat artificial
+diction, which would seem to militate against our claim that his genius
+is of the general and comprehensive order, is, we imagine, simply an
+achievement of his own. It is not imposed from without, but developed
+from within. Whatever may be said of it, it certainly will not be
+accused of being unpoetical; and except this charge, what serious one
+can be made?
+
+The author's style--according to our impression--is neither Chaucerian,
+Spenserian, nor imitative; it is literary, indeed, but it has a freedom
+and irregularity, an adaptability to the movements of the author's mind,
+which make it an ample vehicle of poetical utterance. He says in this
+language of his own the most various and the most truthful things; he
+moves, melts, and delights. Such at least, is our own experience. Other
+persons, we know, find it difficult to take him entirely _au sérieux_.
+But we, taking him--and our critical duties too--in the most serious
+manner our mind permits of, feel strongly impelled, both by gratitude
+and by reflection, to pronounce him a noble and delightful poet. To call
+a man healthy nowadays is almost an insult--invalids learn so many
+secrets. But the health of the intellect is often promoted by physical
+disability. We say therefore, finally, that however the faculty may have
+been promoted--with the minimum of suffering, we certainly hope--Mr.
+Morris is a supremely healthy writer. This poem is marked by all that is
+broad and deep in nature, and all that is elevating, profitable, and
+curious in art.
+
+
+
+
+MATTHEW ARNOLD'S ESSAYS
+
+
+     A review of _Essays in Criticism_. By Matthew Arnold, Professor of
+     Poetry in the University of Oxford. Boston: Ticknor and Fields.
+     1865. Originally published in _North American Review_, July, 1865.
+
+
+
+
+MATTHEW ARNOLD'S ESSAYS
+
+
+Mr. Arnold's _Essays in Criticism_ come to American readers with a
+reputation already made,--the reputation of a charming style, a great
+deal of excellent feeling, and an almost equal amount of questionable
+reasoning. It is for us either to confirm the verdict passed in the
+author's own country, or to judge his work afresh. It is often the
+fortune of English writers to find mitigation of sentence in the United
+States.
+
+The Essays contained in this volume are on purely literary subjects;
+which is for us, by itself, a strong recommendation. English literature,
+especially contemporary literature, is, compared with that of France and
+Germany, very poor in collections of this sort. A great deal of
+criticism is written, but little of it is kept; little of it is deemed
+to contain any permanent application. Mr. Arnold will doubtless find in
+this fact--if indeed he has not already signalized it--but another proof
+of the inferiority of the English to the Continental school of
+criticism, and point to it as a baleful effect of the narrow practical
+spirit which animates, or, as he would probably say, paralyzes, the
+former. But not only is his book attractive as a whole, from its
+exclusively literary character; the subject of each essay is moreover
+particularly interesting. The first paper is on the function of
+Criticism at the present time; a question, if not more important,
+perhaps more directly pertinent here than in England. The second,
+discussing the literary influence of Academies, contains a great deal of
+valuable observation and reflection in a small compass and under an
+inadequate title. The other essays are upon the two De Guérins, Heinrich
+Heine, Pagan and Mediæval Religious Sentiment, Joubert, Spinoza, and
+Marcus Aurelius. The first two articles are, to our mind, much the best;
+the next in order of excellence is the paper on Joubert; while the
+others, with the exception, perhaps, of that on Spinoza, are of about
+equal merit.
+
+Mr. Arnold's style has been praised at once too much and too little. Its
+resources are decidedly limited; but if the word had not become so
+cheap, we should nevertheless call it fascinating. This quality implies
+no especial force; it rests in this case on the fact that, whether or
+not you agree with the matter beneath it, the manner inspires you with a
+personal affection for the author. It expresses great sensibility, and
+at the same time great good-nature; it indicates a mind both susceptible
+and healthy. With the former element alone it would savour of
+affectation; with the latter, it would be coarse. As it stands, it
+represents a spirit both sensitive and generous. We can best describe
+it, perhaps, by the word sympathetic. It exhibits frankly, and without
+detriment to its national character, a decided French influence. Mr.
+Arnold is too wise to attempt to write French English; he probably knows
+that a language can only be indirectly enriched; but as nationality is
+eminently a matter of form, he knows too that he can really violate
+nothing so long as he adheres to the English letter.
+
+His Preface is a striking example of the intelligent amiability which
+animates his style. His two leading Essays were, on their first
+appearance, made the subject of much violent contention, their moral
+being deemed little else than a wholesale schooling of the English press
+by the French programme. Nothing could have better proved the justice of
+Mr. Arnold's remarks upon the "provincial" character of the English
+critical method than the reception which they provoked. He now
+acknowledges this reception in a short introduction, which admirably
+reconciles smoothness of temper with sharpness of wit. The taste of this
+performance has been questioned; but wherever it may err, it is
+assuredly not in being provincial; it is essentially civil. Mr. Arnold's
+amiability is, in our eye, a strong proof of his wisdom. If he were a
+few degrees more short-sighted, he might have less equanimity at his
+command. Those who sympathise with him warmly will probably like him
+best as he is; but with such as are only half his friends, this freedom
+from party passion, from what is after all but a lawful professional
+emotion, will argue against his sincerity.
+
+For ourselves, we doubt not that Mr. Arnold possesses thoroughly what
+the French call the courage of his opinions. When you lay down a
+proposition which is forthwith controverted, it is of course optional
+with you to take up the cudgels in its defence. If you are deeply
+convinced of its truth, you will perhaps be content to leave it to take
+care of itself; or, at all events, you will not go out of your way to
+push its fortunes; for you will reflect that in the long run an opinion
+often borrows credit from the forbearance of its patrons. In the long
+run, we say; it will meanwhile cost you an occasional pang to see your
+cherished theory turned into a football by the critics. A football is
+not, as such, a very respectable object, and the more numerous the
+players, the more ridiculous it becomes. Unless, therefore, you are very
+confident of your ability to rescue it from the chaos of kicks, you will
+best consult its interests by not mingling in the game. Such has been
+Mr. Arnold's choice. His opponents say that he is too much of a poet to
+be a critic; he is certainly too much of a poet to be a disputant. In
+the Preface in question he has abstained from reiterating any of the
+views put forth in the two offensive Essays; he has simply taken a
+delicate literary vengeance upon his adversaries.
+
+For Mr. Arnold's critical feeling and observation, used independently of
+his judgment, we profess a keen relish. He has these qualities, at any
+rate, of a good critic, whether or not he have the others,--the science
+and the logic. It is hard to say whether the literary critic is more
+called upon to understand or to feel. It is certain that he will
+accomplish little unless he can feel acutely; although it is perhaps
+equally certain that he will become weak the moment that he begins to
+"work," as we may say, his natural sensibilities. The best critic is
+probably he who leaves his feelings out of account, and relies upon
+reason for success. If he actually possesses delicacy of feeling, his
+work will be delicate without detriment to its solidity. The complaint
+of Mr. Arnold's critics is that his arguments are too sentimental.
+Whether this complaint is well founded, we shall hereafter inquire; let
+us determine first what sentiment has done for him. It has given him, in
+our opinion, his greatest charm and his greatest worth. Hundreds of
+other critics have stronger heads; few, in England at least, have more
+delicate perceptions. We regret that we have not the space to confirm
+this assertion by extracts. We must refer the reader to the book
+itself, where he will find on every page an illustration of our meaning.
+He will find one, first of all, in the apostrophe to the University of
+Oxford, at the close of the Preface,--"home of lost causes and forsaken
+beliefs and unpopular names and impossible loyalties." This is doubtless
+nothing but sentiment, but it seizes a shade of truth, and conveys it
+with a directness which is not at the command of logical demonstration.
+Such a process might readily prove, with the aid of a host of facts,
+that the University is actually the abode of much retarding
+conservatism; a fine critical instinct alone, and the measure of
+audacity which accompanies such an instinct, could succeed in placing
+her on the side of progress by boldly saluting her as the Queen of
+Romance: romance being the deadly enemy of the commonplace; the
+commonplace being the fast ally of Philistinism, and Philistinism the
+heaviest drag upon the march of civilisation.
+
+Mr. Arnold is very fond of quoting Goethe's eulogy upon Schiller, to the
+effect that his friend's greatest glory was to have left so far behind
+him _was uns alle bändigt, das Gemeine_, that bane of mankind, the
+common. Exactly how much the inscrutable Goethe made of this fact, it is
+hard at this day to determine; but it will seem to many readers that Mr.
+Arnold makes too much of it. Perhaps he does, for himself; but for the
+public in general he decidedly does not. One of the chief duties of
+criticism is to exalt the importance of the ideal; and Goethe's speech
+has a long career in prospect before we can say with the vulgar that it
+is "played out." Its repeated occurrence in Mr. Arnold's pages is but
+another instance of poetic feeling subserving the ends of criticism.
+
+The famous comment upon the girl Wragg, over which the author's
+opponents made so merry, we likewise owe--we do not hesitate to declare
+it--to this same poetic feeling. Why cast discredit upon so valuable an
+instrument of truth? Why not wait at least until it is used in the
+service of error? The worst that can be said of the paragraph in
+question is, that it is a great ado about nothing. All thanks, say we,
+to the critic who will pick up such nothings as these; for if he
+neglects them, they are blindly trodden under foot. They may not be
+especially valuable, but they are for that very reason the critic's
+particular care. Great truths take care of themselves; great truths are
+carried aloft by philosophers and poets; the critic deals in
+contributions to truth.
+
+Another illustration of the nicety of Mr. Arnold's feeling is furnished
+by his remarks upon the quality of _distinction_ as exhibited in Maurice
+and Eugénie de Guérin, "that quality which at last inexorably corrects
+the world's blunders and fixes the world's ideals, [which] procures that
+the popular poet shall not pass for a Pindar, the popular historian for
+a Tacitus, nor the popular preacher for a Bossuet." Another is offered
+by his incidental remarks upon Coleridge, in the article on Joubert;
+another, by the remarkable felicity with which he has translated Maurice
+de Guérin's _Centaur_; and another, by the whole body of citations with
+which, in his second Essay, he fortifies his proposition that the
+establishment in England of an authority answering to the French Academy
+would have arrested certain evil tendencies of English literature,--for
+to nothing more offensive than this, as far as we can see, does this
+argument amount.
+
+In the first and most important of his Essays Mr. Arnold puts forth his
+views upon the actual duty of criticism. They may be summed up as
+follows. Criticism has no concern with the practical; its function is
+simply to get at the best thought which is current,--to see things in
+themselves as they are,--to be disinterested. Criticism can be
+disinterested, says Mr. Arnold,
+
+     "by keeping from practice; by resolutely following the law of its
+     own nature, which is to be a free play of the mind on all subjects
+     which it touches, by steadily refusing to lend itself to any of
+     those ulterior political, practical considerations about ideas
+     which plenty of people will be sure to attach to them, which
+     perhaps ought often to be attached to them, which in this country,
+     at any rate, are certain to be attached to them, but which
+     criticism has really nothing to do with. Its business is simply to
+     know the best that is known and thought in the world, and, by in
+     its turn making this known, to create a current of true and fresh
+     ideas. Its business is to do this with inflexible honesty, with due
+     ability; but its business is to do no more, and to leave alone all
+     questions of practical consequences and applications,--questions
+     which will never fail to have due prominence given to them."
+
+We used just now a word of which Mr. Arnold is very fond,--a word of
+which the general reader may require an explanation, but which, when
+explained, he will be likely to find indispensable; we mean the word
+_Philistine_. The term is of German origin, and has no English synonyme.
+"At Soli," remarks Mr. Arnold, "I imagined they did not talk of
+solecisms; and here, at the very head-quarters of Goliath, nobody talks
+of Philistinism." The word _épicier_, used by Mr. Arnold as a French
+synonyme, is not so good as _bourgeois_, and to those who know that
+_bourgeois_ means a citizen, and who reflect that a citizen is a person
+seriously interested in the maintenance of order, the German term may
+now assume a more special significance. An English review briefly
+defines it by saying that "it applies to the fat-headed respectable
+public in general." This definition must satisfy us here. The Philistine
+portion of the English press, by which we mean the considerably larger
+portion, received Mr. Arnold's novel programme of criticism with the
+uncompromising disapprobation which was to be expected from a literary
+body, the principle of whose influence, or indeed of whose being is its
+subservience, through its various members, to certain political and
+religious interests.
+
+Mr. Arnold's general theory was offensive enough; but the conclusions
+drawn by him from the fact that English practice has been so long and so
+directly at variance with it, were such as to excite the strongest
+animosity. Chief among these was the conclusion that this fact has
+retarded the development and vulgarised the character of the English
+mind, as compared with the French and the German mind. This rational
+inference may be nothing but a poet's flight; but for ourselves, we
+assent to it. It reaches us too. The facts collected by Mr. Arnold on
+this point have long wanted a voice. It has long seemed to us that, as a
+nation, the English are singularly incapable of large, of high, of
+general views. They are indifferent to pure truth, to _la verité vraie_.
+Their views are almost exclusively practical, and it is in the nature of
+practical views to be narrow. They seldom indeed admit a fact but on
+compulsion; they demand of an idea some better recommendation, some
+longer pedigree, than that it is true. That this lack of spontaneity in
+the English intellect is caused by the tendency of English criticism, or
+that it is to be corrected by a diversion, or even by a complete
+reversion, of this tendency, neither Mr. Arnold nor ourselves suppose,
+nor do we look upon such a result as desirable. The part which Mr.
+Arnold assigns to his reformed method of criticism is a purely tributary
+part. Its indirect result will be to quicken the naturally irrational
+action of the English mind; its direct result will be to furnish that
+mind with a larger stock of ideas than it has enjoyed under the
+time-honoured _régime_ of Whig and Tory, High-Church and Low-Church
+organs.
+
+We may here remark, that Mr. Arnold's statement of his principles is
+open to some misinterpretation,--an accident against which he has,
+perhaps, not sufficiently guarded it. For many persons the word
+_practical_ is almost identical with the word _useful_, against which,
+on the other hand, they erect the word _ornamental_. Persons who are
+fond of regarding these two terms as irreconcilable, will have little
+patience with Mr. Arnold's scheme of criticism. They will look upon it
+as an organised preference of unprofitable speculation to common sense.
+But the great beauty of the critical movement advocated by Mr. Arnold is
+that in either direction its range of action is unlimited. It deals with
+plain facts as well as with the most exalted fancies; but it deals with
+them only for the sake of the truth which is in them, and not for _your_
+sake, reader, and that of your party. It takes _high ground_, which is
+the ground of theory. It does not busy itself with consequences, which
+are all in all to you. Do not suppose that it for this reason pretends
+to ignore or to undervalue consequences; on the contrary, it is because
+it knows that consequences are inevitable that it leaves them alone. It
+cannot do two things at once; it cannot serve two masters. Its business
+is to make truth generally accessible, and not to apply it. It is only
+on condition of having its hands free, that it can make truth generally
+accessible. We said just now that its duty was, among other things, to
+exalt, if possible, the importance of the ideal. We should perhaps have
+said the intellectual; that is, of the principle of understanding
+things. Its business is to urge the claims of all things to be
+understood. If this is its function in England, as Mr. Arnold
+represents, it seems to us that it is doubly its function in this
+country. Here is no lack of votaries of the practical, of
+experimentalists, of empirics. The tendencies of our civilisation are
+certainly not such as foster a preponderance of morbid speculation. Our
+national genius inclines yearly more and more to resolve itself into a
+vast machine for sifting, in all things, the wheat from the chaff.
+American society is so shrewd, that we may safely allow it to make
+application of the truths of the study. Only let us keep it supplied
+with the truths of the study, and not with the half-truths of the forum.
+Let criticism take the stream of truth at its source, and then practice
+can take it half-way down. When criticism takes it half-way down,
+practice will come poorly off.
+
+If we have not touched upon the faults of Mr. Arnold's volume, it is
+because they are faults of detail, and because, when, as a whole, a book
+commands our assent, we do not incline to quarrel with its parts. Some
+of the parts in these Essays are weak, others are strong; but the
+impression which they all combine to leave is one of such beauty as to
+make us forget, not only their particular faults, but their particular
+merits. If we were asked what is the particular merit of a given essay,
+we should reply that it is a merit much less common at the present day
+than is generally supposed,--the merit which pre-eminently characterises
+Mr. Arnold's poems, the merit, namely, of having a _subject_. Each essay
+is _about_ something. If a literary work now-a-days start with a certain
+topic, that is all that is required of it; and yet it is a work of art
+only on condition of ending with that topic, on condition of being
+written, not from it, but to it. If the average modern essay or poem
+were to wear its title at the close, and not at the beginning, we wonder
+in how many cases the reader would fail to be surprised by it. A book
+or an article is looked upon as a kind of Staubbach waterfall,
+discharging itself into infinite space.
+
+If we were questioned as to the merit of Mr. Arnold's book as a whole,
+we should say that it lay in the fact that the author takes high ground.
+The manner of his Essays is a model of what criticisms should be. The
+foremost English critical journal, the Saturday Review, recently
+disposed of a famous writer by saying, in a parenthesis, that he had
+done nothing but write nonsense all his life. Mr. Arnold does not pass
+judgment in parenthesis. He is too much of an artist to use leading
+propositions for merely literary purposes. The consequence is, that he
+says a few things in such a way as that almost in spite of ourselves we
+remember them, instead of a number of things which we cannot for the
+life of us remember. There are many things which we wish he had said
+better. It is to be regretted, for instance, that, when Heine is for
+once in a way seriously spoken of, he should not be spoken of more as
+the great poet which he is, and which even in New England he will one
+day be admitted to be, than with reference to the great moralist which
+he is not, and which he never claimed to be. But here, as in other
+places, Mr. Arnold's excellent spirit reconciles us with his
+shortcomings. If he has not spoken of Heine exhaustively, he has at all
+events spoken of him seriously, which for an Englishman is a good deal.
+
+Mr. Arnold's supreme virtue is that he speaks of all things seriously,
+or, in other words, that he is not offensively clever. The writers who
+are willing to resign themselves to this obscure distinction are in our
+opinion the only writers who understand their time. That Mr. Arnold
+thoroughly understands his time we do not mean to say, for this is the
+privilege of a very select few; but he is, at any rate, profoundly
+conscious of his time. This fact was clearly apparent in his poems, and
+it is even more apparent in these Essays. It gives them a peculiar
+character of melancholy,--that melancholy which arises from the
+spectacle of the old-fashioned instinct of enthusiasm in conflict (or at
+all events in contact) with the modern desire to be fair,--the
+melancholy of an age which not only has lost its _naïveté_, but which
+knows it has lost it.
+
+
+
+
+MR. WALT WHITMAN
+
+
+     An unsigned review of _Walt Whitman's_ Drum-Taps, New York, 1865.
+     Originally published in _The Nation_, November 16, 1865.
+
+     As this review has long been familiar to students of Whitman, and
+     its authorship quite generally known, the original title has been
+     retained here.
+
+
+
+
+MR. WALT WHITMAN
+
+
+It has been a melancholy task to read this book; and it is a still more
+melancholy one to write about it. Perhaps since the day of Mr. Tupper's
+_Philosophy_ there has been no more difficult reading of the poetic
+sort. It exhibits the effort of an essentially prosaic mind to lift
+itself, by a prolonged muscular strain, into poetry. Like hundreds of
+other good patriots, during the last four years, Mr. Walt Whitman has
+imagined that a certain amount of violent sympathy with the great deeds
+and sufferings of our soldiers, and of admiration for our national
+energy, together with a ready command of picturesque language, are
+sufficient inspiration for a poet. If this were the case, we had been a
+nation of poets. The constant developments of the war moved us
+continually to strong feeling and to strong expression of it. But in
+those cases in which these expressions were written out and printed with
+all due regard to prosody, they failed to make poetry, as any one may
+see by consulting now in cold blood the back volumes of the _Rebellion
+Record_.
+
+_Of course_ the city of Manhattan, as Mr. Whitman delights to call it,
+when regiments poured through it in the first months of the war, and its
+own sole god, to borrow the words of a real poet, ceased for a while to
+be the millionaire, was a noble spectacle, and a poetical statement to
+this effect is possible. _Of course_ the tumult of a battle is grand,
+the results of a battle tragic, and the untimely deaths of young men a
+theme for elegies. But he is not a poet who merely reiterates these
+plain facts _ore rotundo_. He only sings them worthily who views them
+from a height. Every tragic event collects about it a number of persons
+who delight to dwell upon its superficial points--of minds which are
+bullied by the _accidents_ of the affair. The temper of such minds seems
+to us to be the reverse of the poetic temper; for the poet, although he
+incidentally masters, grasps, and uses the superficial traits of his
+theme, is really a poet only in so far as he extracts its latent meaning
+and holds it up to common eyes. And yet from such minds most of our
+war-verses have come, and Mr. Whitman's utterances, much as the
+assertion may surprise his friends, are in this respect no exception to
+general fashion. They are an exception, however, in that they openly
+pretend to be something better; and this it is that makes them
+melancholy reading.
+
+Mr. Whitman is very fond of blowing his own trumpet, and he has made
+very explicit claims for his books. "Shut not your doors," he exclaims
+at the outset--
+
+    "Shut not your doors to me, proud libraries,
+    For that which was lacking among you all, yet needed most, I bring;
+    A book I have made for your dear sake, O soldiers,
+    And for you, O soul of man, and you, love of comrades;
+    The words of my book nothing, the life of it everything;
+    A book separate, not link'd with the rest, nor felt by the intellect;
+    But you will feel every word, O Libertad! arm'd Libertad!
+    It shall pass by the intellect to swim the sea, the air,
+      With joy with you, O soul of man."
+
+These are great pretensions, but it seems to us that the following are
+even greater:
+
+  "From Paumanok starting, I fly like a bird,
+  Around and around to soar, to sing the idea of all;
+  To the north betaking myself, to sing there arctic songs,
+  To Kanada, 'till I absorb Kanada in myself--to Michigan then,
+  To Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, to sing their songs (they are
+    inimitable);
+  Then to Ohio and Indiana, to sing theirs--to Missouri and Kansas
+    and Arkansas to sing theirs,
+  To Tennessee and Kentucky--to the Carolinas and Georgia, to sing theirs,
+  To Texas, and so along up toward California, to roam accepted
+    everywhere;
+  To sing first (to the tap of the war-drum, if need be)
+  The idea of all--of the western world, one and inseparable,
+  And then the song of each member of these States."
+
+Mr. Whitman's primary purpose is to celebrate the greatness of our
+armies; his secondary purpose is to celebrate the greatness of the city
+of New York. He pursues these objects through a hundred pages of matter
+which remind us irresistibly of the story of the college professor who,
+on a venturesome youth bringing him a theme done in blank verse,
+reminded him that it was not customary in writing prose to begin each
+line with a capital. The frequent capitals are the only marks of verse
+in Mr. Whitman's writings. There is, fortunately, but one attempt at
+rhyme. We say fortunately, for if the inequality of Mr. Whitman's lines
+were self-registering, as it would be in the case of an anticipated
+syllable at their close, the effect would be painful in the extreme. As
+the case stands, each line stands off by itself, in resolute
+independence of its companions, without a visible goal.
+
+But if Mr. Whitman does not write verse, he does not write ordinary
+prose. The reader has seen that liberty is "libertad." In like manner,
+comrade is "camerado"; Americans are "Americanos"; a pavement is a
+"trottoir," and Mr. Whitman himself is a "chansonnier." If there is one
+thing that Mr. Whitman is not, it is this, for Béranger was a
+_chansonnier_. To appreciate the force of our conjunction, the reader
+should compare his military lyrics with Mr. Whitman's declamations. Our
+author's novelty, however, is not in his words, but in the form of his
+writing. As we have said, it begins for all the world like verse and
+turns out to be arrant prose. It is more like Mr. Tupper's proverbs than
+anything we have met.
+
+But what if, in form, it _is_ prose? it may be asked. Very good poetry
+has come out of prose before this. To this we would reply that it must
+first have gone into it. Prose, in order to be good poetry, must first
+be good prose. As a general principle, we know of no circumstance more
+likely to impugn a writer's earnestness than the adoption of an
+anomalous style. He must have something very original to say if none of
+the old vehicles will carry his thoughts. Of course he _may_ be
+surprisingly original. Still, presumption is against him. If on
+examination the matter of his discourse proves very valuable, it
+justifies, or at any rate excuses, his literary innovation.
+
+But if, on the other hand, it is of a common quality, with nothing new
+about it but its manners, the public will judge the writer harshly. The
+most that can be said of Mr. Whitman's vaticinations is, that, cast in a
+fluent and familiar manner, the average substance of them might escape
+unchallenged. But we have seen that Mr. Whitman prides himself
+especially on the substance--the life--of his poetry. It may be rough,
+it may be grim, it may be clumsy--such we take to be the author's
+argument--but it is sincere, it is sublime, it appeals to the soul of
+man, it is the voice of a people. He tells us, in the lines quoted, that
+the words of his book are nothing. To our perception they are
+everything, and very little at that.
+
+A great deal of verse that is nothing but words has, during the war,
+been sympathetically sighed over and cut out of newspaper corners,
+because it has possessed a certain simple melody. But Mr. Whitman's
+verse, we are confident, would have failed even of this triumph, for the
+simple reason that no triumph, however small, is won but through the
+exercise of art, and that this volume is an offence against art. It is
+not enough to be grim and rough and careless; common sense is also
+necessary, for it is by common sense that we are judged. There exists in
+even the commonest minds, in literary matters, a certain precise
+instinct of conservatism, which is very shrewd in detecting wanton
+eccentricities.
+
+To this instinct Mr. Whitman's attitude seems monstrous. It is monstrous
+because it pretends to persuade the soul while it slights the
+intellect; because it pretends to gratify the feelings while it outrages
+the taste. The point is that it does this _on theory_, wilfully,
+consciously, arrogantly. It is the little nursery game of "open your
+mouth and shut your eyes." Our hearts are often touched through a
+compromise with the artistic sense, but never in direct violation of it.
+Mr. Whitman sits down at the outset and counts out the intelligence.
+This were indeed a wise precaution on his part if the intelligence were
+only submissive! But when she is deliberately insulted, she takes her
+revenge by simply standing erect and open-eyed. This is assuredly the
+best she can do. And if she could find a voice she would probably
+address Mr. Whitman as follows:--
+
+"You came to woo my sister, the human soul. Instead of giving me a kick
+as you approach, you should either greet me courteously, or, at least,
+steal in unobserved. But now you have me on your hands. Your chances are
+poor. What the human heart desires above all is sincerity, and you do
+not appear to me sincere. For a lover you talk entirely too much about
+yourself. In one place you threaten to absorb Kanada. In another you
+call upon the city of New York to incarnate you, as you have incarnated
+it. In another you inform us that neither youth pertains to you nor
+'delicatesse,' that you are awkward in the parlour, that you do not
+dance, and that you have neither bearing, beauty, knowledge, nor
+fortune. In another place, by an allusion to your 'little songs,' you
+seem to identify yourself with the third person of the Trinity.
+
+"For a poet who claims to sing 'the idea of all,' this is tolerably
+egotistical. We look in vain, however, through your book for a single
+idea. We find nothing but flashy imitations of ideas. We find a medley
+of extravagances and commonplaces. We find art, measure, grace, sense
+sneered at on every page, and nothing positive given us in their stead.
+To be positive one must have something to say; to be positive requires
+reason, labour, and art; and art requires, above all things, a
+suppression of one's self, a subordination of one's self to an idea.
+This will never do for you, whose plan is to adapt the scheme of the
+universe to your own limitations. You cannot entertain and exhibit
+ideas; but, as we have seen, you are prepared to incarnate them. It is
+for this reason, doubtless, that when once you have planted yourself
+squarely before the public, and in view of the great service you have
+done to the ideal, have become, as you say, 'accepted everywhere,' you
+can afford to deal exclusively in words. What would be bald nonsense and
+dreary platitudes in any one else becomes sublimity in you.
+
+"But all this is a mistake. To become adopted as a national poet, it is
+not enough to discard everything in particular and to accept everything
+in general, to amass crudity upon crudity, to discharge the undigested
+contents of your blotting-book into the lap of the public. You must
+respect the public which you address; for it has taste, if you have not.
+It delights in the grand, the heroic, and the masculine; but it delights
+to see these conceptions cast into worthy form. It is indifferent to
+brute sublimity. It will never do for you to thrust your hands into your
+pockets and cry out that, as the research of form is an intolerable
+bore, the shortest and most economical way for the public to embrace its
+idols--for the nation to realise its genius--is in your own person.
+
+"This democratic, liberty-loving, American populace, this stern and
+war-tried people, is a great civiliser. It is devoted to refinement. If
+it has sustained a monstrous war, and practised human nature's best in
+so many ways for the last five years, it is not to put up with spurious
+poetry afterwards. To sing aright our battles and our glories it is not
+enough to have served in a hospital (however praiseworthy the task in
+itself), to be aggressively careless, inelegant, and ignorant, and to be
+constantly preoccupied with yourself. It is not enough to be rude,
+lugubrious, and grim. You must also be serious. You must forget yourself
+in your ideas. Your personal qualities--the vigour of your temperament,
+the manly independence of your nature, the tenderness of your
+heart--these facts are impertinent. You must be _possessed_, and you
+must thrive to possess your possession. If in your striving you break
+into divine eloquence, then you are a poet. If the idea which possesses
+you is the idea of your country's greatness, then you are a national
+poet; and not otherwise."
+
+
+
+
+THE POETRY OF GEORGE ELIOT
+
+
+     I. A review of _The Spanish Gypsy_. _A Poem._ By George Eliot.
+     Boston: Ticknor and Fields. 1868. Originally published in _North
+     American Review_, October, 1868.
+
+     II. A review of _The Legend of Jubal, and other Poems_. By George
+     Eliot. Wm. Blackwood and Sons: Edinburgh and London. 1874.
+     Originally published in _North American Review_, October, 1874.
+
+
+
+
+THE POETRY OF GEORGE ELIOT
+
+
+I. THE SPANISH GYPSY
+
+I know not whether George Eliot has any enemies, nor why she should have
+any; but if perchance she has, I can imagine them to have hailed the
+announcement of a poem from her pen as a piece of particularly good
+news. "Now, finally," I fancy them saying, "this sadly over-rated author
+will exhibit all the weakness that is in her; now she will prove herself
+what we have all along affirmed her to be--not a serene, self-directing
+genius of the first order, knowing her powers and respecting them, and
+content to leave well enough alone, but a mere showy rhetorician,
+possessed and prompted, not by the humble spirit of truth, but by an
+insatiable longing for applause." Suppose Mr. Tennyson were to come out
+with a novel, or Madame George Sand were to produce a tragedy in French
+alexandrines. The reader will agree with me, that these are hard
+suppositions; yet the world has seen stranger things, and been
+reconciled to them. Nevertheless, with the best possible will toward our
+illustrious novelist, it is easy to put ourselves in the shoes of these
+hypothetical detractors. No one, assuredly, but George Eliot could mar
+George Eliot's reputation; but there was room for the fear that she
+might do it. This reputation was essentially prose-built, and in the
+attempt to insert a figment of verse of the magnitude of _The Spanish
+Gypsy_, it was quite possible that she might injure its fair
+proportions.
+
+In consulting her past works, for approval of their hopes and their
+fears, I think both her friends and her foes would have found sufficient
+ground for their arguments. Of all our English prose-writers of the
+present day, I think I may say, that, as a writer simply, a mistress of
+style, I have been very near preferring the author of _Silas Marner_ and
+of _Romola_,--the author, too, of _Felix Holt_. The motive of my great
+regard for her style I take to have been that I fancied it such perfect
+solid prose. Brilliant and lax as it was in tissue, it seemed to contain
+very few of the silken threads of poetry; it lay on the ground like a
+carpet, instead of floating in the air like a banner. If my impression
+was correct, _The Spanish Gypsy_ is not a genuine poem. And yet, looking
+over the author's novels in memory, looking them over in the light of
+her unexpected assumption of the poetical function, I find it hard at
+times not to mistrust my impression. I like George Eliot well enough, in
+fact, to admit, for the time, that I might have been in the wrong. If I
+had liked her less, if I had rated lower the quality of her prose, I
+should have estimated coldly the possibilities of her verse. Of course,
+therefore, if, as I am told many persons do in England, who consider
+carpenters and weavers and millers' daughters no legitimate subject for
+reputable fiction, I had denied her novels any qualities at all, I
+should have made haste, on reading the announcement of her poem, to
+speak of her as the world speaks of a lady, who, having reached a
+comfortable middle age, with her shoulders decently covered, "for
+reasons deep below the reach of thought," (to quote our author), begins
+to go out to dinner in a low-necked dress "of the period," and say in
+fine, in three words, that she was going to make a fool of herself.
+
+But here, meanwhile, is the book before me, to arrest all this _a
+priori_ argumentation. Time enough has elapsed since its appearance for
+most readers to have uttered their opinions, and for the general verdict
+of criticism to have been formed. In looking over several of the
+published reviews, I am struck with the fact that those immediately
+issued are full of the warmest delight and approval, and that, as the
+work ceases to be a novelty, objections, exceptions, and protests
+multiply. This is quite logical. Not only does it take a much longer
+time than the reviewer on a weekly journal has at his command to
+properly appreciate a work of the importance of _The Spanish Gypsy_, but
+the poem was actually much more of a poem than was to be expected. The
+foremost feeling of many readers must have been--it was certainly my
+own--that we had hitherto only half known George Eliot. Adding this
+dazzling new half to the old one, readers constructed for the moment a
+really splendid literary figure. But gradually the old half began to
+absorb the new, and to assimilate its virtues and failings, and critics
+finally remembered that the cleverest writer in the world is after all
+nothing and no one but himself.
+
+The most striking quality in _The Spanish Gypsy_, on a first reading, I
+think, is its extraordinary rhetorical energy and elegance. The richness
+of the author's style in her novels gives but an inadequate idea of the
+splendid generosity of diction displayed in the poem. She is so much of
+a thinker and an observer that she draws very heavily on her powers of
+expression, and one may certainly say that they not only never fail her,
+but that verbal utterance almost always bestows upon her ideas a
+peculiar beauty and fullness, apart from their significance. The result
+produced in this manner, the reader will see, may come very near being
+poetry; it is assuredly eloquence. The faults in the present work are
+very seldom faults of weakness, except in so far as it is weak to lack
+an absolute mastery of one's powers; they arise rather from an excess of
+rhetorical energy, from a desire to attain to perfect fullness and
+roundness of utterance; they are faults of overstatement. It is by no
+means uncommon to find a really fine passage injured by the addition of
+a clause which dilutes the idea under pretence of completing it. The
+poem opens, for instance, with a description of
+
+    "Broad-breasted Spain, leaning with equal love
+    (A calm earth-goddess crowned with corn and vines)
+    On the Mid Sea that moans with memories,
+    And on the untravelled Ocean, _whose vast tides
+    Pant dumbly passionate with dreams of youth_."
+
+The second half of the fourth line and the fifth, here, seem to me as
+poor as the others are good. So in the midst of the admirable
+description of Don Silva, which precedes the first scene in the
+castle:--
+
+              "A spirit framed
+    Too proudly special for obedience,
+    Too subtly pondering for mastery:
+    Born of a goddess with a mortal sire,
+    Heir of flesh-fettered, weak divinity,
+    _Doom-gifted with long resonant consciousness
+    And perilous heightening of the sentient soul_."
+
+The transition to the lines in Italic is like the passage from a
+well-ventilated room into a vacuum. On reflection, we see "long resonant
+consciousness" to be a very good term; but, as it stands, it certainly
+lacks breathing-space. On the other hand, there are more than enough
+passages of the character of the following to support what I have said
+of the genuine splendour of the style:--
+
+                      "I was right!
+    These gems have life in them: their colours speak,
+    Say what words fail of. So do many things,--
+    The scent of jasmine and the fountain's plash,
+    The moving shadows on the far-off hills,
+    The slanting moonlight and our clasping hands.
+    O Silva, there's an ocean round our words,
+    That overflows and drowns them. Do you know.
+    Sometimes when we sit silent, and the air
+    Breathes gently on us from the orange-trees,
+    It seems that with the whisper of a word
+    Our souls must shrink, get poorer, more apart?
+    Is it not true?
+
+                        DON SILVA.
+
+                      Yes, dearest, it is true.
+    Speech is but broken light upon the depth
+    Of the unspoken: even your loved words
+    Float in the larger meaning of your voice
+    As something dimmer."
+
+I may say in general, that the author's admirers must have found in _The
+Spanish Gypsy_ a presentment of her various special gifts stronger and
+fuller, on the whole, than any to be found in her novels. Those who
+valued her chiefly for her humour--the gentle humour which provokes a
+smile, but deprecates a laugh--will recognise that delightful gift in
+Blasco, and Lorenzo, and Roldan, and Juan,--slighter in quantity than in
+her prose-writings, but quite equal, I think, in quality. Those who
+prize most her descriptive powers will see them wondrously well embodied
+in these pages. As for those who have felt compelled to declare that she
+possesses the Shakespearian touch, they must consent, with what grace
+they may, to be disappointed. I have never thought our author a great
+dramatist, nor even a particularly dramatic writer. A real dramatist, I
+imagine, could never have reconciled himself to the odd mixture of the
+narrative and dramatic forms by which the present work is distinguished;
+and that George Eliot's genius should have needed to work under these
+conditions seems to me strong evidence of the partial and incomplete
+character of her dramatic instincts. An English critic lately described
+her, with much correctness, as a critic rather than a creator of
+characters. She puts her figures into action very successfully, but on
+the whole she thinks for them more than they think for themselves. She
+thinks, however, to wonderfully good purpose. In none of her works are
+there two more distinctly human representations than the characters of
+Silva and Juan. The latter, indeed, if I am not mistaken, ranks with
+Tito Melema and Hetty Sorrel, as one of her very best conceptions.
+
+What is commonly called George Eliot's humour consists largely, I think,
+in a certain tendency to epigram and compactness of utterance,--not the
+short-clipped, biting, ironical epigram, but a form of statement in
+which a liberal dose of truth is embraced in terms none the less
+comprehensive for being very firm and vivid. Juan says of Zarca that
+
+            "He is one of those
+    Who steal the keys from snoring Destiny,
+    And make the prophets lie."
+
+Zarca himself, speaking of "the steadfast mind, the undivided will to
+seek the good," says most admirably,--
+
+    "'Tis that compels the elements, _and wrings
+    A human music from the indifferent air_."
+
+When the Prior pronounces Fedalma's blood "unchristian as the
+leopard's," Don Silva retorts with,--
+
+    "Unchristian as the Blessed Virgin's blood.
+    Before the angel spoke the word, 'All hail!'"
+
+Zarca qualifies his daughter's wish to maintain her faith to her lover,
+at the same time that she embraces her father's fortunes, as
+
+    "A woman's dream,--who thinks by smiling well
+    To ripen figs in frost."
+
+This happy brevity of expression is frequently revealed in those rich
+descriptive passages and touches in which the work abounds. Some of the
+lines taken singly are excellent:--
+
+    "And bells make Catholic the trembling air";
+
+and,
+
+    "Sad as the twilight, all his clothes ill-girt";
+
+and again
+
+    "Mournful professor of high drollery."
+
+Here is a very good line and a half:--
+
+    "The old rain-fretted mountains in their robes
+    Of shadow-broken gray."
+
+Here, finally, are three admirable pictures:--
+
+    "The stars thin-scattered made the heavens large,
+    Bending in slow procession; in the east,
+    Emergent from the dark waves of the hills,
+    Seeming a little sister of the moon,
+    Glowed Venus all unquenched."
+
+    "Spring afternoons, when delicate shadows fall
+    Pencilled upon the grass; high summer morns,
+    When white light rains upon the quiet sea,
+    And cornfields flush for ripeness."
+
+    "Scent the fresh breath of the height-loving herbs,
+    That, trodden by the pretty parted hoofs
+    Of nimble goats, sigh at the innocent bruise,
+    And with a mingled difference exquisite
+    Pour a sweet burden on the buoyant air."
+
+But now to reach the real substance of the poem, and to allow the reader
+to appreciate the author's treatment of human character and passion, I
+must speak briefly of the story. I shall hardly misrepresent it, when I
+say that it is a very old one, and that it illustrates that very common
+occurrence in human affairs,--the conflict of love and duty. Such, at
+least, is the general impression made by the poem as it stands. It is
+very possible that the author's primary intention may have had a breadth
+which has been curtailed in the execution of the work,--that it was her
+wish to present a struggle between nature and culture, between education
+and the instinct of race. You can detect in such a theme the stuff of a
+very good drama,--a somewhat stouter stuff, however, than _The Spanish
+Gypsy_ is made of. George Eliot, true to that didactic tendency for
+which she has hitherto been remarkable, has preferred to make her
+heroine's predicament a problem in morals, and has thereby, I think,
+given herself hard work to reach a satisfactory solution. She has,
+indeed, committed herself to a signal error, in a psychological
+sense,--that of making a Gypsy girl with a conscience. Either Fedalma
+was a perfect Zincala in temper and instinct,--in which case her
+adhesion to her father and her race was a blind, passionate, sensuous
+movement, which is almost expressly contradicted,--or else she was a
+pure and intelligent Catholic, in which case nothing in the nature of a
+struggle can be predicated. The character of Fedalma, I may say, comes
+very near being a failure,--a very beautiful one; but in point of fact
+it misses it.
+
+It misses it, I think, thanks to that circumstance which in reading and
+criticising _The Spanish Gypsy_ we must not cease to bear in mind, the
+fact that the work is emphatically a _romance_. We may contest its being
+a poem, but we must admit that it is a romance in the fullest sense of
+the word. Whether the term may be absolutely defined I know not; but we
+may say of it, comparing it with the novel, that it carries much farther
+that compromise with reality which is the basis of all imaginative
+writing. In the romance this principle of compromise pervades the
+superstructure as well as the basis. The most that we exact is that the
+fable be consistent with itself. Fedalma is not a real Gypsy maiden. The
+conviction is strong in the reader's mind that a genuine Spanish Zincala
+would have somehow contrived both to follow her tribe and to keep her
+lover. If Fedalma is not real, Zarca is even less so. He is interesting,
+imposing, picturesque; but he is very far, I take it, from being a
+genuine _Gypsy_ chieftain. They are both ideal figures,--the offspring
+of a strong mental desire for creatures well rounded in their elevation
+and heroism,--creatures who should illustrate the nobleness of human
+nature divorced from its smallness. Don Silva has decidedly more of the
+common stuff of human feeling, more charming natural passion and
+weakness. But he, too, is largely a vision of the intellect; his
+constitution is adapted to the atmosphere and the climate of romance.
+Juan, indeed, has one foot well planted on the lower earth; but Juan is
+only an accessory figure. I have said enough to lead the reader to
+perceive that the poem should not be regarded as a rigid transcript of
+actual or possible fact,--that the action goes on in an artificial
+world, and that properly to comprehend it he must regard it with a
+generous mind.
+
+Viewed in this manner, as efficient figures in an essentially ideal and
+romantic drama, Fedalma and Zarca seem to gain vastly, and to shine with
+a brilliant radiance. If we reduce Fedalma to the level of the heroines
+of our modern novels, in which the interest aroused by a young girl is
+in proportion to the similarity of her circumstances to those of the
+reader, and in which none but the commonest feelings are required,
+provided they be expressed with energy, we shall be tempted to call her
+a solemn and cold-blooded jilt. In a novel it would have been next to
+impossible for the author to make the heroine renounce her lover. In
+novels we not only forgive that weakness which is common and familiar
+and human, but we actually demand it. But in poetry, although we are
+compelled to adhere to the few elementary passions of our nature, we do
+our best to dress them in a new and exquisite garb. Men and women in a
+poetical drama are nothing, if not distinguished.
+
+    "Our dear young love,--its breath was happiness!
+    But it had grown upon a larger life,
+    Which tore its roots asunder."
+
+These words are uttered by Fedalma at the close of the poem, and in them
+she emphatically claims the distinction of having her own private
+interests invaded by those of a people. The manner of her kinship with
+the Zincali is in fact a very much "larger life" than her marriage with
+Don Silva. We may, indeed, challenge the probability of her relationship
+to her tribe impressing her mind with a force equal to that of her
+love,--her "dear young love." We may declare that this is an unnatural
+and violent result. For my part, I think it is very far from violent; I
+think the author has employed her art in reducing the apparently
+arbitrary quality of her preference for her tribe. I say reducing; I do
+not say effacing; because it seems to me, as I have intimated, that just
+at this point her art has been wanting, and we are not sufficiently
+prepared for Fedalma's movement by a sense of her Gypsy temper and
+instincts. Still, we are in some degree prepared for it by various
+passages in the opening scenes of the book,--by all the magnificent
+description of her dance in the Plaza:--
+
+    "All gathering influences culminate
+    And urge Fedalma. Earth and heaven seem one,
+    Life a glad trembling on the outer edge
+    Of unknown rapture. Swifter now she moves,
+    Filling the measure with a double beat
+    And widening circle; now she seems to glow
+    With more declaréd presence, glorified.
+    Circling, she lightly bends, and lifts on high
+    The multitudinous-sounding tambourine,
+    And makes it ring and boom, then lifts it higher,
+    Stretching her left arm beauteous."
+
+We are better prepared for it, however, than by anything else, by the
+whole impression we receive of the exquisite refinement and elevation of
+the young girl's mind,--by all that makes her so bad a Gypsy. She
+possesses evidently a very high-strung intellect, and her whole conduct
+is in a higher key, as I may say, than that of ordinary women, or even
+ordinary heroines. She is natural, I think, in a poetical sense. She is
+consistent with her own prodigiously superfine character. From a lower
+point of view than that of the author, she lacks several of the
+desirable feminine qualities,--a certain womanly warmth and petulance, a
+graceful irrationality. Her mind is very much too lucid, and her
+aspirations too lofty. Her conscience, especially, is decidedly
+over-active. But this is a distinction which she shares with all the
+author's heroines,--Dinah Morris, Maggie Tulliver, Romola, and Esther
+Lyon,--a distinction, moreover, for which I should be very sorry to hold
+George Eliot to account. There are most assuredly women and women. While
+Messrs. Charles Reade and Wilkie Collins, and Miss Braddon and her
+school, tell one half the story, it is no more than fair that the author
+of _The Spanish Gypsy_ should, all unassisted, attempt to relate the
+other.
+
+Whenever a story really interests one, he is very fond of paying it the
+compliment of imagining it otherwise constructed, and of capping it with
+a different termination. In the present case, one is irresistibly
+tempted to fancy _The Spanish Gypsy_ in prose,--a compact, regular
+drama: not in George Eliot's prose, however: in a diction much more
+nervous and heated and rapid, written with short speeches as well as
+long. (The reader will have observed the want of brevity, retort,
+interruption, rapid alternation, in the dialogue of the poem. The
+characters all talk, as it were, standing still.) In such a play as the
+one indicated one imagines a truly dramatic Fedalma,--a passionate,
+sensuous, irrational Bohemian, as elegant as good breeding and native
+good taste could make her, and as pure as her actual sister in the
+poem,--but rushing into her father's arms with a cry of joy, and losing
+the sense of her lover's sorrow in what the author has elsewhere
+described as "the hurrying ardour of action." Or in the way of a
+different termination, suppose that Fedalma should for the time value at
+once her own love and her lover's enough to make her prefer the latter's
+destiny to that represented by her father. Imagine, then, that, after
+marriage, the Gypsy blood and nature should begin to flow and throb in
+quicker pulsations,--and that the poor girl should sadly contrast the
+sunny freedom and lawless joy of her people's lot with the splendid
+rigidity and formalism of her own. You may conceive at this point that
+she should pass from sadness to despair, and from despair to revolt.
+Here the catastrophe may occur in a dozen different ways. Fedalma may
+die before her husband's eyes, of unsatisfied longing for the fate she
+has rejected; or she may make an attempt actually to recover her fate,
+by wandering off and seeking out her people. The cultivated mind,
+however, it seems to me, imperiously demands, that, on finally
+overtaking them, she shall die of mingled weariness and shame, as
+neither a good Gypsy nor a good Christian, but simply a good figure for
+a tragedy. But there is a degree of levity which almost amounts to
+irreverence in fancying this admirable performance as anything other
+than it is.
+
+After Fedalma comes Zarca, and here our imagination flags. Not so George
+Eliot's: for as simple imagination, I think that in the conception of
+this impressive and unreal figure it appears decidedly at its strongest.
+With Zarca, we stand at the very heart of the realm of romance. There is
+a truly grand simplicity, to my mind, in the outline of his character,
+and a remarkable air of majesty in his poise and attitude. He is a _père
+noble_ in perfection. His speeches have an exquisite eloquence. In
+strictness, he is to the last degree unreal, illogical, and rhetorical;
+but a certain dramatic unity is diffused through his character by the
+depth and energy of the colours in which he is painted. With a little
+less simplicity, his figure would be decidedly modern. As it stands, it
+is neither modern nor mediæval; it belongs to the world of intellectual
+dreams and visions. The reader will admit that it is a vision of no
+small beauty, the conception of a stalwart chieftain who distils the
+cold exaltation of his purpose from the utter loneliness and obloquy of
+his race:--
+
+    "Wanderers whom no God took knowledge of,
+    To give them laws, to fight for them, or blight
+    Another race to make them ampler room;
+    A people with no home even in memory,
+    No dimmest lore of giant ancestors
+    To make a common hearth for piety";
+
+a people all ignorant of
+
+        "The rich heritage, the milder life,
+    Of nations fathered by a mighty Past."
+
+Like Don Silva, like Juan, like Sephardo, Zarca is decidedly a man of
+intellect.
+
+Better than Fedalma or than Zarca is the remarkably beautiful and
+elaborate portrait of Don Silva, in whom the author has wished to
+present a young nobleman as splendid in person and in soul as the
+dawning splendour of his native country. In the composition of his
+figure, the real and the romantic, brilliancy and pathos, are equally
+commingled. He cannot be said to stand out in vivid relief. As a piece
+of painting, there is nothing commanding, aggressive, brutal, as I may
+say, in his lineaments. But they will bear close scrutiny. Place
+yourself within the circumscription of the work, breathe its atmosphere,
+and you will see that Don Silva is portrayed with a delicacy to which
+English story-tellers, whether in prose or verse, have not accustomed
+us. There are better portraits in Browning, but there are also worse; in
+Tennyson there are none as good; and in the other great poets of the
+present century there are no attempts, that I can remember, to which we
+may compare it. In spite of the poem being called in honour of his
+mistress, Don Silva is in fact the central figure in the work. Much more
+than Fedalma, he is the passive object of the converging blows of Fate.
+The young girl, after all, did what was easiest; but he is entangled in
+a network of agony, without choice or compliance of his own. It is an
+admirable subject admirably treated. I may describe it by saying that it
+exhibits a perfect aristocratic nature (born and bred at a time when
+democratic aspirations were quite irrelevant to happiness), dragged down
+by no fault of its own into the vulgar mire of error and expiation. The
+interest which attaches to Don Silva's character revolves about its
+exquisite human weakness, its manly scepticism, its antipathy to the
+trenchant, the absolute, and arbitrary. At the opening of the book, the
+author rehearses his various titles:--
+
+    "Such titles with their blazonry are his
+    Who keeps this fortress, sworn Alcaÿde,
+    Lord of the valley, master of the town,
+    Commanding whom he will, himself commanded
+    By Christ his Lord, who sees him from the cross,
+    And from bright heaven where the Mother pleads;
+    By good Saint James, upon the milk-white steed,
+    Who leaves his bliss to fight for chosen Spain;
+    By the dead gaze of all his ancestors;
+    And by the mystery of his Spanish blood,
+    Charged with the awe and glories of the past."
+
+Throughout the poem, we are conscious, during the evolution of his
+character, of the presence of these high mystical influences, which,
+combined with his personal pride, his knightly temper, his delicate
+culture, form a splendid background for passionate dramatic action. The
+finest pages in the book, to my taste, are those which describe his
+lonely vigil in the Gypsy camp, after he has failed in winning back
+Fedalma, and has pledged his faith to Zarca. Placed under guard, and
+left to his own stern thoughts, his soul begins to react against the
+hideous disorder to which he has committed it, to proclaim its kinship
+with "customs and bonds and laws," and its sacred need of the light of
+human esteem:--
+
+                                  "Now awful Night,
+    Ancestral mystery of mysteries, came down
+    Past all the generations of the stars,
+    And visited his soul with touch more close
+    Than when he kept that closer, briefer watch,
+    Under the church's roof, beside his arms,
+    And won his knighthood."
+
+To be appreciated at their worth, these pages should be attentively
+read. Nowhere has the author's marvellous power of expression, the
+mingled dignity and pliancy of her style, obtained a greater triumph.
+She has reproduced the expression of a mind with the same vigorous
+distinctness as that with which a great painter represents the
+expression of a countenance.
+
+The character which accords best with my own taste is that of the
+minstrel Juan, an extremely generous conception. He fills no great part
+in the drama; he is by nature the reverse of a man of action; and,
+strictly, the story could very well dispense with him. Yet, for all
+that, I should be sorry to lose him, and lose thereby the various
+excellent things which are said of him and by him. I do not include his
+songs among the latter. Only two of the lyrics in the work strike me as
+good: the song of Pablo, "The world is great: the birds all fly from
+me"; and, in a lower degree, the chant of the Zincali, in the fourth
+book. But I do include the words by which he is introduced to the
+reader:--
+
+          "Juan was a troubadour revived,
+    Freshening life's dusty road with babbling rills
+    Of wit and song, living 'mid harnessed men
+    With limbs ungalled by armour, ready so
+    To soothe them weary and to cheer them sad.
+    Guest at the board, companion in the camp,
+    A crystal mirror to the life around:
+    Flashing the comment keen of simple fact
+    Defined in words; lending brief lyric voice
+    To grief and sadness; hardly taking note
+    Of difference betwixt his own and others';
+    But, rather singing as a listener
+    To the deep moans, the cries, the wildstrong joys
+    Of universal Nature, old, yet young."
+
+When Juan talks at his ease, he strikes the note of poetry much more
+surely than when he lifts his voice in song:--
+
+    "Yet if your graciousness will not disdain
+    A poor plucked songster, shall he sing to you?
+    _Some lay of afternoons,--some ballad strain
+    Of those who ached once, but are sleeping now
+    Under the sun-warmed flowers?_"
+
+Juan's link of connection with the story is, in the first place, that he
+is in love with Fedalma, and, in the second, as a piece of local colour.
+His attitude with regard to Fedalma is indicated with beautiful
+delicacy:--
+
+    "O lady, constancy has kind and rank.
+    One man's is lordly, plump, and bravely clad,
+    Holds its head high, and tells the world its name:
+    Another man's is beggared, must go bare,
+    And shiver through the world, the jest of all,
+    But that it puts the motley on, and plays
+    Itself the jester."
+
+Nor are his merits lost upon her, as she declares, with no small
+force,--
+
+    "No! on the close-thronged spaces of the earth
+    A battle rages; Fate has carried me
+    'Mid the thick arrows: I will keep my stand,--
+    Nor shrink, and let the shaft pass by my breast
+    To pierce another. O, 'tis written large,
+    The thing I have to do. But you, dear Juan,
+    Renounce, endure, are brave, unurged by aught
+    Save the sweet overflow of your good-will."
+
+In every human imbroglio, be it of a comic or a tragic nature, it is
+good to think of an observer standing aloof, the critic, the idle
+commentator of it all, taking notes, as we may say, in the interest of
+truth. The exercise of this function is the chief ground of our interest
+in Juan. Yet as a man of action, too, he once appeals most irresistibly
+to our sympathies: I mean in the admirable scene with Hinda, in which he
+wins back his stolen finery by his lute-playing. This scene, which is
+written in prose, has a simple realistic power which renders it a truly
+remarkable composition.
+
+Of the different parts of _The Spanish Gypsy_ I have spoken with such
+fullness as my space allows: it remains to add a few remarks upon the
+work as a whole. Its great fault is simply that it is not a genuine
+poem. It lacks the hurrying quickness, the palpitating warmth, the
+bursting melody of such a creation. A genuine poem is a tree that breaks
+into blossom and shakes in the wind. George Eliot's elaborate
+composition is like a vast mural design in mosaic-work, where great
+slabs and delicate morsels of stone are laid together with wonderful
+art, where there are plenty of noble lines and generous hues, but where
+everything is rigid, measured, and cold,--nothing dazzling, magical, and
+vocal. The poem contains a number of faulty lines,--lines of twelve, of
+eleven, and of eight syllables,--of which it is easy to suppose that a
+more sacredly commissioned versifier would not have been guilty.
+Occasionally, in the search for poetic effect, the author decidedly
+misses her way:--
+
+                              "All her being paused
+    In resolution, _as some leonine wave_," etc.
+
+A "leonine" wave is rather too much of a lion and too little of a wave.
+The work possesses imagination, I think, in no small measure. The
+description of Silva's feelings during his sojourn in the Gypsy camp is
+strongly pervaded by it; or if perchance the author achieved these
+passages without rising on the wings of fancy, her glory is all the
+greater. But the poem is wanting in passion. The reader is annoyed by a
+perpetual sense of effort and of intellectual tension. It is a
+characteristic of George Eliot, I imagine, to allow her impressions to
+linger a long time in her mind, so that by the time they are ready for
+use they have lost much of their original freshness and vigour. They
+have acquired, of course, a number of artificial charms, but they have
+parted with their primal natural simplicity. In this poem we see the
+landscape, the people, the manners of Spain as through a glass smoked
+by the flame of meditative vigils, just as we saw the outward aspect of
+Florence in _Romola_. The brightness of colouring is there, the artful
+chiaroscuro, and all the consecrated properties of the scene; but they
+gleam in an artificial light. The background of the action is admirable
+in spots, but is cold and mechanical as a whole. The immense rhetorical
+ingenuity and elegance of the work, which constitute its main
+distinction, interfere with the faithful, uncompromising reflection of
+the primary elements of the subject.
+
+The great merit of the characters is that they are marvellously well
+_understood_,--far better understood than in the ordinary picturesque
+romance of action, adventure, and mystery. And yet they are not
+understood to the bottom; they retain an indefinably factitious air,
+which is not sufficiently justified by their position as ideal figures.
+The reader who has attentively read the closing scene of the poem will
+know what I mean. The scene shows remarkable talent; it is eloquent, it
+is beautiful; but it is arbitrary and fanciful, more than
+unreal,--untrue. The reader silently chafes and protests, and finally
+breaks forth and cries, "O for a blast from the outer world!" Silva and
+Fedalma have developed themselves so daintily and elaborately within the
+close-sealed precincts of the author's mind, that they strike us at last
+as acting not as simple human creatures, but as downright _amateurs_ of
+the morally graceful and picturesque. To say that this is the ultimate
+impression of the poem is to say that it is not a great work. It is in
+fact not a great drama. It is, in the first place, an admirable study of
+character,--an essay, as they say, toward the solution of a given
+problem in conduct. In the second, it is a noble literary performance.
+It can be read neither without interest in the former respect, nor
+without profit for its signal merits of style,--and this in spite of the
+fact that the versification is, as the French say, as little _réussi_ as
+was to be expected in a writer beginning at a bound with a kind of verse
+which is very much more difficult than even the best prose,--the
+author's own prose. I shall indicate most of its merits and defects,
+great and small, if I say it is a romance,--a romance written by one who
+is emphatically a thinker.
+
+
+II. THE LEGEND OF JUBAL AND OTHER POEMS
+
+When the author of _Middlemarch_ published, some years since, her first
+volume of verse, the reader, in trying to judge it fairly, asked himself
+what he should think of it if she had never published a line of prose.
+The question, perhaps, was not altogether a help to strict fairness of
+judgment, but the author was protected from illiberal conclusions by the
+fact that, practically, it was impossible to answer it. George Eliot
+belongs to that class of pre-eminent writers in relation to whom the
+imagination comes to self-consciousness only to find itself in
+subjection. It was impossible to disengage one's judgment from the
+permanent influence of _Adam Bede_ and its companions, and it was
+necessary, from the moment that the author undertook to play the poet's
+part, to feel that her genius was all of one piece.
+
+People have often asked themselves how they would estimate Shakespeare
+if they knew him only by his comedies, Homer if his name stood only for
+the _Odyssey_, and Milton if he had written nothing but "Lycidas" and
+the shorter pieces. The question of necessity, inevitable though it is,
+leads to nothing. George Eliot is neither Homer nor Shakespeare nor
+Milton; but her work, like theirs, is a massive achievement, divided
+into a supremely good and a less good, and it provokes us, like theirs,
+to the fruitless attempt to estimate the latter portion on its own
+merits alone.
+
+The little volume before us gives us another opportunity; but here, as
+before, we find ourselves uncomfortably divided between the fear, on the
+one hand, of being bribed into favour, and, on the other, of giving
+short measure of it. The author's verses are a narrow manifestation of
+her genius, but they are an unmistakeable manifestation. _Middlemarch_
+has made us demand even finer things of her than we did before, and
+whether, as patented readers of _Middlemarch_, we like "Jubal" and its
+companions the less or the more, we must admit that they are
+characteristic products of the same intellect.
+
+We imagine George Eliot is quite philosopher enough, having produced her
+poems mainly as a kind of experimental entertainment for her own mind,
+to let them commend themselves to the public on any grounds whatever
+which will help to illustrate the workings of versatile
+intelligence,--as interesting failures, if nothing better. She must feel
+they are interesting; an exaggerated modesty cannot deny that.
+
+We have found them extremely so. They consist of a rhymed narrative, of
+some length, of the career of Jubal, the legendary inventor of the lyre;
+of a short rustic idyl in blank verse on a theme gathered in the Black
+Forest of Baden; of a tale, versified in rhyme, from Boccaccio; and of a
+series of dramatic scenes called "Armgart,"--the best thing, to our
+sense, of the four. To these are added a few shorter pieces, chiefly in
+blank verse, each of which seems to us proportionately more successful
+than the more ambitious ones. Our author's verse is a mixture of
+spontaneity of thought and excessive reflectiveness of expression and
+its value is generally more in the idea than in the form. In whatever
+George Eliot writes you have the comfortable certainty, infrequent in
+other quarters, of finding an idea, and you get the substance of her
+thought in the short poems, without the somewhat rigid envelope of her
+poetic diction.
+
+If we may say, broadly, that the supreme merit of a poem is in having
+warmth, and that it is less and less valuable in proportion as it cools
+by too long waiting upon either fastidious skill or inefficient skill,
+the little group of verses entitled "Brother and Sister" deserve our
+preference. They have extreme loveliness, and the feeling they so
+abundantly express is of a much less intellectualised sort than that
+which prevails in the other poems. It is seldom that one of our author's
+compositions concludes upon so simply sentimental a note as the last
+lines of "Brother and Sister":--
+
+    "But were another childhood-world my share,
+    I would be born a little sister there!"
+
+This will be interesting to many readers as proceeding more directly
+from the writer's personal experience than anything else they remember.
+George Eliot's is a personality so enveloped in the mists of reflection
+that it is an uncommon sensation to find one's self in immediate contact
+with it. This charming poem, too, throws a grateful light on some of the
+best pages the author has written,--those in which she describes her
+heroine's childish years in _The Mill on the Floss_. The finest thing
+in that admirable novel has always been, to our taste, not its
+portrayal of the young girl's love-struggles as regards her lover, but
+those as regards her brother. The former are fiction,--skilful fiction;
+but the latter are warm reality, and the merit of the verses we speak of
+is that they are coloured from the same source.
+
+In "Stradivarius," the famous old violin-maker affirms in every pregnant
+phrase the supreme duty of being perfect in one's labour, and lays down
+the dictum, which should be the first article in every artist's faith:--
+
+                  "'Tis God gives skill,
+    But not without men's hands: He could not make
+    Antonio Stradivari's violins
+    Without Antonio."
+
+This is the only really inspiring working-creed, and our author's
+utterance of it justifies her claim to having the distinctively artistic
+mind, more forcibly than her not infrequent shortcomings in the
+direction of an artistic _ensemble_.
+
+Many persons will probably pronounce "A Minor Prophet" the gem of this
+little collection, and it is certainly interesting, for a great many
+reasons. It may seem to characterise the author on a number of sides. It
+illustrates vividly, in the extraordinary ingenuity and flexibility of
+its diction, her extreme provocation to indulge in the verbal licence
+of verse. It reads almost like a close imitation of Browning, the great
+master of the poetical grotesque, except that it observes a discretion
+which the poet of _Red-Cotton Night-caps_ long ago threw overboard. When
+one can say neat things with such rhythmic felicity, why not attempt it,
+even if one has at one's command the magnificent vehicle of the style of
+_Middlemarch_?
+
+The poem is a kindly satire upon the views and the person of an American
+vegetarian, a certain Elias Baptist Butterworth,--a gentleman,
+presumably, who under another name, as an evening caller, has not a
+little retarded the flight of time for the author. Mr. Browning has
+written nothing better than the account of the Butterworthian "Thought
+Atmosphere":--
+
+    "And when all earth is vegetarian,
+    When, lacking butchers, quadrupeds die out,
+    And less Thought-atmosphere is re-absorbed
+    By nerves of insects parasitical,
+    Those higher truths, seized now by higher minds,
+    But not expressed (the insects hindering),
+    Will either flash out into eloquence,
+    Or, better still, be comprehensible,
+    By rappings simply, without need of roots."
+
+The author proceeds to give a sketch of the beatific state of things
+under the vegetarian _régime_ prophesied by her friend in
+
+        "Mildly nasal tones,
+    And vowels stretched to suit the widest views."
+
+How, for instance,
+
+        "Sahara will be populous
+    With families of gentlemen retired
+    From commerce in more Central Africa,
+    Who order coolness, as we order coal,
+    And have a lobe anterior strong enough
+    To think away the sand-storms."
+
+Or how, as water is probably a non-conductor of the Thought-atmosphere,
+
+    "Fishes may lead carnivorous lives obscure,
+    But must not dream of culinary rank
+    Or being dished in good society."
+
+Then follows the author's own melancholy head-shake and her reflections
+on the theme that there can be no easy millennium, and that
+
+                                          "Bitterly
+    I feel that every change upon this earth
+    Is bought with sacrifice";
+
+and that, even if Mr. Butterworth's axioms were not too good to be true,
+one might deprecate them in the interest of that happiness which is
+associated with error that is deeply familiar. Human improvement, she
+concludes, is something both larger and smaller than the vegetarian
+bliss, and consists less in a realised perfection than in the sublime
+dissatisfaction of generous souls with the shortcomings of the actual.
+All this is unfolded in verse which, if without the absolute pulse of
+spontaneity, has at least something that closely resembles it. It has
+very fine passages.
+
+Very fine, too, both in passages and as a whole, is "The Legend of
+Jubal." It is noteworthy, by the way, that three of these poems are on
+themes connected with music; and yet we remember no representation of a
+musician among the multitudinous figures which people the author's
+novels. But George Eliot, we take it, has the musical sense in no small
+degree, and the origin of melody and harmony is here described in some
+very picturesque and sustained poetry.
+
+Jubal invents the lyre and teaches his companions and his tribe how to
+use it, and then goes forth to wander in quest of new musical
+inspiration. In this pursuit he grows patriarchally old, and at last
+makes his way back to his own people. He finds them, greatly advanced in
+civilisation, celebrating what we should call nowadays his centennial,
+and making his name the refrain of their songs. He goes in among them
+and declares himself, but they receive him as a lunatic, and buffet him,
+and thrust him out into the wilderness again, where he succumbs to their
+unconscious ingratitude.
+
+    "The immortal name of Jubal filled the sky,
+    While Jubal, lonely, laid him down to die."
+
+In his last hour he has a kind of metaphysical vision which consoles
+him, and enables him to die contented. A mystic voice assures him that
+he has no cause for complaint; that his use to mankind was everything,
+and his credit and glory nothing; that being rich in his genius, it was
+his part to give, gratuitously, to unendowed humanity; and that the
+knowledge of his having become a part of man's joy, and an image in
+man's soul, should reconcile him to the prospect of lying senseless in
+the tomb. Jubal assents, and expires.
+
+              "A quenched sun-wave,
+    The all-creating Presence for his grave."
+
+This is very noble and heroic doctrine, and is enforced in verse not
+unworthy of it for having a certain air of strain and effort; for surely
+it is not doctrine that the egoistic heart rises to without some
+experimental flutter of the wings. It is the expression of a pessimistic
+philosophy which pivots upon itself only in the face of a really
+formidable ultimatum. We cordially accept it, however, and are tolerably
+confident that the artist in general, in his death-throes, will find
+less repose in the idea of a heavenly compensation for earthly neglect
+than in the certainty that humanity is really assimilating his
+productions.
+
+"Agatha" is slighter in sentiment than its companions, and has the vague
+aroma of an idea rather than the positive weight of thought. It is very
+graceful. "How Lisa loved the King" seems to us to have, more than its
+companions, the easy flow and abundance of prime poetry; it wears a
+reflection of the incomparable naturalness of its model in the
+_Decameron_. "Armgart" we have found extremely interesting, although
+perhaps it offers plainest proof of what the author sacrifices in
+renouncing prose. The drama, in prose, would have been vividly dramatic,
+while, as it stands, we have merely a situation contemplated, rather
+than unfolded, in a dramatic light. A great singer loses her voice, and
+a patronising nobleman, who, before the calamity, had wished her to
+become his wife, retire from the stage, and employ her genius for the
+beguilement of private life, finds that he has urgent business in
+another neighbourhood, and that he has not the mission to espouse her
+misfortune. Armgart rails tremendously at fate, often in very striking
+phrase. The Count of course, in bidding her farewell, has hoped that
+time will soften her disappointment:--
+
+    "That empty cup so neatly ciphered, 'Time,'
+    Handed me as a cordial for despair.
+    Time--what a word to fling in charity!
+    Bland, neutral word for slow, dull-beating pain,--
+    Days, months, and years!"
+
+We must refer the reader to the poem itself for knowledge how
+resignation comes to so bitter a pain as the mutilation of conscious
+genius. It comes to Armgart because she is a very superior girl; and
+though her outline, here, is at once rather sketchy and rather rigid,
+she may be added to that group of magnificently generous women,--the
+Dinahs, the Maggies, the Romolas, the Dorotheas,--the representation of
+whom is our author's chief title to our gratitude. But in spite of
+Armgart's resignation, the moral atmosphere of the poem, like that of
+most of the others and like that of most of George Eliot's writings, is
+an almost gratuitously sad one.
+
+It would take more space than we can command to say how it is that at
+this and at other points our author strikes us as a spirit mysteriously
+perverted from her natural temper. We have a feeling that, both
+intellectually and morally, her genius is essentially of a simpler order
+than most of her recent manifestations of it. Intellectually, it has run
+to epigram and polished cleverness, and morally to a sort of conscious
+and ambitious scepticism, with which it only half commingles. The
+interesting thing would be to trace the moral divergence from the
+characteristic type. At bottom, according to this notion, the author of
+_Romola_ and _Middlemarch_ has an ardent desire and faculty for
+positive, active, constructive belief of the old-fashioned kind, but she
+has fallen upon a critical age and felt its contagion and dominion. If,
+with her magnificent gifts, she had been borne by the mighty general
+current in the direction of passionate faith, we often think that she
+would have achieved something incalculably great.
+
+
+
+
+THE LIMITATIONS OF DICKENS
+
+
+     A review of _Our Mutual Friend_. By Charles Dickens. New York:
+     Harper Brothers. 1865. Originally published in _The Nation_,
+     December 21, 1865.
+
+
+
+
+THE LIMITATIONS OF DICKENS
+
+
+_Our Mutual Friend_ is, to our perception, the poorest of Mr. Dickens's
+works. And it is poor with the poverty not of momentary embarrassment,
+but of permanent exhaustion. It is wanting in inspiration. For the last
+ten years it has seemed to us that Mr. Dickens has been unmistakeably
+forcing himself. _Bleak House_ was forced; _Little Dorrit_ was laboured;
+the present work is dug out as with a spade and pickaxe.
+
+Of course--to anticipate the usual argument--who but Dickens could have
+written it? Who, indeed? Who else would have established a lady in
+business in a novel on the admirably solid basis of her always putting
+on gloves and tying a handkerchief around her head in moments of grief,
+and of her habitually addressing her family with "Peace! hold!" It is
+needless to say that Mrs. Reginald Wilfer is first and last the occasion
+of considerable true humour. When, after conducting her daughter to Mrs.
+Boffin's carriage, in sight of all the envious neighbours, she is
+described as enjoying her triumph during the next quarter of an hour by
+airing herself on the doorstep "in a kind of splendidly serene trance,"
+we laugh with as uncritical a laugh as could be desired of us. We pay
+the same tribute to her assertions, as she narrates the glories of the
+society she enjoyed at her father's table, that she has known as many as
+three copper-plate engravers exchanging the most exquisite sallies and
+retorts there at one time. But when to these we have added a dozen more
+happy examples of the humour which was exhaled from every line of Mr.
+Dickens's earlier writings, we shall have closed the list of the merits
+of the work before us.
+
+To say that the conduct of the story, with all its complications,
+betrays a long-practised hand, is to pay no compliment worthy the
+author. If this were, indeed, a compliment, we should be inclined to
+carry it further, and congratulate him on his success in what we should
+call the manufacture of fiction; for in so doing we should express a
+feeling that has attended us throughout the book. Seldom, we reflected,
+had we read a book so intensely _written_, so little seen, known, or
+felt.
+
+In all Mr. Dickens's works the fantastic has been his great resource;
+and while his fancy was lively and vigorous it accomplished great
+things. But the fantastic, when the fancy is dead, is a very poor
+business. The movement of Mr. Dickens's fancy in Mr. Wilfer and Mr.
+Boffin and Lady Tippins, and the Lammles and Miss Wren, and even in
+Eugene Wrayburn, is, to our mind, a movement lifeless, forced,
+mechanical. It is the letter of his old humour without the spirit. It is
+hardly too much to say that every character here put before us is a mere
+bundle of eccentricities, animated by no principle of nature whatever.
+
+In former days there reigned in Mr. Dickens's extravagances a
+comparative consistency; they were exaggerated statements of types that
+really existed. We had, perhaps, never known a Newman Noggs, nor a
+Pecksniff, nor a Micawber; but we had known persons of whom these
+figures were but the strictly logical consummation. But among the
+grotesque creatures who occupy the pages before us, there is not one
+whom we can refer to as an existing type. In all Mr. Dickens's stories,
+indeed, the reader has been called upon, and has willingly consented, to
+accept a certain number of figures or creatures of pure fancy, for this
+was the author's poetry. He was, moreover, always repaid for his
+concession by a peculiar beauty or power in these exceptional
+characters. But he is now expected to make the same concession, with a
+very inadequate reward.
+
+What do we get in return for accepting Miss Jenny Wren as a possible
+person? This young lady is the type of a certain class of characters of
+which Mr. Dickens has made a specialty, and with which he has been
+accustomed to draw alternate smiles and tears, according as he pressed
+one spring or another. But this is very cheap merriment and very cheap
+pathos. Miss Jenny Wren is a poor little dwarf, afflicted as she
+constantly reiterates, with a "bad back" and "queer legs," who makes
+doll's dresses, and is for ever pricking at those with whom she
+converses in the air, with her needle, and assuring them that she knows
+their "tricks and their manners." Like all Mr. Dickens's pathetic
+characters, she is a little monster; she is deformed, unhealthy,
+unnatural; she belongs to the troop of hunchbacks, imbeciles, and
+precocious children who have carried on the sentimental business in all
+Mr. Dickens's novels; the little Nells, the Smikes, the Paul Dombeys.
+
+Mr. Dickens goes as far out of the way for his wicked people as he does
+for his good ones. Rogue Riderhood, indeed, in the present story, is
+villainous with a sufficiently natural villainy; he belongs to that
+quarter of society in which the author is most at his ease. But was
+there ever such wickedness as that of the Lammles and Mr. Fledgeby? Not
+that people have not been as mischievous as they; but was any one ever
+mischievous in that singular fashion? Did a couple of elegant swindlers
+ever take such particular pains to be aggressively inhuman?--for we can
+find no other word for the gratuitous distortions to which they are
+subjected. The word _humanity_ strikes us as strangely discordant, in
+the midst of these pages; for, let us boldly declare it, there is no
+humanity here.
+
+Humanity is nearer home than the Boffins, and the Lammles, and the
+Wilfers, and the Veneerings. It is in what men have in common with each
+other, and not what they have in distinction. The people just named have
+nothing in common with each other, except the fact that they have
+nothing in common with mankind at large. What a world were this world if
+the world of _Our Mutual Friend_ were an honest reflection of it! But a
+community of eccentrics is impossible. Rules alone are consistent with
+each other; exceptions are inconsistent. Society is maintained by
+natural sense and natural feeling. We cannot conceive a society in which
+these principles are not in some manner represented. Where in these
+pages are the depositaries of that intelligence without which the
+movement of life would cease? Who represents nature?
+
+Accepting half of Mr. Dickens's persons as intentionally grotesque,
+where are those examplars of sound humanity who should afford us the
+proper measure of their companions' variations? We ought not, in justice
+to the author, to seek them among his weaker--that is, his mere
+conventional--characters; in John Harmon, Lizzie Hexam, or Mortimer
+Lightwood; but we assuredly cannot find them among his stronger--that
+is, his artificial creations.
+
+Suppose we take Eugene Wrayburn and Bradley Headstone. They occupy a
+half-way position between the habitual probable of nature and the
+habitual impossible of Mr. Dickens. A large portion of the story rests
+upon the enmity borne by Headstone to Wrayburn, both being in love with
+the same woman. Wrayburn is a gentleman, and Headstone is one of the
+people. Wrayburn is well-bred, careless, elegant, sceptical, and idle:
+Headstone is a high-tempered, hard-working, ambitious young
+schoolmaster. There lay in the opposition of these two characters a very
+good story. But the prime requisite was that they should _be_
+characters: Mr. Dickens, according to his usual plan, has made them
+simply figures, and between them the story that was to be, the story
+that should have been, has evaporated. Wrayburn lounges about with his
+hands in his pockets, smoking a cigar, and talking nonsense. Headstone
+strides about, clenching his fists and biting his lips and grasping his
+stick.
+
+There is one scene in which Wrayburn chaffs the schoolmaster with easy
+insolence, while the latter writhes impotently under his well-bred
+sarcasm. This scene is very clever, but it is very insufficient. If the
+majority of readers were not so very timid in the use of words we should
+call it vulgar. By this we do not mean to indicate the conventional
+impropriety of two gentlemen exchanging lively personalities; we mean to
+emphasise the essentially small character of these personalities. In
+other words, the moment, dramatically, is great, while the author's
+conception is weak. The friction of two _men_, of two characters, of two
+passions, produces stronger sparks than Wrayburn's boyish repartees and
+Headstone's melodramatic commonplaces.
+
+Such scenes as this are useful in fixing the limits of Mr. Dickens's
+insight. Insight is, perhaps, too strong a word; for we are convinced
+that it is one of the chief conditions of his genius not to see beneath
+the surface of things. If we might hazard a definition of his literary
+character, we should, accordingly, call him the greatest of superficial
+novelists. We are aware that this definition confines him to an inferior
+rank in the department of letters which he adorns; but we accept this
+consequence of our proposition. It were, in our opinion, an offence
+against humanity to place Mr. Dickens among the greatest novelists. For,
+to repeat what we have already intimated, he has created nothing but
+figure. He has added nothing to our understanding of human character. He
+is master of but two alternatives: he reconciles us to what is
+commonplace, and he reconciles us to what is odd. The value of the
+former service is questionable; and the manner in which Mr. Dickens
+performs it sometimes conveys a certain impression of charlatanism. The
+value of the latter service is incontestable, and here Mr. Dickens is an
+honest, an admirable artist.
+
+But what is the condition of the truly great novelist? For him there are
+no alternatives, for him there are no oddities, for him there is nothing
+outside of humanity. He cannot shirk it; it imposes itself upon him. For
+him alone, therefore, there is a true and a false; for him alone, it is
+possible to be right, because it is possible to be wrong. Mr. Dickens is
+a great observer and a great humourist, but he is nothing of a
+philosopher.
+
+Some people may hereupon say, so much the better; we say, so much the
+worse. For a novelist very soon has need of a little philosophy. In
+treating of Micawber, and Boffin, and Pickwick, _et hoc genus omne_, he
+can, indeed, dispense with it, for this--we say it with all
+deference--is not serious writing. But when he comes to tell the story
+of a passion, a story like that of Headstone and Wrayburn, he becomes a
+moralist as well as an artist. He must know _man_ as well as _men_, and
+to know man is to be a philosopher.
+
+The writer who knows men alone, if he have Mr. Dickens's humour and
+fancy, will give us figures and pictures for which we cannot be too
+grateful, for he will enlarge our knowledge of the world. But when he
+introduces men and women whose interest is preconceived to lie not in
+the poverty, the weakness, the drollery of their natures, but in their
+complete and unconscious subjection to ordinary and healthy human
+emotions, all his humour, all his fancy, will avail him nothing if, out
+of the fullness of his sympathy, he is unable to prosecute those
+generalisations in which alone consists the real greatness of a work of
+art.
+
+This may sound like very subtle talk about a very simple matter. It is
+rather very simple talk about a very subtle matter. A story based upon
+those elementary passions in which alone we seek the true and final
+manifestation of character must be told in a spirit of intellectual
+superiority to those passions. That is, the author must understand what
+he is talking about. The perusal of a story so told is one of the most
+elevating experiences within the reach of the human mind. The perusal of
+a story which is not so told is infinitely depressing and
+unprofitable.
+
+
+
+
+TENNYSON'S DRAMA
+
+
+     I. A review of _Queen Mary_. _A Drama._ By Alfred Tennyson. Boston:
+     J. R. Osgood. 1875. Originally published in _The Galaxy_,
+     September, 1875.
+
+     _Queen Mary_ was produced at the Lyceum Theatre, London, in 1876.
+     Mr. Irving playing the part of Philip II. It was Tennyson's wish
+     that he should appear as Cardinal Pole, but in the acting version
+     that character was eliminated. The part of Philip has been
+     immortalized by Whistler's celebrated painting of Irving in that
+     rôle. ED.
+
+     II. A review of _Harold_. _A Drama._ By Alfred Tennyson. London.
+     1877. Originally published in _The Nation_, January 18, 1877.
+
+
+
+
+TENNYSON'S DRAMA
+
+
+I. QUEEN MARY
+
+A new poem by Mr. Tennyson is certain to be largely criticised, and if
+the new poem is a drama, the performance must be a great event for
+criticism as well as for poetry. Great surprise, great hopes, and great
+fears had been called into being by the announcement that the author of
+so many finely musical lyrics and finished, chiselled specimens of
+narrative verse, had tempted fortune in the perilous field of the drama.
+
+Few poets seemed less dramatic than Tennyson, even in his most dramatic
+attempts--in "Maud," in "Enoch Arden," or in certain of the _Idyls of
+the King_. He had never used the dramatic form, even by snatches; and
+though no critic was qualified to affirm that he had no slumbering
+ambition in that direction, it seemed likely that a poet who had
+apparently passed the meridian of his power had nothing absolutely new
+to show us. On the other hand, if he had for years been keeping a gift
+in reserve, and suffering it to ripen and mellow in some deep corner of
+his genius, while shallower tendencies waxed and waned above it, it was
+not unjust to expect that the consummate fruit would prove magnificent.
+
+On the whole, we think that doubt was uppermost in the minds of those
+persons who to a lively appreciation of the author of "Maud" added a
+vivid conception of the exigencies of the drama. But at last _Queen
+Mary_ appeared, and conjecture was able to merge itself in knowledge.
+There was a momentary interval, during which we all read, among the
+cable telegrams in the newspapers, that the London _Times_ affirmed the
+new drama to contain more "true fire" than anything since Shakespeare
+had laid down the pen. This gave an edge to our impatience; for "fire,"
+true or false, was not what the Laureate's admirers had hitherto claimed
+for him. In a day or two, however, most people had the work in their
+hands.
+
+Every one, it seems to us, has been justified--those who hoped (that is,
+expected), those who feared, and those who were mainly surprised. _Queen
+Mary_ is both better and less good than was to have been supposed, and
+both in its merits and its defects it is extremely singular. It is the
+least Tennysonian of all the author's productions; and we may say that
+he has not so much refuted as evaded the charge that he is not a
+dramatic poet. To produce his drama he has had to cease to be himself.
+Even if _Queen Mary_, as a drama, had many more than its actual faults,
+this fact alone--this extraordinary defeasance by the poet of his
+familiar identity--would make it a remarkable work.
+
+We know of few similar phenomena in the history of literature--few such
+examples of rupture with a consecrated past. Poets in their prime have
+groped and experimented, tried this and that, and finally made a great
+success in a very different vein from that in which they had found their
+early successes. But the writers in prose or in verse are few who, after
+a lifetime spent in elaborating and perfecting a certain definite and
+extremely characteristic manner, have at Mr. Tennyson's age suddenly
+dismissed it from use and stood forth clad from head to foot in a
+disguise without a flaw. We are sure that the other great English
+poet--the author of "The Ring and the Book,"--would be quite incapable
+of any such feat. The more's the pity, as many of his readers will say!
+
+_Queen Mary_ is upward of three hundred pages long; and yet in all these
+three hundred pages there is hardly a trace of the Tennyson we know. Of
+course the reader is on the watch for reminders of the writer he has
+greatly loved; and of course, vivid signs being absent, he finds a
+certain eloquence in the slightest intimations. When he reads that
+
+                        ----"that same tide
+    Which, coming with our coming, seemed to smile
+    And sparkle like our fortune as thou saidest,
+    Ran sunless down and moaned against the piers,"
+
+he seems for a moment to detect the peculiar note and rhythm of "Enoch
+Arden" or "The Princess." Just preceding these, indeed, is a line which
+seems Tennysonian because it is in a poem by Tennyson:
+
+    "Last night I climbed into the gate-house, Brett,
+    And scared the gray old porter and his wife."
+
+In such touches as these the Tennysonian note is faintly struck; but if
+the poem were unsigned, they would not do much toward pointing out the
+author. On the other hand, the fine passages in _Queen Mary_ are
+conspicuously deficient in those peculiar cadences--that exquisite
+perfume of diction--which every young poet of the day has had his hour
+of imitating. We may give as an example Pole's striking denial of the
+charge that the Church of Rome has ever known trepidation:
+
+                        "What, my Lord!
+    The Church on Petra's rock? Never! I have seen
+    A pine in Italy that cast its shadow
+    Athwart a cataract; firm stood the pine--
+    The cataract shook the shadow. To my mind
+    The cataract typed the headlong plunge and fall
+    Of heresy to the pit: the pine was Rome.
+    You see, my Lords,
+    It was the shadow of the Church that trembled."
+
+This reads like Tennyson doing his best not to be Tennyson, and very
+fairly succeeding. Well as he succeeds, however, and admirably skilful
+and clever as is his attempt throughout to play tricks with his old
+habits of language, and prove that he was not the slave but the master
+of the classic Tennysonian rhythm, I think that few readers can fail to
+ask themselves whether the new gift is of equal value with the old. The
+question will perhaps set them to fingering over the nearest volume of
+the poet at hand, to refresh their memory of his ancient magic. It has
+rendered the present writer this service, and he feels as if it were a
+considerable one. Every great poet has something that he does supremely
+well, and when you come upon Tennyson at his best you feel that you are
+dealing with poetry at its highest. One of the best passages in _Queen
+Mary_--the only one, it seems to me, very sensibly warmed by the "fire"
+commemorated by the London _Times_--is the passionate monologue of Mary
+when she feels what she supposes to be the intimations of maternity:
+
+    "He hath awaked, he hath awaked!
+    He stirs within the darkness!
+    Oh Philip, husband! how thy love to mine
+    Will cling more close, and those bleak manners thaw,
+    That make me shamed and tongue-tied in my love.
+    The second Prince of Peace--
+    The great unborn defender of the Faith,
+    Who will avenge me of mine enemies--
+    He comes, and my star rises.
+    The stormy Wyatts and Northumberlands
+    And proud ambitions of Elizabeth,
+    And all her fiercest partisans, are pale
+    Before my star!
+    His sceptre shall go forth from Ind to Ind!
+    His sword shall hew the heretic peoples down!
+    His faith shall clothe the world that will be his,
+    Like universal air and sunshine! Open,
+    Ye everlasting gates! The King is here!--
+    My star, my son!"
+
+That is very fine, and its broken verses and uneven movement have great
+felicity and suggestiveness. But their magic is as nothing, surely, to
+the magic of such a passage as this:
+
+    "Yet hold me not for ever in thine East;
+    How can my nature longer mix with thine?
+    Coldly thy rosy shadows bathe me, cold
+    Are all thy lights, and cold my wrinkled feet
+    Upon thy glimmering thresholds, where the stream
+    Floats up from those dim fields about the homes
+    Of happy men that have the power to die,
+    And grassy barrows of the happier dead.
+    Release me and restore me to the ground;
+    Thou seëst all things, thou wilt see my grave;
+    Thou wilt renew thy beauty morn by morn;
+    I, earth in earth, forget these empty courts,
+    And thee returning on thy silver wheels."
+
+In these beautiful lines from "Tithonus" there is a purity of tone, an
+inspiration, a something sublime and exquisite, which is easily within
+the compass of Mr. Tennyson's usual manner at its highest, but which is
+not easily achieved by any really dramatic verse. It is poised and
+stationary, like a bird whose wings have borne him high, but the beauty
+of whose movement is less in great ethereal sweeps and circles than in
+the way he hangs motionless in the blue air, with only a vague tremor of
+his pinions. Even if the idea with Tennyson were more largely dramatic
+than it usually is, the immobility, as we must call it, of his phrase
+would always defeat the dramatic intention. When he wishes to represent
+movement, the phrase always seems to me to pause and slowly pivot upon
+itself, or at most to move backward. I do not know whether the reader
+recognizes the peculiarity to which I allude; one has only to open
+Tennyson almost at random to find an example of it:
+
+    "For once when Arthur, walking all alone,
+    Vext at a rumour rife about the Queen,
+    Had met her, Vivien being greeted fair,
+    Would fain have wrought upon his cloudy mood
+    With reverent eyes mock-loyal, shaken voice,
+    And fluttered adoration."
+
+That perhaps is a subtle illustration; the allusion to Teolin's dog in
+"Aylmer's Field" is a franker one:
+
+    ----"his old Newfoundlands, when they ran
+    To lose him at the stables; for he rose,
+    Two-footed, at the limit of his chain,
+    Roaring to make a third."
+
+What these pictures present is not the action itself, but the poet's
+complex perception of it; it seems hardly more vivid and genuine than
+the sustained posturings of brilliant _tableaux vivants_. With the poets
+who are natural chroniclers of movement, the words fall into their
+places as with some throw of the dice, which fortune should always
+favour. With Scott and Byron they leap into the verse _à pieds joints_,
+and shake it with their coming; with Tennyson they arrive slowly and
+settle cautiously into their attitudes, after having well scanned the
+locality. In consequence they are generally exquisite, and make
+exquisite combinations; but the result is intellectual poetry and not
+passionate--poetry which, if the term is not too pedantic, one may
+qualify as static poetry. Any scene of violence represented by Tennyson
+is always singularly limited and compressed; it is reduced to a few
+elements--refined to a single statuesque episode. There are, for
+example, several descriptions of tournaments and combats in the _Idyls
+of the King_. They are all most beautiful, but they are all curiously
+delicate. One gets no sense of the din and shock of battle; one seems to
+be looking at a bas relief of two contesting knights in chiselled
+silver, on a priceless piece of plate. They belong to the same family as
+that charming description, in Hawthorne's _Marble Faun_, of the sylvan
+dance of Donatello and Miriam in the Borghese gardens. Hawthorne talks
+of the freedom and frankness of their mirth and revelry; what we seem to
+see is a solemn frieze in stone along the base of a monument. These are
+the natural fruits of geniuses who are of the brooding rather than the
+impulsive order. I do not mean to say that here and there Tennyson does
+not give us a couplet in which motion seems reflected without being made
+to tarry. I open "Enoch Arden" at hazard, and I read of Enoch's ship
+that
+
+                            ----"at first indeed
+    Thro' many a fair sea-circle, day by day,
+    Scarce rocking, her full-busted figure-head
+    Stared o'er the ripple feathering from her bows."
+
+I turn the page and read of
+
+    "The myriad shriek of wheeling ocean fowl,
+    The league-long roller thundering on the reef,
+    The moving whisper of huge trees that branched
+    And blossomed in the zenith";
+
+of
+
+    "The sunrise broken into scarlet shafts
+    Among the palms and ferns and precipices;
+    The blaze upon the waters to the east;
+    The blaze upon his island overhead;
+    The blaze upon the waters to the west;
+    Then the great stars that globed themselves in Heaven,
+    The hollower-bellowing Ocean, and again
+    The scarlet shafts of sunrise."
+
+These lines represent movement on the grand natural scale--taking place
+in that measured, majestic fashion which, at any given moment, seems
+identical with permanence. One is almost ashamed to quote Tennyson; one
+can hardly lay one's hand on a passage that does not form part of the
+common stock of reference and recitation. Passages of the more impulsive
+and spontaneous kind will of course chiefly be found in his lyrics and
+rhymed verses (though rhyme would at first seem but another check upon
+his freedom); and passages of the kind to which I have been calling
+attention, chiefly in his narrative poems, in the _Idyls_ generally, and
+especially in the later ones, while the words strike one as having been
+pondered and collated with an almost miserly care.
+
+But a man has always the qualities of his defects, and if Tennyson is
+what I have called a static poet, he at least represents repose and
+stillness and the fixedness of things, with a splendour that no poet
+has surpassed. We all of this generation have lived in such intimacy
+with him, and made him so much part of our regular intellectual meat and
+drink, that it requires a certain effort to hold him off at the proper
+distance for scanning him. We need to cease mechanically murmuring his
+lines, so that we may hear them speak for themselves.
+
+Few persons who have grown up within the last forty years but have
+passed through the regular Tennysonian phase; happy few who have paid it
+a merely passive tribute, and not been moved to commit their emotions to
+philosophic verse, in the metre of "In Memoriam"! The phase has lasted
+longer with some persons than with others; but it will not be denied
+that with the generation at large it has visibly declined. The young
+persons of twenty now read Tennyson (though, as we imagine, with a
+fervour less intense than that which prevailed twenty years ago); but
+the young persons of thirty read Browning and Dante Rossetti, and Omar
+Kheyam--and are also sometimes heard to complain that poetry is dead and
+that there is nothing nowadays to read.
+
+We have heard Tennyson called "dainty" so often, we have seen so many
+allusions to the "Tennysonian trick," we have been so struck, in a
+certain way, with M. Taine's remarkable portrait of the poet, in
+contrast to that of Alfred de Musset, that every one who has anything of
+a notion of keeping abreast of what is called the "culture of the time"
+is rather shy of making an explicit, or even a serious profession of
+admiration for his earlier idol. It has long been the fashion to praise
+Byron, if one praises him at all, with an apologetic smile; and Tennyson
+has been, I think, in a measure, tacitly classed with the author of
+"Childe Harold" as a poet whom one thinks most of while one's taste is
+immature.
+
+This is natural enough, I suppose, and the taste of the day must travel
+to its opportunity's end. But I do not believe that Byron has passed, by
+any means, and I do not think that Tennyson has been proved to be a
+secondary or a tertiary poet. If he is not in the front rank, it is hard
+to see what it is that constitutes exquisite quality. There are poets of
+a larger compass; he has not the passion of Shelley nor the transcendent
+meditation of Wordsworth; but his inspiration, in its own current, is
+surely as pure as theirs. He depicts the assured beauties of life, the
+things that civilisation has gained and permeated, and he does it with
+an ineffable delicacy of imagination. Only once, as it seems to me (at
+the close of "Maud"), has he struck the note of irrepressible emotion,
+and appeared to say the thing that must be said at the moment, at any
+cost. For the rest, his verse is the verse of leisure, of luxury, of
+contemplation, of a faculty that circumstances have helped to become
+fastidious; but this leaves it a wide province--a province that it fills
+with a sovereign splendour.
+
+When a poet is such an artist as Tennyson, such an unfaltering,
+consummate master, it is no shame to surrender one's self to his spell.
+Reading him over here and there, as I have been doing, I have received
+an extraordinary impression of talent--talent ripened and refined, and
+passed, with a hundred incantations, through the crucible of taste. The
+reader is in thoroughly good company, and if the language is to a
+certain extent that of a coterie, the coterie can offer convincing
+evidence of its right to be exclusive. Its own tone is exquisite; listen
+to it, and you will desire nothing more.
+
+Tennyson's various _Idyls_ have been in some degree discredited by
+insincere imitations, and in some degree, perhaps, by an inevitable
+lapse of sympathy on the part of some people from what appears their
+falsetto pitch. That King Arthur, in the great ones of the series, is
+rather a prig, and that he couldn't have been all the poet represents
+him without being a good deal of a hypocrite; that the poet himself is
+too monotonously unctuous, and that in relating the misdeeds of
+Launcelot and Guinevere he seems, like the lady in the play in "Hamlet,"
+to "protest too much" for wholesomeness--all this has been often said,
+and said with abundant force. But there is a way of reading the
+_Idyls_, one and all, and simply enjoying them. It has been, just now,
+the way of the writer of these lines; he does not exactly know what may
+be gained by taking the other way, but he feels as if there were a
+pitiful loss in not taking this one. If one surrenders one's sense to
+their perfect picturesqueness, it is the most charming poetry in the
+world. The prolonged, delicate, exquisite sustentation of the pictorial
+tone seems to me a marvel of ingenuity and fancy. It appeals to a highly
+cultivated sense, but what enjoyment is so keen as that of the
+cultivated sense when its finer nerve is really touched? The _Idyls_ all
+belong to the poetry of association; but before they were written we had
+yet to learn how finely association could be analysed, and how softly
+its chords could be played upon. When Enoch Arden came back from his
+desert island,
+
+    "He like a lover down through all his blood
+    Drew in the dewy, meadowy morning breath
+    Of England, blown across her ghostly wall."
+
+Tennyson's solid verbal felicities, his unerring sense of the romantic,
+his acute perception of everything in nature that may contribute to his
+fund of exquisite imagery, his refinement, his literary tone, his aroma
+of English lawns and English libraries, the whole happy chance of his
+selection of the Arthurian legends--all this, and a dozen minor graces
+which it would take almost his own "daintiness" to formulate, make him,
+it seems to me, the most charming of the _entertaining_ poets. It is as
+an entertaining poet I chiefly think of him; his morality, at moments,
+is certainly importunate enough, but elevated as it is, it never seems
+to me of so fine a distillation as his imagery. As a didactic creation I
+do not greatly care for King Arthur; but as a fantastic one he is
+infinitely remunerative. He is doubtless not, as an intellectual
+conception, massive enough to be called a great figure; but he is,
+picturesquely, so admirably self-consistent, that the reader's
+imagination is quite willing to turn its back, if need be, on his
+judgment, and give itself up to idle enjoyment.
+
+As regards Tennyson's imagery, anything that one quotes in illustration
+is, as I have said, certain to be extremely familiar; but even
+familiarity can hardly dull the beauty of such a touch as that about
+Merlin's musings:
+
+    "So dark a forethought rolled about his brain,
+    As on a dull day in an Ocean cave
+    The blind wave feeling round his long sea-hall
+    In silence."
+
+Or of that which puts in vivid form the estrangement of Enid and
+Geraint:
+
+                              "The two remained
+    Apart by all the chamber's width, and mute
+    As creatures voiceless through the fault of birth,
+    Or two wild men, supporters of a shield,
+    Painted, who stare at open space, nor glance
+    The one at other, parted by the shield."
+
+Happy, in short, the poet who can offer his heroine for her dress
+
+        ----"a splendid silk of foreign loom,
+    Where, like a shoaling sea, the lovely blue
+    Played into green."
+
+I have touched here only upon Tennyson's narrative poems, because they
+seemed most in order in any discussion of the author's dramatic faculty.
+They cannot be said to place it in an eminent light, and they remind one
+more of the courage than of the discretion embodied in _Queen Mary_.
+Lovely pictures of things standing, with a sort of conscious stillness,
+for their poetic likeness, measured speeches, full of delicate harmonies
+and curious cadences--these things they contain in plenty, but little of
+that liberal handling of cross-speaking passion and humour which, with a
+strong constructive faculty, we regard as the sign of a genuine
+dramatist.
+
+The dramatic form seems to me of all literary forms the very noblest, I
+have so extreme a relish for it that I am half afraid to trust myself to
+praise it, lest I should seem to be merely rhapsodizing. But to be
+really noble it must be quite itself, and between a poor drama and a
+fine one there is, I think, a wider interval than anywhere else in the
+scale of success. A sequence of speeches headed by proper names--a
+string of dialogues broken into acts and scenes--does not constitute a
+drama; not even when the speeches are very clever and the dialogue
+bristles with "points."
+
+The fine thing in a real drama, generally speaking, is that, more than
+any other work of literary art, it needs a masterly structure. It needs
+to be shaped and fashioned and laid together, and this process makes a
+demand upon an artist's rarest gifts. He must combine and arrange,
+interpolate and eliminate, play the joiner with the most attentive
+skill; and yet at the end effectually bury his tools and his sawdust,
+and invest his elaborate skeleton with the smoothest and most polished
+integument. The five-act drama--serious or humourous, poetic or
+prosaic--is like a box of fixed dimensions and inelastic material, into
+which a mass of precious things are to be packed away. It is a problem
+in ingenuity and a problem of the most interesting kind. The precious
+things in question seem out of all proportion to the compass of the
+receptacle; but the artist has an assurance that with patience and skill
+a place may be made for each, and that nothing need be clipped or
+crumpled, squeezed or damaged. The false dramatist either knocks out
+the sides of his box, or plays the deuce with the contents; the real one
+gets down on his knees, disposes of his goods tentatively, this, that,
+and the other way, loses his temper but keeps his ideal, and at last
+rises in triumph, having packed his coffer in the one way that is
+mathematically right. It closes perfectly, and the lock turns with a
+click; between one object and another you cannot insert the point of a
+penknife.
+
+To work successfully beneath a few grave, rigid laws, is always a strong
+man's highest ideal of success. The reader cannot be sure how deeply
+conscious Mr. Tennyson has been of the laws of the drama, but it would
+seem as if he had not very attentively pondered them. In a play,
+certainly, the subject is of more importance than in any other work of
+art. Infelicity, triviality, vagueness of subject, may be outweighed in
+a poem, a novel, or a picture, by charm of manner, by ingenuity of
+execution; but in a drama the subject is of the essence of the work--it
+_is_ the work. If it is feeble, the work can have no force; if it is
+shapeless, the work must be amorphous.
+
+_Queen Mary_, I think, has this fundamental weakness; it would be very
+hard to say what its subject is. Strictly speaking, the drama has none.
+To the statement, "It is the reign of the elder daughter of Henry
+VIII.," it seems to me very nearly fair to reply that that is not a
+subject. I do not mean to say that a consummate dramatist could not
+resolve it into one, but the presumption is altogether against it. It
+cannot be called an intrigue, nor treated as one; it tends altogether to
+expansion; whereas a genuine dramatic subject should tend to
+concentration.
+
+Madame Ristori, that accomplished tragédienne, has for some years been
+carrying about the world with her a piece of writing, punctured here and
+there with curtain-falls, which she presents to numerous audiences as a
+tragedy embodying the history of Queen Elizabeth. The thing is worth
+mentioning only as an illustration; it is from the hand of a prolific
+Italian purveyor of such wares, and is as bad as need be. Many of the
+persons who read these lines will have seen it, and will remember it as
+a mere bald sequence of anecdotes, roughly cast into dialogue. It is not
+incorrect to say that, as regards form, Mr. Tennyson's drama is of the
+same family as the historical tragedies of Signor Giacometti. It is
+simply a dramatised chronicle, without an internal structure, taking its
+material in pieces, as history hands them over, and working each one up
+into an independent scene--usually with rich ability. It has no shape;
+it is cast into no mould; it has neither beginning, middle, nor end,
+save the chronological ones.
+
+A work of this sort may have a great many merits (those of _Queen Mary_
+are numerous), but it cannot have the merit of being a drama. We have,
+indeed, only to turn to Shakespeare to see how much of pure dramatic
+interest may be infused into an imperfect dramatic form. _Henry IV._ and
+the others of its group, _Richard III._, _Henry VIII._, _Antony and
+Cleopatra_, _Julius Cæsar_, are all chronicles in dialogue, are all
+simply Holinshed and Plutarch transferred into immortal verse. They are
+magnificent because Shakespeare could do nothing weak; but all
+Shakespearian as they are, they are not models; the models are _Hamlet_
+and _Othello_, _Macbeth_ and _Lear_. Tennyson is not Shakespeare, but in
+everything he had done hitherto there had been an essential perfection,
+and we are sorry that, in the complete maturity of his talent, proposing
+to write a drama, he should have chosen the easy way rather than the
+hard.
+
+He chose, however, a period out of which a compact dramatic subject of
+the richest interest might well have been wrought. For this, of course,
+considerable invention would have been needed, and Mr. Tennyson had
+apparently no invention to bring to his task. He has embroidered
+cunningly the groundwork offered him by Mr. Froude, but he has
+contributed no new material. The field offers a great stock of dramatic
+figures, and one's imagination kindles as one thinks of the multifarious
+combinations into which they might have been cast. We do not pretend of
+course to say in detail what Mr. Tennyson might have done; we simply
+risk the affirmation that he might have wrought a somewhat denser
+tissue. History certainly would have suffered, but poetry would have
+gained, and he is writing poetry and not history. As his drama stands,
+we take it that he does not pretend to have deepened our historic light.
+
+Psychologically, picturesquely, the persons in the foreground of Mary's
+reign constitute a most impressive and interesting group. The
+imagination plays over it importunately, and wearies itself with
+scanning the outlines and unlighted corners. Mary herself unites a dozen
+strong dramatic elements--in her dark religious passion, her unrequited
+conjugal passion, her mixture of the Spanish and English natures, her
+cruelty and her conscience, her high-handed rule and her constant
+insecurity. With her dark figure lighted luridly by perpetual
+martyr-fires, and made darker still by the presence of her younger
+sister, radiant with the promise of England's coming greatness; with
+Lady Jane Grey groping for the block behind her; her cold fanatic of a
+husband beside her, as we know him by Velasquez (with not a grain of
+fanaticism to spare for her); with her subtle ecclesiastical cousin Pole
+on the other side, with evil counsellors and dogged martyrs and a
+threatening people all around her, and with a lonely, dreary,
+disappointed and unlamented death before her, she is a subject made to
+the hand of a poet who should know how to mingle cunningly his darker
+shades. Tennyson has elaborated her figure in a way that is often
+masterly; it is a success--the greatest success of the poem. It is
+compounded in his hands of very subtle elements, and he keeps them from
+ever becoming gross.
+
+The Mary of his pages is a complex personage, and not what she might so
+easily become--a mere picturesque stalking-horse of melodrama. The art
+with which he has still kept her sympathetic and human, at the same time
+that he has darkened the shadows in her portrait to the deepest tone
+that he had warrant for, is especially noticeable. It is not in Mr.
+Tennyson's pages that Mary appears for the first time in the drama; she
+gives her name to a play of Victor Hugo's dating from the year 1833--the
+prime of the author's career. I have just been reading over _Marie
+Tudor_, and it has suggested a good many reflections. I think it
+probable that many of the readers of _Queen Mary_ would be quite unable
+to peruse Victor Hugo's consummately unpleasant production to the end;
+but they would admit, I suppose, that a person who had had the stomach
+to do so might have something particular to say about it.
+
+If one had an eye for contrasts, the contrast between these two works is
+extremely curious. I said just now that Tennyson had brought no
+invention to his task; but it may be said, on the other side, that
+Victor Hugo has brought altogether too much. If Tennyson has been unduly
+afraid of remodelling history, the author of _Marie Tudor_ has known no
+such scruples; he has slashed into the sacred chart with the shears of a
+_romantique_ of 1830. Although Tennyson, in a general way, is an
+essentially picturesque poet, his picturesqueness is of an infinitely
+milder type than that of Victor Hugo; the one ends where the other
+begins. With Victor Hugo the horrible is always the main element of the
+picturesque, and the beautiful and the tender are rarely introduced save
+to give it relief. In _Marie Tudor_ they cannot be said to be introduced
+at all; the drama is one masterly compound of abominable horror; horror
+for horror's sake--for the sake of chiaroscuro, of colour, of the
+footlights, of the actors; not in the least in any visible interest of
+human nature, of moral verity, of the discrimination of character.
+
+What Victor Hugo has here made of the rigid, strenuous, pitiable English
+queen seems to me a good example of how little the handling of sinister
+passions sometimes costs a genius of his type--how little conviction or
+deep reflection goes with it. There was a Mary of a far keener tragic
+interest than the epigrammatic Messalina whom he has portrayed; but her
+image was established in graver and finer colours, and he passes
+jauntily beside it, without suspecting its capacity. Marie Tudor is a
+lascivious termagant who amuses herself, first, with caressing an
+Italian adventurer, then with slapping his face, and then with dabbling
+in his blood; but we do not really see why the author should have given
+his heroine a name which history held in her more or less sacred
+keeping; one's interest in the drama would have been more comfortable if
+the persons, in their impossible travesty, did not present themselves as
+old friends. It is true that the "Baron of Dinasmonddy" can hardly be
+called an old friend; but he is at least as familiar as the Earl of
+Clanbrassil, the Baron of Darmouth in Devonshire, and Lord South-Repps.
+
+_Marie Tudor_, then has little to do with nature and nothing with either
+history or morality; and yet, without a paradox, it has some very strong
+qualities. It is at any rate a genuine drama, and it succeeds thoroughly
+well in what it attempts. It is moulded and proportioned to a definite
+scenic end, and never falters in its course. To read it just after you
+have read _Queen Mary_ brings out its merits, as well as its defects;
+and if the contrast makes you inhale with a double satisfaction the
+clearer moral atmosphere of the English work, it leads you also to
+reflect with some gratitude that dramatic tradition, in our modern era,
+has not remained solely in English hands.
+
+Mr. Tennyson has very frankly fashioned his play upon the model of the
+Shakespearian "histories." He has given us the same voluminous list of
+characters; he has made the division into acts merely arbitrary; he has
+introduced low-life interlocutors, talking in archaic prose; and
+whenever the fancy has taken him, he has culled his idioms and epithets
+from the Shakespearian vocabulary. As regards this last point, he has
+shown all the tact and skill that were to be expected from so approved a
+master of language. The prose scenes are all of a quasi-humourous
+description, and they emulate the queer jocosities of Shakespeare more
+successfully than seemed probable; though it was not to be forgotten
+that the author of the "Palace of Art" was also the author of the
+"Northern Farmer." These few lines might have been taken straight from
+_Henry IV._ or _Henry VIII._:
+
+     "No; we know that you be come to kill the Queen, and we'll pray for
+     you all on our bended knees. But o' God's mercy, don't you kill the
+     Queen here, Sir Thomas; look ye, here's little Dickon, and little
+     Robin, and little Jenny--though she's but a side cousin--and all,
+     on our knees, we pray you to kill the Queen farther off, Sir
+     Thomas."
+
+The poet, however, is modern when he chooses to be:
+
+                          "Action and reaction,
+    The miserable see-saw of our child-world,
+    Make us despise it at odd hours, my Lord."
+
+That reminds one less of the Elizabethan than of the Victorian era. Mr.
+Tennyson has desired to give a general picture of the time, to reflect
+all its leading elements and commemorate its salient episodes. From this
+point of view England herself--England struggling and bleeding in the
+clutches of the Romish wolf, as he would say--is the heroine of the
+drama. This heroine is very nobly and vividly imaged, and we feel the
+poet to be full of a retroactive as well as a present patriotism. It is
+a plain Protestant attitude that he takes; there is no attempt at
+analysis of the Catholic sense of the situation; it is quite the old
+story that we learned in our school-histories as children. We do not
+mean that this is not the veracious way of presenting it; but we notice
+the absence of that tendency to place it in different lights, accumulate
+_pros_ and _cons_, and plead opposed causes in the interest of ideal
+truth, which would have been so obvious if Mr. Browning had handled the
+theme. And yet Mr. Tennyson has been large and liberal, and some of the
+finest passages in the poem are uttered by independent Catholics. The
+author has wished to give a hint of everything, and he has admirably
+divined the anguish of mind of many men who were unprepared to go with
+the new way of thinking, and yet were scandalised at the license of the
+old--who were willing to be Catholics, and yet not willing to be
+delivered over to Spain.
+
+Where so many episodes are sketched, few of course can be fully
+developed; but there is a vivid manliness of the classic English type in
+such portraits as Lord William Howard and Sir Ralph Bagenhall--poor Sir
+Ralph, who declares that
+
+    "Far liefer had I in my country hall
+    Been reading some old book, with mine old hound
+    Couch'd at my hearth, and mine old flask of wine
+      Beside me,"
+
+than stand as he does in the thick of the trouble of the time; and who
+finally is brought to his account for not having knelt with the commons
+to the legate of Charles V. We have a glimpse of Sir Thomas Wyatt's
+insurrection, and a portrait of that robust rebel, who was at the same
+time an editor of paternal sonnets--sonnets of a father who loved
+
+    "To read and rhyme in solitary fields,
+    The lark above, the nightingale below,
+    And answer them in song."
+
+We have a very touching report of Lady Jane Grey's execution, and we
+assist almost directly at the sad perplexities of poor Cranmer's
+eclipse. We appreciate the contrast between the fine nerves and
+many-sided conscience of that wavering martyr, and the more comfortable
+religious temperament of Bonner and Gardiner--Bonner, apt "to gorge a
+heretic whole, roasted, or raw;" and Gardiner, who can say,
+
+    "I've gulpt it down; I'm wholly for the Pope,
+    Utterly and altogether for the Pope,
+    The Eternal Peter of the changeless chair,
+    Crowned slave of slaves and mitred king of kings.
+    God upon earth! What more? What would you have?"
+
+Elizabeth makes several appearances, and though they are brief, the poet
+has evidently had a definite figure in his mind's eye. On a second
+reading it betrays a number of fine intentions. The circumspection of
+the young princess, her high mettle, her coquetry, her frankness, her
+coarseness, are all rapidly glanced at. Her exclamation--
+
+                      "I would I were a milkmaid,
+    To sing, love, marry, churn, brew, bake, and die,
+    And have my simple headstone by the church,
+    And all things lived and ended honestly"--
+
+marks one limit of the sketch; and the other is indicated by her reply
+to Cecil at the end of the drama, on his declaring, in allusion to Mary,
+that "never English monarch dying left England so little":
+
+                              "But with Cecil's aid
+    And others', if our person be secured
+    From traitor stabs, we will make England great!"
+
+The middle term is perhaps marked by her reception of the functionary
+who comes to inform her that her sister bids her know that the King of
+Spain desires her to marry Prince Philibert of Savoy:
+
+                        "I thank you heartily, sir,
+    But I am royal, tho' your prisoner,
+    And God hath blessed or cursed me with a nose--
+    Your boots are from the horses."
+
+The drama is deficient in male characters of salient interest. Philip is
+vague and blank, as he is evidently meant to be, and Cardinal Pole is a
+portrait of a character constitutionally inapt for breadth of action.
+The portrait is a skilful one, however, and expresses forcibly the pangs
+of a sensitive nature entangled in trenchant machinery. There is a fine
+scene near the close of the drama in which Pole and the Queen--cousins,
+old friends, and for a moment betrothed (Victor Hugo characteristically
+assumes Mary to have been her cousin's mistress)--confide to each other
+their weariness and disappointment. Mary endeavours to console the
+Cardinal, but he has only grim answers for her:
+
+    "Our altar is a mound of dead men's clay,
+    Dug from the grave that yawns for us beyond;
+    And there is one Death stands beside the Groom,
+    And there is one Death stands beside the Bride."
+
+_Queen Mary_, I believe, is to be put upon the stage next winter in
+London. I do not pretend to forecast its success in representation; but
+it is not indiscrete to say that it will suffer from the absence of a
+man's part capable of being made striking. The very clever Mr. Henry
+Irving has, we are told, offered his services, presumably to play either
+Philip or Pole. If he imparts any great relief to either figure, it will
+be a signal proof of talent. The actress, however, to whom the part of
+the Queen is allotted will have every reason to be grateful. The
+character is full of colour and made to utter a number of really
+dramatic speeches. When Renard assures her that Philip is only waiting
+for leave of the Parliament to land on English shores she has an
+admirable outbreak:
+
+    "God change the pebble which his kingly foot
+    First presses into some more costly stone
+        Than ever blinded eye. I'll have one mark it
+    And bring it me. I'll have it burnished firelike;
+    I'll set it round with gold, with pearl, with diamond.
+    Let the great angel of the Church come with him,
+    Stand on the deck and spread his wings for sail!"
+
+Mary is not only vividly conceived from within, but her physiognomy, as
+seen from without, is indicated with much pictorial force:
+
+              "Did you mark our Queen?
+    The colour freely played into her face,
+    And the half sight which makes her look so stern
+    Seemed, through that dim, dilated world of hers,
+    To read our faces."
+
+In the desolation of her last days, when she bids her attendants go to
+her sister and
+
+    "Tell her to come and close my dying eyes
+    And wear my crown and dance upon my grave,"
+
+Mary, to attest her misery, seats herself on the ground, like Constance
+in "King John"; and the comment of one of her women hereupon is
+strikingly picturesque:
+
+    "Good Lord! how grim and ghastly looks her Grace,
+    With both her knees drawn upward to her chin.
+    There was an old-world tomb beside my father's,
+    And this was opened, and the dead were found
+    Sitting, and in this fashion; she looks a corpse."
+
+The great merit of Mr. Tennyson's drama, however, is not in the
+quotableness of certain passages, but in the thoroughly elevated spirit
+of the whole. He desired to make us feel of what sound manly stuff the
+Englishmen of that Tudor reign of terror needed to be, and his verse is
+pervaded by the echo of their deep-toned refusal to abdicate their
+manhood. The temper of the poem, on this line, is so noble that the
+critic who has indulged in a few strictures as to matters of form feels
+as if he had been frivolous and niggardly. I nevertheless venture to
+add in conclusion that _Queen Mary_ seems to me a work of rare ability
+rather than great inspiration; a powerful _tour de force_ rather than a
+labour of love. But though it is not the best of a great poet's
+achievement, only a great poet could have written it.
+
+
+II. HAROLD
+
+The author of _Queen Mary_ seems disposed to show us that that work was
+not an accident, but rather, as it may be said, an incident of his
+literary career. The incident has just been repeated, though _Harold_
+has come into the world more quietly than its predecessor.
+
+It is singular how soon the public gets used to unfamiliar notions. By
+the time the reader has finished _Harold_ he has almost contracted the
+habit of thinking of Mr. Tennyson as a writer chiefly known to fame by
+"dramas" without plots and dialogues without point. This impression it
+behooves him, of course, to shake off if he wishes to judge the book
+properly. He must compare the author of "Maud" and the earlier _Idyls_
+with the great poets, and not with the small. _Harold_ would be a
+respectable production for a writer who had spent his career in
+producing the same sort of thing, but it is a somewhat graceless anomaly
+in the record of a poet whose verse has, in a large degree, become part
+of the civilisation of his day.
+
+_Queen Mary_ was not, on the whole, pronounced a success, and _Harold_,
+roughly speaking, is to _Queen Mary_ what that work is to the author's
+earlier masterpieces. _Harold_ is not in the least bad: it contains
+nothing ridiculous, unreasonable, or disagreeable; it is only decidedly
+weak, decidedly colourless, and tame. The author's inspiration is like a
+fire which is quietly and contentedly burning low. The analogy is
+perfectly complete. The hearth is clean swept and the chimney-side is
+garnished with its habitual furniture; but the room is getting colder
+and colder, and the occasional little flickers emitted by the mild
+embers are not sufficient to combat the testimony of the poetical
+thermometer. There is nothing necessarily harsh in this judgment. Few
+fires are always at a blaze, and the imagination, which is the most
+delicate machine in the world, cannot be expected to serve longer than a
+good gold repeater. We must take what it gives us, in every case, and be
+thankful. Mr. Tennyson is perfectly welcome to amuse himself with
+listening to the fainter tick of his honoured time-piece; it is going
+still, unquestionably; it has not stopped. Only we may without rudeness
+abstain from regulating our engagements by the indications of the
+instrument.
+
+_Harold_ seems at first to have little, in form, that is characteristic
+of the author--little of the thoroughly familiar Tennysonian quality.
+Nevertheless, there is every now and then a line which arrests the ear
+by the rhythm and cadence which have always formed the chief mystery in
+the art of imitating the Laureate.
+
+Meeting in the early pages such a line as
+
+    "What, with this flaming horror overhead?"
+
+we should suspect we were reading Tennyson if we did not know it; and
+our suspicion would he amply confirmed by half a dozen other lines:
+
+    "Taken the rifted pillars of the wood."
+
+    "My greyhounds fleeting like a beam of light."
+
+    "Suffer a stormless shipwreck in the pools."
+
+    "That scared the dying conscience of the king."
+
+_Harold_ is interesting as illustrating, in addition to _Queen Mary_,
+Mr. Tennyson's idea of what makes a drama. A succession of short scenes,
+detached from the biography of a historical character, is, apparently,
+to his sense sufficient; the constructive side of the work is thereby
+reduced to a primitive simplicity. It is even more difficult to imagine
+acting _Harold_ than it was to imagine acting _Queen Mary_; and it is
+probable that in this case the experiment will not be tried. And yet the
+story, or rather the historical episode, upon which Mr. Tennyson has
+here laid his hand is eminently interesting.
+
+Harold, the last of the "English," as people of a certain way of feeling
+are fond of calling him--the son of Godwin, masterful minister of Edward
+the Confessor, the wearer for a short and hurried hour of the English
+crown, and the opponent and victim of William of Normandy on the field
+of Hastings--is a figure which combines many of the elements of romance
+and of heroism. The author has very characteristically tried to
+accentuate the moral character of his hero by making him a sort of
+distant relation of the family of Galahad and Arthur and the other
+moralising gallants to whom his pages have introduced us. Mr. Tennyson's
+Harold is a warrior who talks about his "better self," and who alludes
+to
+
+                "Waltham, my foundation
+    For men who serve their neighbour, not themselves,"
+
+--a touch which transports us instantly into the atmosphere of the
+Arthurian Idyls. But Harold's history may be very easily and properly
+associated with a moral problem, inasmuch as it was his unhappy fortune
+to have to solve, practically, a knotty point which might have been more
+comfortably left to the casuists. Shipwrecked during Edward's life upon
+the coast of Normandy, he is betrayed into the hands of Duke William,
+who already retains as hostage one of his brothers (the sons of Godwin
+were very numerous, and they all figure briefly, but with a certain
+attempt at individual characterisation, in the drama). To purchase his
+release and that of his brother, who passionately entreats him, he
+consents to swear by certain unseen symbols, which prove afterwards to
+be the bones of certain august Norman saints, that if William will
+suffer him to return to England, he will, on the Confessor's death,
+abstain from urging the claim of the latter's presumptive heir and do
+his utmost to help the Norman duke himself to the crown.
+
+This scene is presented in the volume before us. Harold departs and
+regains England, and there, on the king's death, overborne by
+circumstances, but with much tribulation of mind, violates his oath, and
+himself takes possession of the throne. The interest of the drama is in
+a great measure the picture of his temptation and remorse, his sense of
+his treachery and of the inevitableness of his chastisement. With this
+other matters are mingled: Harold's conflict with his disloyal brother
+Tostig, Earl of Northumberland, who brings in the King of Norway to
+claim the crown, and who, with his Norwegian backers, is defeated by
+Harold in battle just before William comes down upon him. Then there is
+his love-affair with Edith, ward of the Confessor, whom the latter,
+piously refusing to hear of his violation of his oath, condemns him to
+put away, as penance for the very thought. There is also his marriage
+with Aldwyth, a designing person, widow of a Welsh king whom Harold has
+defeated, and who, having herself through her parentage, strong English
+interests, inveigles Harold into a union which may consolidate their
+forces.
+
+Altogether, Harold is, for a hero, rather inclined to falter and
+succumb. It is to his conscience, however, that he finally succumbs; he
+loses heart and goes to meet William at Hastings with a depressing
+presentiment of defeat. Mr. Tennyson, however, as we gather from a
+prefatory sonnet, which is perhaps finer than anything in the drama
+itself, holds that much can be said for the "Norman-slandered hero," and
+declares that he has nothing to envy William if
+
+    "Each stands full face with all he did below."
+
+Edith, Harold's repudiated lady-love, is, we suppose, the heroine of the
+story, inasmuch as she has the privilege of expiring upon the corpse of
+the hero. Harold's defeat is portrayed through a conversation between
+Edith and Stigand, the English and anti-papal Archbishop of Canterbury,
+who watches the fight at Senlac from a tent near the field, while the
+monks of Waltham, outside, intone a Latin invocation to the God of
+Battles to sweep away the Normans.
+
+The drama closes with a scene on the field, after the fight, in which
+Edith and Aldwyth wander about, trying to identify Harold among the
+slain. On discovering him they indulge in a few natural recriminations,
+then Edith loses her head and expires by his side. William comes in,
+rubbing his hands over his work, and intimates to Aldwyth that she may
+now make herself agreeable to _him_. She replies, hypocritically, "My
+punishment is more than I can bear"; and with this, the most dramatic
+speech, perhaps in the volume, the play terminates. Edith, we should
+say, is a heroine of the didactic order. She has a bad conscience about
+Harold's conduct, and about her having continued on affectionate terms
+with him after his diplomatic marriage with Aldwyth. When she prays for
+Harold's success she adds that she hopes heaven will not refuse to
+listen to her because she loves "the husband of another"; and after he
+is defeated she reproaches herself with having injured his prospects--
+
+    "For there was more than sister in my kiss."
+
+Though there are many persons in the poem it cannot be said that any of
+them attains a very vivid individuality. Indeed, their great number, the
+drama being of moderate length, hinders the unfolding of any one of
+them.
+
+Mr. Tennyson, moreover, has not the dramatic touch; he rarely finds the
+phrase or the movement that illuminates a character, rarely makes the
+dialogue strike sparks. This is generally mild and colourless, and the
+passages that arrest us, relatively, owe their relief to juxtaposition
+rather than to any especial possession of the old Tennysonian energy.
+Now and then we come upon a few lines together in which we seem to catch
+an echo of the author's earlier magic, or sometimes simply of his
+earlier manner. When we do, we make the most of them and are grateful.
+Such, for instance, is the phrase of one of the characters describing
+his rescue from shipwreck. He dug his hands, he says, into
+
+    "My old fast friend the shore, and clinging thus
+    Felt the remorseless outdraught of the deep
+    Haul like a great strong fellow at my legs."
+
+Such are the words in which Wulfnoth, Harold's young brother, detained
+in Normandy, laments his situation:
+
+                            "Yea, and I
+    Shall see the dewy kiss of dawn no more
+    Make blush the maiden-white of our tall cliffs,
+    Nor mark the sea-bird rouse himself and hover
+    Above the windy ripple, and fill the sky
+    With free sea-laughter."
+
+In two or three places the author makes, in a few words, a picture, an
+image, of considerable felicity. Harold wishes that he were like Edward
+the Confessor,
+
+    "As holy and as passionless as he!
+    That I might rest as calmly! Look at him--
+    The rosy face, and long, down-silvering beard,
+    The brows unwrinkled as a summer mere."
+
+We may add that in the few speeches allotted to this monarch of virtuous
+complexion this portrait is agreeably sustained. "Holy, is he?" says the
+Archbishop, Stigand, of him to Harold--
+
+    "A conscience for his own soul, not his realm;
+    A twilight conscience lighted thro' a chink;
+    Thine by the sun."
+
+And the same character hits upon a really vigorous image in describing,
+as he watches them, Harold's exploits on the battle-fields:
+
+    "Yea, yea, for how their lances snap and shiver,
+    Against the shifting blaze of Harold's axe!
+    War-woodman of old Woden, how he fells
+    The mortal copse of faces!"
+
+We feel, after all, in Mr. Tennyson, even in the decidedly minor key in
+which this volume is pitched, that he has once known how to turn our
+English poetic phrase as skilfully as any one, and that he has not
+altogether forgotten the art.
+
+
+
+
+CONTEMPORARY NOTES ON WHISTLER VS. RUSKIN
+
+
+     I. Originally published as an unsigned note in _The Nation_,
+     December 19, 1878. The jury allowed Whistler one farthing damages.
+
+     II. Originally published as an unsigned note in _The Nation_,
+     February 13, 1879.
+
+     The pamphlet here referred to was entitled _Whistler vs. Ruskin:
+     Art and Art-Critics_. London: Chatto & Windus. 1878. This essay was
+     afterwards reprinted in _The Gentle Art of Making Enemies_, London,
+     1890.
+
+
+
+
+CONTEMPORARY NOTES ON WHISTLER VS. RUSKIN
+
+
+I. THE SUIT FOR LIBEL
+
+The London public is never left for many days without a _cause célèbre_
+of some kind. The latest novelty in this line has been the suit for
+damages brought against Mr. Ruskin by Mr. James Whistler, the American
+painter, and decided last week. Mr. Whistler is very well known in the
+London world, and his conspicuity, combined with the renown of the
+defendant and the nature of the case, made the affair the talk of the
+moment. All the newspapers have had leading articles upon it, and people
+have differed for a few hours more positively than it had come to be
+supposed that they could differ about anything save the character of the
+statesmanship of Lord Beaconsfield. The injury suffered by Mr. Whistler
+resides in a paragraph published more than a year ago in that strange
+monthly manifesto called _Fors Clavigera_, which Mr. Ruskin had for a
+long time addressed to a partly edified, partly irritated, and greatly
+amused public. Mr. Ruskin spoke at some length of the pictures at the
+Grosvenor Gallery, and, falling foul of Mr. Whistler, he alluded to him
+in these terms:
+
+"For Mr. Whistler's own sake, no less than for the protection of the
+purchaser, Sir Coutts Lindsay ought not to have admitted works into the
+gallery in which the ill-educated conceit of the artist so nearly
+approached the aspect of wilful imposture. I have seen and heard much of
+cockney impudence before now, but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask
+200 guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face."
+
+Mr. Whistler alleged that these words were libellous, and that, coming
+from a critic of Mr. Ruskin's eminence, they had done him,
+professionally, serious injury; and he asked for £1,000 damage. The case
+had a two days' hearing, and it was a singular and most regrettable
+exhibition. If it had taken place in some Western American town, it
+would have been called provincial and barbarous; it would have been
+cited as an incident of a low civilisation. Beneath the stately towers
+of Westminster it hardly wore a higher aspect.
+
+A British jury of ordinary tax-payers was appealed to decide whether Mr.
+Whistler's pictures belonged to a high order of art, and what degree of
+"finish" was required to render a picture satisfactory. The painter's
+singular canvases were handed about in court, and the counsel for the
+defence, holding one of them up, called upon the jury to pronounce
+whether it was an "accurate representation" of Battersea Bridge.
+Witnesses were summoned on either side to testify to the value of Mr.
+Whistler's productions, and Mr. Ruskin had the honour of having his
+estimate of them substantiated by Mr. Frith. The weightiest testimony,
+the most intelligently, and apparently the most reluctantly delivered,
+was that of Mr. Burne Jones, who appeared to appreciate the ridiculous
+character of the process to which he had been summoned (by the defence)
+to contribute, and who spoke of Mr. Whistler's performance as only in a
+partial sense of the word pictures--as being beautiful in colour, and
+indicating an extraordinary power of representing the atmosphere, but as
+being also hardly more than beginnings, and fatally deficient in finish.
+For the rest the crudity and levity of the whole affair were decidedly
+painful, and few things, I think, have lately done more to vulgarise the
+public sense of the character of artistic production.
+
+The jury gave Mr. Whistler nominal damages. The opinion of the
+newspapers seems to be that he has got at least all he deserved--that
+anything more would have been a blow at the liberty of criticism. I
+confess to thinking it hard to decide what Mr. Whistler ought properly
+to have done, while--putting aside the degree of one's appreciation of
+his works--I quite understand his resentment. Mr. Ruskin's language
+quite transgresses the decencies of criticism, and he has been laying
+about him for some years past with such promiscuous violence that it
+gratifies one's sense of justice to see him brought up as a disorderly
+character. On the other hand, he is a chartered libertine--he has
+possessed himself by prescription of the function of a general scold.
+His literary bad manners are recognised, and many of his contemporaries
+have suffered from them without complaining. It would very possibly,
+therefore, have been much wiser on Mr. Whistler's part to feign
+indifference. Unfortunately, Mr. Whistler's productions are so very
+eccentric and imperfect (I speak here of his paintings only; his
+etchings are quite another affair, and altogether admirable) that his
+critic's denunciation could by no means fall to the ground of itself. I
+wonder that before a British jury they had any chance whatever; they
+must have been a terrible puzzle.
+
+The verdict, of course, satisfies neither party; Mr. Ruskin is formally
+condemned, but the plaintiff is not compensated. Mr. Ruskin too,
+doubtless, is not gratified at finding that the fullest weight of his
+disapproval is thought to be represented by the sum of one farthing.
+
+
+II. MR. WHISTLER'S REJOINDER
+
+I may mention as a sequel to the brief account of the suit Whistler v.
+Ruskin, which I sent you a short time since, that the plaintiff has
+lately published a little pamphlet in which he delivers himself on the
+subject of art-criticism.
+
+This little pamphlet, issued by Chatto & Windus, is an affair of
+seventeen very prettily-printed small pages; it is now in its sixth
+edition, it sells for a shilling, and is to be seen in most of the
+shop-windows. It is very characteristic of the painter, and highly
+entertaining; but I am not sure that it will have rendered appreciable
+service to the cause, which he has at heart. The cause that Mr. Whistler
+has at heart is the absolute suppression and extinction of the
+art-critic and his function. According to Mr. Whistler the art-critic is
+an impertinence, a nuisance, a monstrosity--and usually, into the
+bargain, an arrant fool.
+
+Mr. Whistler writes in an off-hand, colloquial style, much besprinkled
+with French--a style which might be called familiar if one often
+encountered anything like it. He writes by no means as well as he
+paints; but his little diatribe against the critics is suggestive, apart
+from the force of anything that he specifically urges. The painter's
+irritated feeling is interesting, for it suggests the state of mind of
+many of his brothers of the brush in the presence of the bungling and
+incompetent disquisitions of certain members of the fraternity who sit
+in judgment upon their works.
+
+"Let work be received in silence," says Mr. Whistler, "as it was in the
+days to which the penman still points as an era when art was at its
+apogee." He is very scornful of the "penman," and it is on the general
+ground of his being a penman that he deprecates the existence of his
+late adversary, Mr. Ruskin. He does not attempt to make out a case in
+detail against the great commentator of pictures; it is enough for Mr.
+Whistler that he is a "littérateur," and that a littérateur should
+concern himself with his own business. The author also falls foul of Mr.
+Tom Taylor, who does the reports of the exhibitions in the _Times_, and
+who had the misfortune, fifteen years ago, to express himself rather
+unintelligently about Velasquez.
+
+"The Observatory at Greenwich under the direction of an apothecary,"
+says Mr. Whistler, "the College of Physicians with Tennyson as
+president, and we know what madness is about! But a school of art with
+an accomplished littérateur at its head disturbs no one, and is actually
+what the world receives as rational, while Ruskin writes for pupils and
+Colvin holds forth at Cambridge! Still, quite alone stands Ruskin, whose
+writing is art and whose art is unworthy his writing. To him and his
+example do we owe the outrage of proffered assistance from the
+unscientific--the meddling of the immodest--the intrusion of the
+garrulous. Art, that for ages has hewn its own history in marble and
+written its own comments on canvas, shall it suddenly stand still and
+stammer and wait for wisdom from the passer-by?--for guidance from the
+hand that holds neither brush nor chisel? Out upon the shallow conceit!
+What greater sarcasm can Mr. Ruskin pass upon himself than that he
+preaches to young men what he cannot perform? Why, unsatisfied with his
+conscious power, should he choose to become the type of incompetency by
+talking for forty years of what he has never done?"
+
+Mr. Whistler winds up by pronouncing Mr. Ruskin, of whose writings he
+has perused, I suspect, an infinitesimally small number of pages, "the
+Peter Parley of Painting." This is very far, as I say, from exhausting
+the question; but it is easy to understand the state of mind of a London
+artist (to go no further) who skims through the critiques in the local
+journals. There is no scurrility in saying that these are for the most
+part almost incredibly weak and unskilled; to turn from one of them to a
+critical _feuilleton_ in one of the Parisian journals is like passing
+from a primitive to a very high civilisation. Even, however, if the
+reviews of pictures were very much better, the protest of the producer
+as against the critic would still have a considerable validity.
+
+Few people will deny that the development of criticism in our day has
+become inordinate, disproportionate, and that much of what is written
+under that exalted name is very idle and superficial. Mr. Whistler's
+complaint belongs to the general question, and I am afraid it will never
+obtain a serious hearing, on special and exceptional grounds. The whole
+artistic fraternity is in the same boat--the painters, the architects,
+the poets, the novelists, the dramatists, the actors, the musicians, the
+singers. They have a standing, and in many ways a very just, quarrel
+with criticism; but perhaps many of them would admit that, on the whole,
+so long as they appeal to a public laden with many cares and a great
+variety of interests, it gratifies as much as it displeases them. Art is
+one of the necessities of life; but even the critics themselves would
+probably not assert that criticism is anything more than an agreeable
+luxury--something like printed talk. If it be said that they claim too
+much in calling it "agreeable" to the criticised, it may be added in
+their behalf that they probably mean agreeable in the long run.
+
+
+
+
+A NOTE ON JOHN BURROUGHS
+
+
+     An unsigned review of _Winter Sunshine_. By John Burroughs. New
+     York: Hurd & Houghton. 1876. Originally published in _The Nation_,
+     January 27, 1876.
+
+
+
+
+A NOTE ON JOHN BURROUGHS
+
+
+This is a very charming little book. We had noticed, on their appearance
+in various periodicals, some of the articles of which it is composed,
+and we find that, read continuously, they have given us even more
+pleasure. We have, indeed, enjoyed them more perhaps than we can show
+sufficient cause for. They are slender and light, but they have a real
+savour of their own.
+
+Mr. Burroughs is known as an out-of-door observer--a devotee of birds
+and trees and fields and aspects of weather and humble wayside
+incidents. The minuteness of his observation, the keenness of his
+perception of all these things, give him a real originality which is
+confirmed by a style sometimes indeed idiomatic and unfinished to a
+fault, but capable of remarkable felicity and vividness. Mr. Burroughs
+is also, fortunately for his literary prosperity in these days, a
+decided "humourist"; he is essentially and genially an American, without
+at all posing as one, and his sketches have a delightful oddity,
+vivacity, and freshness.
+
+The first half of his volume, and the least substantial, treats of
+certain rambles taken in the winter and spring in the country around
+Washington; the author is an apostle of pedestrianism, and these pages
+form a prolonged rhapsody upon the pleasures within the reach of any one
+who will take the trouble to stretch his legs. They are full of charming
+touches, and indicate a real genius for the observation of natural
+things. Mr. Burroughs is a sort of reduced, but also more humourous,
+more available, and more sociable Thoreau. He is especially intimate
+with the birds, and he gives his reader an acute sense of how sociable
+an affair, during six months of the year, this feathery lore may make a
+lonely walk. He is also intimate with the question of apples, and he
+treats of it in a succulent disquisition which imparts to the somewhat
+trivial theme a kind of lyrical dignity. He remarks, justly, that women
+are poor apple-eaters.
+
+But the best pages in his book are those which commemorate a short visit
+to England and the rapture of his first impressions. This little sketch,
+in spite of its extreme slightness, really deserves to become classical.
+We have read far solider treatises which contained less of the essence
+of the matter; or at least, if it is not upon the subject itself that
+Mr. Burroughs throws particularly powerful light, it is the essence of
+the ideal traveller's spirit that he gives us, the freshness and
+intensity of impression, the genial bewilderment, the universal
+appreciativeness. All this is delightfully _naïf_, frank, and natural.
+
+"All this had been told, and it pleased me so in the seeing that I must
+tell it again," the author says; and this is the constant spirit of his
+talk. He appears to have been "pleased" as no man was ever pleased
+before; so much so that his reflections upon his own country sometimes
+become unduly invidious. But if to be appreciative is the traveller's
+prime duty, Mr. Burroughs is a prince of travellers.
+
+"Then to remember that it was a new sky and a new earth I was beholding,
+that it was England, the old mother at last, no longer a faith or a
+fable but an actual fact, there before my eyes and under my feet--why
+should I not exult? Go to! I will be indulged. These trees, those
+fields, that bird darting along the hedge-rows, those men and boys
+picking blackberries in October, those English flowers by the roadside
+(stop the carriage while I leap out and pluck them), the homely domestic
+look of things, those houses, those queer vehicles, those thick-coated
+horses, those big-footed, coarsely-clad, clear-skinned men and women;
+this massive, homely, compact architecture--let me have a good look, for
+this is my first hour in England, and I am drunk with the joy of seeing!
+This house-fly let me inspect it, and that swallow skimming along so
+familiarly."
+
+One envies Mr. Burroughs his acute relish of the foreign spectacle even
+more than one enjoys his expression of it. He is not afraid to start and
+stare; his state of mind is exactly opposed to the high dignity of the
+_nil admirari_. When he goes into St. Paul's, "my companions rushed
+about," he says, "as if each one had a search-warrant in his pocket; but
+I was content to uncover my head and drop into a seat, and busy my mind
+with some simple object near at hand, while the sublimity that soared
+about me stole into my soul." He meets a little girl carrying a pail in
+a meadow near Stratford, stops her and talks with her, and finds an
+ineffable delight in "the sweet and novel twang of her words. Her family
+had emigrated to America, failed to prosper, and come back; but I hardly
+recognise even the name of my own country in her innocent prattle; it
+seemed like a land of fable--all had a remote mythological air, and I
+pressed my enquiries as if I was hearing of this strange land for the
+first time."
+
+Mr. Burroughs is unfailingly complimentary; he sees sermons in stones
+and good in everything; the somewhat dusky British world was never
+steeped in so intense a glow of rose-colour. Sometimes his optimism
+rather interferes with his accuracy--as when he detects "forests and
+lakes" in Hyde Park, and affirms that the English rural landscape does
+not, in comparison with the American, appear highly populated. This
+latter statement is apparently made apropos of that long stretch of
+suburban scenery, pure and simple, which extends from Liverpool to
+London. It does not strike us as felicitous, either, to say that women
+are more kindly treated in England than in the United States, and
+especially that they are less "leered at." "Leering" at women is happily
+less common all the world over than it is sometimes made to appear for
+picturesque purposes in the magazines; but we should say that if there
+is a country where the art has not reached a high stage of development,
+it is our own.
+
+It must be added that although Mr. Burroughs is shrewd as well as
+_naïf_, the latter quality sometimes distances the former. He runs over
+for a week to France. "At Dieppe I first saw the wooden shoe, and heard
+its dry, senseless clatter upon the pavement. How suggestive of the
+cramped and inflexible conditions with which human nature has borne so
+long in these lands!" But in Paris also he is appreciative--singularly
+so for so complete an outsider as he confesses himself to be--and
+throughout he is very well worth reading. We heartily commend his little
+volume for its honesty, its individuality, and, in places, its really
+blooming freshness.
+
+
+
+
+MR. KIPLING'S EARLY STORIES
+
+
+     Originally published as an _Introduction_ to the Continental
+     edition of _Soldiers Three_. By Rudyard Kipling; volume 59 of the
+     _English Library_, Leipzig, Heinemann and Balestier Limited,
+     London. 1891.
+
+
+
+
+MR. KIPLING'S EARLY STORIES
+
+
+It would be difficult to answer the general question whether the books
+of the world grow, as they multiply, as much better as one might suppose
+they ought, with such a lesson of wasteful experiment spread perpetually
+behind them. There is no doubt, however, that in one direction we profit
+largely by this education: whether or not we have become wiser to
+fashion, we have certainly become keener to enjoy. We have acquired the
+sense of a particular quality which is precious beyond all others--so
+precious as to make us wonder where, at such a rate, our posterity will
+look for it, and how they will pay for it. After tasting many essences
+we find freshness the sweetest of all. We yearn for it, we watch for it
+and lie in wait for it, and when we catch it on the wing (it flits by so
+fast) we celebrate our capture with extravagance. We feel that after so
+much has come and gone it is more and more of a feat and a _tour de
+force_ to be fresh. The tormenting part of the phenomenon is that, in
+any particular key, it can happen but once--by a sad failure of the law
+that inculcates the repetition of goodness. It is terribly a matter of
+accident; emulation and imitation have a fatal effect upon it. It is
+easy to see, therefore, what importance the epicure may attach to the
+brief moment of its bloom. While that lasts we all are epicures.
+
+This helps to explain, I think, the unmistakeable intensity of the
+general relish for Mr. Rudyard Kipling. His bloom lasts, from month to
+month, almost surprisingly--by which I mean that he has not worn out
+even by active exercise the particular property that made us all, more
+than a year ago, so precipitately drop everything else to attend to him.
+He has many others which he will doubtless always keep; but a part of
+the potency attaching to his freshness, what makes it as exciting as a
+drawing of lots, is our instinctive conviction that he cannot, in the
+nature of things, keep that; so that our enjoyment of him, so long as
+the miracle is still wrought, has both the charm of confidence and the
+charm of suspense. And then there is the further charm, with Mr.
+Kipling, that this same freshness is such a very strange affair of its
+kind--so mixed and various and cynical, and, in certain lights, so
+contradictory of itself. The extreme recentness of his inspiration is as
+enviable as the tale is startling that his productions tell of his being
+at home, domesticated and initiated, in this wicked and weary world. At
+times he strikes us as shockingly precocious, at others as serenely
+wise. On the whole, he presents himself as a strangely clever youth who
+has stolen the formidable mask of maturity and rushes about, making
+people jump with the deep sounds, and sportive exaggerations of tone,
+that issue from its painted lips. He has this mark of a real vocation,
+that different spectators may like him--must like him, I should almost
+say--for different things; and this refinement of attraction, that to
+those who reflect even upon their pleasures he has as much to say as to
+those who never reflect upon anything. Indeed there is a certain amount
+of room for surprise in the fact that, being so much the sort of figure
+that the hardened critic likes to meet, he should also be the sort of
+figure that inspires the multitude with confidence--for a complicated
+air is, in general, the last thing that does this.
+
+By the critic who likes to meet such a bristling adventurer as Mr.
+Kipling I mean, of course, the critic for whom the happy accident of
+character, whatever form it may take, is more of a bribe to interest
+than the promise of some character cherished in theory--the appearance
+of justifying some foregone conclusion as to what a writer or a book
+"ought," in the Ruskinian sense, to be; the critic, in a word, who has,
+_à priori_, no rule for a literary production but that it shall have
+genuine life. Such a critic (he gets much more out of his opportunities,
+I think, than the other sort) likes a writer exactly in proportion as he
+is a challenge, an appeal to interpretation, intelligence, ingenuity,
+to what is elastic in the critical mind--in proportion indeed as he may
+be a negation of things familiar and taken for granted. He feels in this
+case how much more play and sensation there is for himself.
+
+Mr. Kipling, then, has the character that furnishes plenty of play and
+of vicarious experience--that makes any perceptive reader foresee a rare
+luxury. He has the great merit of being a compact and convenient
+illustration of the surest source of interest in any painter of
+life--that of having an identity as marked as a window-frame. He is one
+of the illustrations, taken near at hand, that help to clear up the
+vexed question in the novel or the tale, of kinds, camps, schools,
+distinctions, the right way and the wrong way; so very positively does
+he contribute to the showing that there are just as many kinds, as many
+ways, as many forms and degrees of the "right," as there are personal
+points in view. It is the blessing of the art he practises that it is
+made up of experience conditioned, infinitely, in this personal way--the
+sum of the feeling of life as reproduced by innumerable natures; natures
+that feel through all their differences, testify through their
+diversities. These differences, which make the identity, are of the
+individual; they form the channel by which life flows through him, and
+how much he is able to give us of life--in other words, how much he
+appeals to us--depends on whether they form it solidly.
+
+This hardness of the conduit, cemented with a rare assurance, is perhaps
+the most striking idiosyncrasy of Mr. Kipling; and what makes it more
+remarkable is that incident of his extreme youth which, if we talk about
+him at all, we cannot affect to ignore. I cannot pretend to give a
+biography or a chronology of the author of "Soldiers Three," but I
+cannot overlook the general, the importunate fact that, confidently as
+he has caught the trick and habit of this sophisticated world, he has
+not been long of it. His extreme youth is indeed what I may call his
+window-bar--the support on which he somewhat rowdily leans while he
+looks down at the human scene with his pipe in his teeth; just as his
+other conditions (to mention only some of them), are his prodigious
+facility, which is only less remarkable than his stiff selection; his
+unabashed temperament, his flexible talent, his smoking-room manner, his
+familiar friendship with India--established so rapidly, and so
+completely under his control; his delight in battle, his "cheek" about
+women--and indeed about men and about everything; his determination not
+to be duped, his "imperial" fibre, his love of the inside view, the
+private soldier and the primitive man. I must add further to this list
+of attractions the remarkable way in which he makes us aware that he
+has been put up to the whole thing directly by life (miraculously, in
+his teens), and not by the communications of others. These elements, and
+many more, constitute a singularly robust little literary character (our
+use of the diminutive is altogether a note of endearment and enjoyment)
+which, if it has the rattle of high spirits and is in no degree
+apologetic or shrinking, yet offers a very liberal pledge in the way of
+good faith and immediate performance. Mr. Kipling's performance comes
+off before the more circumspect have time to decide whether they like
+him or not, and if you have seen it once you will be sure to return to
+the show. He makes us prick up our ears to the good news that in the
+smoking-room too there may be artists; and indeed to an intimation still
+more refined--that the latest development of the modern also may be,
+most successfully, for the canny artist to put his victim off his guard
+by imitating the amateur (superficially, of course) to the life.
+
+These, then, are some of the reasons why Mr. Kipling may be dear to the
+analyst as well as, M. Renan says, to the simple. The simple may like
+him because he is wonderful about India, and India has not been "done";
+while there is plenty left for the morbid reader in the surprises of his
+skill and the _fioriture_ of his form, which are so oddly independent of
+any distinctively literary note in him, any bookish association. It is
+as one of the morbid that the writer of these remarks (which doubtless
+only too shamefully betray his character) exposes himself as most
+consentingly under the spell. The freshness arising from a subject
+that--by a good fortune I do not mean to underestimate--has never been
+"done," is after all less of an affair to build upon than the freshness
+residing in the temper of the artist. Happy indeed is Mr. Kipling, who
+can command so much of both kinds. It is still as one of the morbid, no
+doubt--that is, as one of those who are capable of sitting up all night
+for a new impression of talent, of scouring the trodden field for one
+little spot of green--that I find our young author quite most curious in
+his air, and not only in his air, but in his evidently very real sense,
+of knowing his way about life. Curious in the highest degree and well
+worth attention is such an idiosyncrasy as this in a young Anglo-Saxon.
+We meet it with familiar frequency in the budding talents of France, and
+it startles and haunts us for an hour. After an hour, however, the
+mystery is apt to fade, for we find that the wondrous initiation is not
+in the least general, is only exceedingly special, and is, even with
+this limitation, very often rather conventional. In a word, it is with
+the ladies that the young Frenchman takes his ease, and more
+particularly with the ladies selected expressly to make this attitude
+convincing. When they have let him off, the dimnesses too often
+encompass him. But for Mr. Kipling there are no dimnesses anywhere, and
+if the ladies are indeed violently distinct they are not only strong
+notes in a universal loudness. This loudness fills the ears of Mr.
+Kipling's admirers (it lacks sweetness, no doubt, for those who are not
+of the number), and there is really only one strain that is absent from
+it--the voice, as it were, of the civilised man; in whom I of course
+also include the civilised woman. But this is an element that for the
+present one does not miss--every other note is so articulate and direct.
+
+It is a part of the satisfaction the author gives us that he can make us
+speculate as to whether he will be able to complete his picture
+altogether (this is as far as we presume to go in meddling with the
+question of his future) without bringing in the complicated soul. On the
+day he does so, if he handles it with anything like the cleverness he
+has already shown, the expectation of his friends will take a great
+bound. Meanwhile, at any rate, we have Mulvaney, and Mulvaney is after
+all tolerably complicated. He is only a six-foot saturated Irish
+private, but he is a considerable pledge of more to come. Hasn't he, for
+that matter, the tongue of a hoarse siren, and hasn't he also mysteries
+and infinitudes almost Carlylese? Since I am speaking of him I may as
+well say that, as an evocation, he has probably led captive those of
+Mr. Kipling's readers who have most given up resistance. He is a piece
+of portraiture of the largest, vividest kind, growing and growing on the
+painter's hands without ever outgrowing them. I can't help regarding
+him, in a certain sense, as Mr. Kipling's tutelary deity--a landmark in
+the direction in which it is open to him to look furthest. If the author
+will only go as far in this direction as Mulvaney is capable of taking
+him (and the inimitable Irishman is like Voltaire's Habakkuk, _capable
+de tout_) he may still discover a treasure and find a reward for the
+services he has rendered the winner of Dinah Shadd. I hasten to add that
+the truly appreciative reader should surely have no quarrel with the
+primitive element in Mr. Kipling's subject-matter, or with what, for
+want of a better name, I may call his love of low life. What is that but
+essentially a part of his freshness? And for what part of his freshness
+are we exactly more thankful than for just this smart jostle that he
+gives the old stupid superstition that the amiability of a story-teller
+is the amiability of the people he represents--that their vulgarity, or
+depravity, or gentility, or fatuity are tantamount to the same qualities
+in the painter itself? A blow from which, apparently, it will not easily
+recover is dealt this infantine philosophy by Mr. Howells when, with the
+most distinguished dexterity and all the detachment of a master, he
+handles some of the clumsiest, crudest, most human things in
+life--answering surely thereby the play-goers in the sixpenny gallery
+who howl at the representative of the villain when he comes before the
+curtain.
+
+Nothing is more refreshing than this active, disinterested sense of the
+real; it is doubtless the quality for the want of more of which our
+English and American fiction has turned so wofully stale. We are ridden
+by the old conventionalities of type and small proprieties of
+observance--by the foolish baby-formula (to put it sketchily) of the
+picture and the subject. Mr. Kipling has all the air of being disposed
+to lift the whole business off the nursery carpet, and of being perhaps
+even more able than he is disposed. One must hasten of course to
+parenthesise that there is not, intrinsically, a bit more luminosity in
+treating of low life and of primitive man than of those whom
+civilisation has kneaded to a finer paste: the only luminosity in either
+case is in the intelligence with which the thing is done. But it so
+happens that, among ourselves, the frank, capable outlook, when turned
+upon the vulgar majority, the coarse, receding edges of the social
+perspective, borrows a charm from being new; such a charm as, for
+instance, repetition has already despoiled it of among the French--the
+hapless French who pay the penalty as well as enjoy the glow of living
+intellectually so much faster than we. It is the most inexorable part
+of our fate that we grow tired of everything, and of course in due time
+we may grow tired even of what explorers shall come back to tell us
+about the great grimy condition, or, with unprecedented items and
+details, about the gray middle state which darkens into it. But the
+explorers, bless them! may have a long day before that; it is early to
+trouble about reactions, so that we must give them the benefit of every
+presumption. We are thankful for any boldness and any sharp curiosity,
+and that is why we are thankful for Mr. Kipling's general spirit and for
+most of his excursions.
+
+Many of these, certainly, are into a region not to be designated as
+superficially dim, though indeed the author always reminds us that India
+is above all the land of mystery. A large part of his high spirits, and
+of ours, comes doubtless from the amusement of such vivid, heterogeneous
+material, from the irresistible magic of scorching suns, subject
+empires, uncanny religions, uneasy garrisons and smothered-up
+women--from heat and colour and danger and dust. India is a portentous
+image, and we are duly awed by the familiarities it undergoes at Mr.
+Kipling's hand and by the fine impunity, the sort of fortune that
+favours the brave, of _his_ want of awe. An abject humility is not his
+strong point, but he gives us something instead of it--vividness and
+drollery, the vision and the thrill of many things, the misery and
+strangeness of most, the personal sense of a hundred queer contacts and
+risks. And then in the absence of respect he has plenty of knowledge,
+and if knowledge should fail him he would have plenty of invention.
+Moreover, if invention should ever fail him, he would still have the
+lyric string and the patriotic chord, on which he plays admirably; so
+that it may be said he is a man of resources. What he gives us, above
+all, is the feeling of the English manner and the English blood in
+conditions they have made at once so much and so little their own; with
+manifestations grotesque enough in some of his satiric sketches and
+deeply impressive in some of his anecdotes of individual responsibility.
+
+His Indian impressions divide themselves into three groups, one of
+which, I think, very much outshines the others. First to be mentioned
+are the tales of native life, curious glimpses of custom and
+superstition, dusky matters not beholden of the many, for which the
+author has a remarkable _flair_. Then comes the social, the Anglo-Indian
+episode, the study of administrative and military types, and of the
+wonderful rattling, riding ladies who, at Simla and more desperate
+stations, look out for husbands and lovers; often, it would seem, and
+husbands and lovers of others. The most brilliant group is devoted
+wholly to the common soldier, and of this series it appears to me that
+too much good is hardly to be said. Here Mr. Kipling, with all his
+off-handedness, is a master; for we are held not so much by the greater
+or less oddity of the particular yarn--sometimes it is scarcely a yarn
+at all, but something much less artificial--as by the robust attitude of
+the narrator, who never arranges or glosses or falsifies, but makes
+straight for the common and the characteristic. I have mentioned the
+great esteem in which I hold Mulvaney--surely a charming man and one
+qualified to adorn a higher sphere. Mulvaney is a creation to be proud
+of, and his two comrades stand as firm on their legs. In spite of
+Mulvaney's social possibilities, they are all three finished brutes; but
+it is precisely in the finish that we delight. Whatever Mr. Kipling may
+relate about them forever will encounter readers equally fascinated and
+unable fully to justify their faith.
+
+Are not those literary pleasures after all the most intense which are
+the most perverse and whimsical, and even indefensible? There is a logic
+in them somewhere, but it often lies below the plummet of criticism. The
+spell may be weak in a writer who has every reasonable and regular
+claim, and it may be irresistible in one who presents himself with a
+style corresponding to a bad hat. A good hat is better than a bad one,
+but a conjuror may wear either. Many a reader will never be able to say
+what secret human force lays its hand upon him when Private Ortheris,
+having sworn "quietly into the blue sky," goes mad with homesickness by
+the yellow river and raves for the basest sights and sounds of London. I
+can scarcely tell why I think "The Courting of Dinah Shadd" a
+masterpiece (though, indeed, I can make a shrewd guess at one of the
+reasons), nor would it be worth while perhaps to attempt to defend the
+same pretension in regard to "On Greenhow Hill"--much less to trouble
+the tolerant reader of these remarks with a statement of how many more
+performances in the nature of "The End of the Passage" (quite admitting
+even that they might not represent Mr. Kipling at his best) I am
+conscious of a latent relish for. One might as well admit while one is
+about it that one has wept profusely over "The Drums of the Fore and
+Aft," the history of the "Dutch courage" of two dreadful dirty little
+boys, who, in the face of Afghans scarcely more dreadful, saved the
+reputation of their regiment and perished, the least mawkishly in the
+world, in a squalor of battle incomparably expressed. People who know
+how peaceful they are themselves and have no bloodshed to reproach
+themselves with needn't scruple to mention the glamour that Mr.
+Kipling's intense militarism has for them, and how astonishing and
+contagious they find it, in spite of the unromantic complexion of
+it--the way it bristles with all sorts of ugliness and technicalities.
+Perhaps that is why I go all the way even with "The Gadsbys"--the
+Gadsbys were so connected (uncomfortably, it is true) with the army.
+There is fearful fighting--or a fearful danger of it--in "The Man Who
+Would be King"; is that the reason we are deeply affected by this
+extraordinary tale? It is one of them, doubtless, for Mr. Kipling has
+many reasons, after all, on his side, though they don't equally call
+aloud to be uttered.
+
+One more of them, at any rate, I must add to these unsystematised
+remarks--it is the one I spoke of a shrewd guess at in alluding to "The
+Courting of Dinah Shadd." The talent that produces such a tale is a
+talent eminently in harmony with the short story, and the short story
+is, on our side of the Channel and of the Atlantic, a mine which will
+take a great deal of working. Admirable is the clearness with which Mr.
+Kipling perceives this--perceives what innumerable chances it gives,
+chances of touching life in a thousand different places, taking it up in
+innumerable pieces, each a specimen and an illustration. In a word, he
+appreciates the episode, and there are signs to show that this
+shrewdness will, in general, have long innings. It will find the
+detachable, compressible "case" an admirable, flexible form; the
+cultivation of which may well add to the mistrust already entertained
+by Mr. Kipling, if his manner does not betray him, for what is clumsy
+and tasteless in the time-honoured practice of the "plot." It will
+fortify him in the conviction that the vivid picture has a greater
+communicative value than the Chinese puzzle. There is little enough
+"plot" in such a perfect little piece of hard representation as "The End
+of the Passage," to cite again only the most salient of twenty examples.
+
+But I am speaking of our author's future, which is the luxury that I
+meant to forbid myself--precisely because the subject is so tempting.
+There is nothing in the world (for the prophet) so charming as to
+prophesy, and as there is nothing so inconclusive the tendency should be
+repressed in proportion as the opportunity is good. There is a certain
+want of courtesy to a peculiarly contemporaneous present even in
+speculating, with a dozen differential precautions, on the question of
+what will become in the later hours of the day of a talent that has got
+up so early. Mr. Kipling's actual performance is like a tremendous walk
+before breakfast, making one welcome the idea of the meal, but consider
+with some alarm the hours still to be traversed. Yet if his breakfast is
+all to come, the indications are that he will be more active than ever
+after he has had it. Among these indications are the unflagging
+character of his pace and the excellent form, as they say in athletic
+circles, in which he gets over the ground. We don't detect him
+stumbling; on the contrary, he steps out quite as briskly as at first,
+and still more firmly. There is something zealous and craftsman-like in
+him which shows that he feels both joy and responsibility. A whimsical,
+wanton reader, haunted by a recollection of all the good things he has
+seen spoiled; by a sense of the miserable, or, at any rate, the
+inferior, in so many continuations and endings, is almost capable of
+perverting poetic justice to the idea that it would be even positively
+well for so surprising a producer to remain simply the fortunate,
+suggestive, unconfirmed and unqualified representative of what he has
+actually done. We can always refer to that.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Views and Reviews, by Henry James
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