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diff --git a/37424-h/37424-h.htm b/37424-h/37424-h.htm new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ba3e80f --- /dev/null +++ b/37424-h/37424-h.htm @@ -0,0 +1,6123 @@ +<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" +"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> + +<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en" xml:lang="en"> + <head> +<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" /> +<title> + The Project Gutenberg eBook of Views and Reviews, by Henry James. +</title> +<style type="text/css"> + p {margin-top:.2em;text-align:justify;margin-bottom:.2em;text-indent:2%;} + +.c {text-align:center;text-indent:0%;} + +.cb {text-align:center;text-indent:0%;font-weight:bold;} + +.letra {font-size:300%;font-weight:bold;float:left;margin-top: -1.5%;} + +.nind {text-indent:0%;} + +.r {text-align:right;margin-right: 5%;} + +small {font-size: 70%;} + + h1 {margin-top:10%;text-align:center;clear:both;} + + h4 {text-align:center;clear:both;} + + h3 {margin-top:10%;text-align:center;clear:both;font-family: courier new;} + + hr.full {width: 50%;margin:5% auto 5% auto;border:4px double gray;} + + table {margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;border:none;text-align:left;font-family: courier new;} + + body{margin-left:2%;margin-right:2%;background:#fdfdfd;color:black;font-family:"Times New Roman", serif;font-size:medium;} + +a:link {background-color:#ffffff;color:blue;text-decoration:none;} + + link {background-color:#ffffff;color:blue;text-decoration:none;} + +a:visited {background-color:#ffffff;color:purple;text-decoration:none;} + +a:hover {background-color:#ffffff;color:#FF0000;text-decoration:underline;} + +.smcap {font-variant:small-caps;font-size:95%;} + +.blockquot {margin: 5% 15% 5% 15%;} + +.blockquott {margin: 4% auto 4% auto;font-size:90%;} + +.poem {margin:3% auto 3% 25%;text-indent:-.35em;} + +.poemm {margin:3% auto 3% 15%;text-indent:-.35em;} + +.poemmm {margin:3% auto 3% 5%;text-indent:-.35em;} +</style> + </head> +<body> + + +<pre> + +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.) + + + + + + +</pre> + +<hr class="full" /> + +<p class="cb">VIEWS AND REVIEWS</p> + +<h1>VIEWS<br /> +AND REVIEWS<br /> +<small>BY</small><br /> +HENRY JAMES</h1> + +<p class="cb">NOW FIRST COLLECTED</p> + +<p> +<br /> +<br /> +</p> + +<p class="cb"><small>INTRODUCTION BY</small><br /> +<big>LE ROY PHILLIPS</big><br /> +<small>COMPILER OF<br /> +"A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE WRITINGS<br /> +OF HENRY JAMES"</small><br /> +<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /> +BOSTON<br /> +THE BALL PUBLISHING COMPANY<br /> +1908<br /> +<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /> +<i>Copyright, 1908</i><br /> +B<small>Y</small> T<small>HE</small> B<small>ALL</small> P<small>UBLISHING</small> C<small>O.</small></p> + +<h3><a name="INTRODUCTION" id="INTRODUCTION"></a>INTRODUCTION</h3> + +<p><i>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.</i></p> + +<p><i>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</i> Daisy Miller +<i>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.</i></p> + +<p><i>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.</i></p> + +<p><i>The earliest authenticated magazine article by Mr. James—printed when +he was twenty-one—is a critical notice of Nassau W. Senior's</i> Essays on +Fiction <i>in</i> The North American Review <i>for October, 1864. From this +time until the appearance of his first volume</i>—A Passionate Pilgrim and +Other Tales, <i>Boston: 1875—as many as one hundred and twenty-five +serious literary notices contributed to periodicals can be traced to +him</i>.</p> + +<p><i>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.</i></p> + +<p><i>In</i> The North American Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The Galaxy, +Lippincott's Magazine, The New York Tribune, The Independent <i>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.</i></p> + +<p><i>The articles in</i> The Nation <i>are seldom signed, and there is no +published index showing the contributors to its files. In preparing a +recent</i><small>[*]</small> <i>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</i> +The Nation <i>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</i>, "The Hillyars and the Bartons: A Story of +Two Families," <i>under the title</i>, "The Noble School of Fiction," <i>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</i> The Nation <i>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.</i></p> + +<p class="c"><small>[*]</small> <i>A Bibliography of the Writings of Henry James. Boston and +New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1906</i>.</p> + +<p><i>Volumes of the collected critical papers have already +appeared</i>,—French Poets and Novelists, London: <i>1878, and</i> Partial +Portraits, <i>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.</i></p> + +<p><i>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.</i></p> + +<p><i>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.</i></p> + +<p class="r"><i>LE ROY PHILLIPS.</i></p> + +<p><i>Boston, April 10, 1908.</i></p> + +<p> +<br /> +<br /> +</p> + +<table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" summary="CONTENTS"> + +<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS"></a><big>CONTENTS</big></th></tr> + +<tr><td colspan="2" align="right"><small>PAGE</small></td></tr> + +<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#THE_NOVELS_OF_GEORGE_ELIOT">The Novels of George Eliot</a></span> </td><td align="right"><a href="#page_001">1</a></td></tr> + +<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#ON_A_DRAMA_OF_MR_BROWNING">On a Drama of Robert Browning</a></span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_041">41</a></td></tr> + +<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#SWINBURNES_ESSAYS">Swinburne's Essays</a></span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_051">51</a></td></tr> + +<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#THE_POETRY_OF_WILLIAM_MORRIS">The Poetry of William Morris</a></span></td></tr> +<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">I. <span class="smcap"><a href="#THE_LIFE_AND_DEATH_OF_JASON">The Life and Death of Jason</a></span></span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_063">63</a></td></tr> +<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 1em;">II. <span class="smcap"><a href="#THE_EARTHLY_PARADISE">The Earthly Paradise</a></span></span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_071">71</a></td></tr> + +<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#MATTHEW_ARNOLDS_ESSAYS">Matthew Arnold's Essays</a></span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_083">83</a></td></tr> + +<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#MR_WALT_WHITMAN">Mr. Walt Whitman</a></span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_101">101</a></td></tr> + +<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#THE_POETRY_OF_GEORGE_ELIOT">The Poetry of George Eliot</a></span></td></tr> +<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">I. <span class="smcap"><a href="#THE_SPANISH_GYPSY">The Spanish Gypsy</a></span></span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_113">113</a></td></tr> +<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 1em;">II. <span class="smcap"><a href="#THE_LEGEND_OF_JUBAL_AND_OTHER_POEMS">The Legend of Jubal</a></span></span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_138">138</a></td></tr> + +<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#THE_LIMITATIONS_OF_DICKENS">The Limitations of Dickens</a></span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_153">153</a></td></tr> + +<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#TENNYSONS_DRAMA">Tennyson's Drama</a></span></td></tr> +<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">I. <span class="smcap"><a href="#QUEEN_MARY">Queen Mary</a></span></span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_165">165</a></td></tr> +<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 1em;">II. <span class="smcap"><a href="#HAROLD">Harold</a></span></span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_196">196</a></td></tr> + +<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#CONTEMPORARY_NOTES_ON_WHISTLER_VS_RUSKIN">Contemporary Notes on Whistler vs. Ruskin</a></span></td></tr> +<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">I. <span class="smcap"><a href="#THE_SUIT_FOR_LIBEL">The Suit for Libel</a></span></span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_207">207</a></td></tr> +<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 1em;">II. <span class="smcap"><a href="#MR_WHISTLERS_REJOINDER">Mr. Whistler's Rejoinder</a></span></span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_211">211</a></td></tr> + +<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#A_NOTE_ON_JOHN_BURROUGHS">A Note on John Burroughs</a></span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_217">217</a></td></tr> + +<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#MR_KIPLINGS_EARLY_STORIES">Mr. Kipling's Early Stories</a></span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_225">225</a></td></tr> +</table> + +<h3><a name="THE_NOVELS_OF_GEORGE_ELIOT" id="THE_NOVELS_OF_GEORGE_ELIOT"></a>THE NOVELS OF GEORGE ELIOT</h3> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>Originally published in <i>The Atlantic Monthly</i>, October, +1866.</p> + +<p>This essay was written in 1866 before <i>Middlemarch</i> +or <i>Daniel Deronda</i> 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 <i>Atlantic Monthly</i>, December, 1876, and reprinted +in 1888 in <i>Partial Portraits</i>.</p></div> + +<h1>VIEWS AND REVIEWS</h1> + +<p><a name="page_001" id="page_001"></a></p> + +<h3>THE NOVELS OF GEORGE ELIOT</h3> + +<p class="nind"><span class="letra">T</span><b>HE</b> 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 <i>Adam Bede</i> the following +passage:—</p> + +<p>"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<a name="page_002" id="page_002"></a> +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....</p> + +<p>"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....</p> + +<p>"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<a name="page_003" id="page_003"></a> +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."</p> + +<p>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 <i>Scenes +of Clerical Life</i>, the author is constantly slipping +down from the clergymen, her heroes, to the most +ignorant and obscure of their parishioners. Even +in <i>Romola</i> she consecrates page after page to the +conversation of the Florentine populace. She is as +unmistakably a painter of <i>bourgeois</i> life as Thackeray +was a painter of the life of drawing-rooms.</p> + +<p>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.<a name="page_004" id="page_004"></a> +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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_005" id="page_005"></a> +pictures of vice or poverty or squalor. There are +no rags, no gin, no brutal passions. That average +humanity which she favours is very <i>borné</i> in intellect, +but very genial in heart, as a glance at +its representatives in her pages will convince us. +In <i>Adam Bede</i>, 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 <i>The Mill on the Floss</i>. 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.</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_006" id="page_006"></a> +the common traits of our author's various groups +is the word <i>respectable</i>. 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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>Scenes of Clerical Life</i> to <i>Adam +Bede</i> 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.</p> + +<p>"Mr. Gilfil's Love-Story," the second of the +tales in question, I cannot hesitate to pronounce<a name="page_007" id="page_007"></a> +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 <i>Silas Marner</i>.</p> + +<p>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 <i>The +Mill on the Floss</i>. The subject of this tale might +almost be qualified by the French epithet <i>scabreux</i>. +It would be difficult for what is called <i>realism</i> 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<a name="page_008" id="page_008"></a> +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.</p> + +<p>To a certain extent, I think <i>Silas Marner</i> 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 <i>dramatis +personae</i>. More than any of its brother-works, +<i>Silas Marner</i>, I think, leaves upon the mind a deep +impression of the grossly material life of agricultural +England in the last days of the old <i>régime</i>,—the +days of full-orbed Toryism, of Trafalgar +and of Waterloo, when the invasive spirit of<a name="page_009" id="page_009"></a> +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."</p> + +<p>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 <i>Silas Marner</i>, 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:—</p> + +<p>"'Some folks 'ud say that was a fine beast you +druv in yesterday, Bob?'</p> + +<p>"The butcher, a jolly, smiling, red-haired man,<a name="page_010" id="page_010"></a> +was not disposed to answer rashly. He gave a +few puffs before he spat, and replied, 'And they +wouldn't be fur wrong, John.'</p> + +<p>"After this feeble, delusive thaw, silence set in +as severely as before.</p> + +<p>"'Was it a red Durham?' said the farrier, taking +up the thread of discourse after the lapse of +a few minutes.</p> + +<p>"The farrier looked at the landlord, and the +landlord looked at the butcher, as the person who +must take the responsibility of answering.</p> + +<p>"'Red it was,' said the butcher, in his good-humoured +husky treble,—'and a Durham it was.'</p> + +<p>"'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?'</p> + +<p>"'Well; yes—she might,' said the butcher, +slowly, considering that he was giving a decided +affirmation. 'I don't say contrairy.'</p> + +<p>"'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.'</p> + +<p>"The farrier looked fierce, and the mild +butcher's conversational spirit was roused a little.<a name="page_011" id="page_011"></a></p> + +<p>"'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>I</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.'</p> + +<p>"'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.'</p> + +<p>"'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.'</p> + +<p>"'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.'"</p> + +<p>Matters having come to this point, the landlord +interferes <i>ex officio</i> 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<a name="page_012" id="page_012"></a> +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.'"</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>"'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.'</p> + +<p>"'But <i>you</i> knew what was going on well enough, +didn't you, Mr. Macey? You were live enough, +eh?' said the butcher.</p> + +<p>"'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<a name="page_013" id="page_013"></a> +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?'"</p> + +<p>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.'"<a name="page_014" id="page_014"></a></p> + +<p>The best drawn of the village worthies in <i>Silas +Marner</i> 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.</p> + +<p>"'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.'</p> + +<p>"'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.'</p> + +<p>"'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!'"</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_015" id="page_015"></a> +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.</p> + +<p>"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<a name="page_016" id="page_016"></a> +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."</p> + +<p>"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.</p> + +<p>In all those of our author's books which have +borne the name of the hero or heroine,—<i>Adam +Bede</i>, <i>Silas Marner</i>, <i>Romola</i>, and <i>Felix Holt</i>,—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 <i>Romola</i>. +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 <i>Silas Marner</i>. Felix Holt, in the work +which bears his name, is little more than an occasional<a name="page_017" id="page_017"></a> +apparition; and indeed the novel has no +hero, but only a heroine.</p> + +<p>The same remark applies to <i>Adam Bede</i>, 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 <i>sufficient</i> 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.</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_018" id="page_018"></a> +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 <i>possible</i>.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>When you re-read coldly and critically a book<a name="page_019" id="page_019"></a> +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 +<i>Adam Bede</i> 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.</p> + +<p>Mrs. Poyser is <i>too</i> 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 <i>staccato</i>; 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<a name="page_020" id="page_020"></a> +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? <i>Everybody 'ud be wanting to make +bread o' tail ends</i>, 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.</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_021" id="page_021"></a> +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.</p> + +<p>"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<a name="page_022" id="page_022"></a> +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."</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_023" id="page_023"></a> +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.</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_024" id="page_024"></a> +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.</p> + +<p>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?</p> + +<p>It is as a picture, or rather as a series of pictures, +that I find <i>Adam Bede</i> most valuable. The +author succeeds better in drawing attitudes of feeling<a name="page_025" id="page_025"></a> +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.</p> + +<p>It is not in her conceptions nor her composition +that George Eliot is strongest: it is in her <i>touches</i>. +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<a name="page_026" id="page_026"></a> +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.</p> + +<p>The contrast here indicated, strong in <i>Adam +Bede</i>, is most striking in <i>Felix Holt, the Radical</i>. +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 +<i>Felix Holt</i>, 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,<a name="page_027" id="page_027"></a> +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.</p> + +<p>"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."</p> + +<p>"I'm afraid of ever expecting anything good +again," her mistress says to her in a moment of +depression.</p> + +<p>"'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.'<a name="page_028" id="page_028"></a></p> + +<p>"'Nonsense! There's no pleasure for old +women.... What are your pleasures, Denner, +besides being a slave to me?'</p> + +<p>"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."</p> + +<p>And, on another occasion, when her mistress exclaims, +in a fit of distress, that "God was cruel +when he made women," the author says:—</p> + +<p>"The waiting-woman had none of that awe +which could be turned into defiance; the sacred +grove was a common thicket to her.</p> + +<p>"'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. <i>They're a coarse lot, I think.</i>'"<a name="page_029" id="page_029"></a></p> + +<p>I should think they were, beside Mrs. Denner.</p> + +<p>This glimpse of her is made up of what I +have called the author's <i>touches</i>. 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.</p> + +<p>"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; <i>but his voice being unpleasantly +sharp, while Harold's was full and penetrating, +the questioning was cried down</i>."</p> + +<p>Of the four English stories, <i>The Mill on the +Floss</i> 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<a name="page_030" id="page_030"></a> +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.</p> + +<p>"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.'</p> + +<p>"'What for?'</p> + +<p>"'You never mind what for,—shut 'em when I +tell you.'</p> + +<p>"Maggie obeyed.</p> + +<p>"'Now, which'll you have, Maggie, right hand +or left?'</p> + +<p>"'I'll have that one with the jam run out,' said +Maggie, keeping her eyes shut to please Tom.</p> + +<p>"'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.'</p> + +<p>"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<a name="page_031" id="page_031"></a> +Tom told her to 'say which,' and then she said, +'Left hand.'</p> + +<p>"'You've got it,' said Tom, in rather a bitter +tone.</p> + +<p>"'What! the bit with the jam run out?'</p> + +<p>"'No; here, take it,' said Tom, firmly, handing +decidedly the best piece to Maggie.</p> + +<p>"'O, please, Tom, have it; I don't mind,—I +like the other; please take this.'</p> + +<p>"'No, I sha'n't,' said Tom, almost crossly, beginning +on his own inferior piece.</p> + +<p>"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. <i>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.</i></p> + +<p>"'O, you greedy thing!' said Tom, when she +had swallowed the last morsel."</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_032" id="page_032"></a> +accumulate small examples of their idiosyncrasies, +I do not mean to say that the resemblance is very +deep.</p> + +<p>The chief defect—indeed, the only serious one—in +<i>The Mill on the Floss</i> 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 <i>dénouement</i> +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 <i>dénouement</i> 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.</p> + +<p>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,<a name="page_033" id="page_033"></a> +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 <i>dénouement</i> 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.</p> + +<p>I have come to the end of my space without +speaking of <i>Romola</i>, 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 <i>is</i> 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.</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_034" id="page_034"></a> +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.</p> + +<p>"Our deeds determine us," George Eliot says +somewhere in <i>Adam Bede</i>, "as much as we determine +our deeds." This is the moral lesson of <i>Romola</i>. +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.</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_035" id="page_035"></a> +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, <i>and the soul recovers the noble attitude +of simplicity</i>." 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.</p> + +<p>The fact that has led me to a belief in the fundamental +equality between the worth of <i>Romola</i> +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<a name="page_036" id="page_036"></a> +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 <i>Adam Bede</i> which treat +of Hetty's flight and wanderings, and those of +Miss Bronté's <i>Jane Eyre</i> 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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>Felix Holt, +the Radical</i>) 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<a name="page_037" id="page_037"></a> +an attempt was—considering the title—conspicuous +by its absence.</p> + +<p>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" +<i>without</i> 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 <i>The Mill on the Floss</i> 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.</p> + +<p><a name="page_038" id="page_038"></a></p> + +<p><a name="page_039" id="page_039"></a></p> + +<h3><a name="ON_A_DRAMA_OF_MR_BROWNING" id="ON_A_DRAMA_OF_MR_BROWNING"></a>ON A DRAMA OF MR. BROWNING<a name="page_040" id="page_040"></a></h3> + +<div class="blockquot"> +<p>A review of <i>The Inn Album</i>, by Robert Browning, +London, Smith & Elder; Boston, J. R. Osgood & Co. 1875. +Originally published in <i>The Nation</i>, January 20, 1876.<a name="page_041" id="page_041"></a></p> +</div> + +<h3>ON A DRAMA OF MR. BROWNING</h3> + +<p class="nind"><span class="letra">T</span><b>HIS</b> 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.</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_042" id="page_042"></a> +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.</p> + +<p><i>The Inn Album</i> 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.</p> + +<p>"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<a name="page_043" id="page_043"></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 <i>The Inn Album</i>, +as we fancy cultivating for conversational +purposes the society of a person afflicted with a +grievous impediment of speech.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_044" id="page_044"></a> +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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>intime</i> conversation.<a name="page_045" id="page_045"></a></p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_046" id="page_046"></a> +is related in two pregnant lines, which, +judged by the general standard of style of the <i>Inn +Album</i>, must be considered fine:</p> + +<p> +"A tiger-flash, yell, spring and scream: halloo!<br /> +Death's out and on him, has and holds him—ugh!"<br /> +</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.<a name="page_047" id="page_047"></a> 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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>The Inn Album</i>. 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 <i>The Inn Album</i> 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.</p> + +<p><a name="page_048" id="page_048"></a></p> + +<p><a name="page_049" id="page_049"></a></p> + +<h3><a name="SWINBURNES_ESSAYS" id="SWINBURNES_ESSAYS"></a>SWINBURNE'S ESSAYS<a name="page_050" id="page_050"></a></h3> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>A review of <i>Essays and Studies</i>, by Algernon Charles Swinburne. London: +Chatto & Windus, 1875. Originally published in <i>The Nation</i>, July 29, +1875.<a name="page_051" id="page_051"></a></p></div> + +<h3>SWINBURNE'S ESSAYS</h3> + +<p class="nind"><span class="letra">M</span><b>R. SWINBURNE</b> 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.</p> + +<p>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.<a name="page_052" id="page_052"></a> +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.</p> + +<p>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."</p> + +<p>The essays before us are upon Victor Hugo, D. G. Rossetti, William +Morris, Matthew Arnold as a poet, Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, and John +Ford.<a name="page_053" id="page_053"></a> 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.</p> + +<p>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.<a name="page_054" id="page_054"></a> 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:—</p> + +<p>"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<a name="page_055" id="page_055"></a> force of a +great hand he won the place he holds against all odds of rivalry in a +race of rival giants."</p> + +<p>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 <i>en passant</i> to Gautier's <i>Mademoiselle de +Maupin</i> as "the most perfect and exquisite book of modern times."</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_056" id="page_056"></a> 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:—</p> + +<p>"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<a name="page_057" id="page_057"></a> 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."</p> + +<p>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.<a name="page_058" id="page_058"></a> The train +shimmers and tumbles in a very gorgeous fashion, but the rustle of its +embroidery is fatally importunate.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>We do not remember in this whole volume a single instance of delicate +moral discrimination—a single<a name="page_059" id="page_059"></a> 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.</p> + +<p><a name="page_060" id="page_060"></a></p> + +<p><a name="page_061" id="page_061"></a></p> + +<h3><a name="THE_POETRY_OF_WILLIAM_MORRIS" id="THE_POETRY_OF_WILLIAM_MORRIS"></a>THE POETRY OF WILLIAM MORRIS<a name="page_062" id="page_062"></a></h3> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>I. A review of <i>The Life and Death of Jason</i>: A poem. By William Morris, +Boston: Roberts Brothers. 1867. Originally published in <i>North American +Review</i>, October, 1867.</p> + +<p>II. A review of <i>The Earthly Paradise</i>: A poem. By William Morris, +Boston: Roberts Bros. 1868. Originally published in <i>The Nation</i>, July +9, 1868.</p> + +<p><i>The Earthly Paradise; Parts I and II</i> 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.<a name="page_063" id="page_063"></a></p></div> + +<h3>THE POETRY OF WILLIAM MORRIS</h3> + +<h4>I. <a name="THE_LIFE_AND_DEATH_OF_JASON" id="THE_LIFE_AND_DEATH_OF_JASON"></a>THE LIFE AND DEATH OF JASON</h4> + +<p class="nind"><span class="letra">I</span><b>N</b> 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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>Poems and +Ballads</i>,—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<a name="page_064" id="page_064"></a> 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.</p> + +<p><i>The Life and Death of Jason</i>, 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:—</p> + +<p>"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<a name="page_065" id="page_065"></a> 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."</p> + +<p>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 <i>contours</i>, 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<a name="page_066" id="page_066"></a> 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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>The idea, for instance, of a <i>flying ram</i>, 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<a name="page_067" id="page_067"></a> 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.</p> + +<p>A large number, however, of far greater drawbacks than any we are able +to mention could not materially diminish the powerful beauty of this<a name="page_068" id="page_068"></a> +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.</p> + +<p>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.<a name="page_069" id="page_069"></a></p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_070" id="page_070"></a> 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:—</p> + +<p class="poem"> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">"One man was left alive, but wounded sore,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Who, staring round about and seeing no more</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">His brothers' spears against him, fixed his eyes</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Upon the queller of those mysteries.</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Then dreadfully they gleamed, and with no word,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">He tottered towards him with uplifted sword.</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">But scarce he made three paces down the field,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Ere chill death seized his heart, and on his shield</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Clattering he fell."</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_071" id="page_071"></a> 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.</p> + +<h4>II. <a name="THE_EARTHLY_PARADISE" id="THE_EARTHLY_PARADISE"></a>THE EARTHLY PARADISE</h4> + +<p>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:<a name="page_072" id="page_072"></a></p> + +<p class="poem"> +<span style="margin-left: 3em;">... "Hot July was drawing to an end,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 3em;">And August came the fainting year to mend</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;">With fruit and grain; so 'neath the trellises,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Nigh blossomless, did they lie well at ease,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 3em;">And watched the poppies burn across the grass,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;">And o'er the bindweed's bells the brown bee pass,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Still murmuring of his gains: windless and bright</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 3em;">The morn had been, to help their dear delight.</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;">... Then a light wind arose</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 3em;">That shook the light stems of that flowery close,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;">And made men sigh for pleasure."</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>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, <i>The Life and Death of Jason</i>, 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<a name="page_073" id="page_073"></a> 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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>Earthly Paradise</i> with them to the country.</p> + +<p>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:—</p> + +<p>"Certain gentlemen and mariners of Norway, having considered all that +they had heard of the<a name="page_074" id="page_074"></a> 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."</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_075" id="page_075"></a> 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.</p> + +<p>The Greek stories are the various histories of Atalanta, of Perseus, of +Cupid and Psyche, of Alcestis, of Atys, the hapless son of Crœsus, +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.</p> + +<p>"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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>belle inhumaine</i>. 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<a name="page_076" id="page_076"></a> art +the sense of devout stillness and of pagan sanctity which invests this +remote and prayerful spot. The yellow torch-light,</p> + +<p class="poem"> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">"Wherein with fluttering gown and half-bared limb</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">The temple damsels sung their evening hymn;"</span><br /> +</p> + +<p class="nind">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.</p> + +<p>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,"</p> + +<p class="poem"> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">"Such as in Cyprus, the fair blossomed isle,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">When on the altar in the summer night</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">They pile the roses up for her delight,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Men see within their hearts."</span><br /> +</p> + +<p><a name="page_077" id="page_077"></a></p> + +<p>"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.</p> + +<p>The story of the "Son of Crœsus," 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 <i>recherché</i> +character of his<a name="page_078" id="page_078"></a> 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.</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_079" id="page_079"></a> is all aglow with his unanswered passion, he one day +sits down before his image:</p> + +<p class="poem"> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">"And at the last drew forth a book of rhymes,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Wherein were writ the tales of many climes,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">And read aloud the sweetness hid therein</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Of lovers' sorrows and their tangled sin."</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>He reads aloud to his marble torment: would Mr. Swinburne have touched +that note?</p> + +<p>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."</p> + +<p>The author in his <i>Jason</i> 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<a name="page_080" id="page_080"></a> +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?</p> + +<p>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 <i>au sérieux</i>. +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.<a name="page_081" id="page_081"></a></p> + +<h3><a name="MATTHEW_ARNOLDS_ESSAYS" id="MATTHEW_ARNOLDS_ESSAYS"></a>MATTHEW ARNOLD'S ESSAYS<a name="page_082" id="page_082"></a></h3> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>A review of <i>Essays in Criticism</i>. By Matthew Arnold, Professor of +Poetry in the University of Oxford. Boston: Ticknor and Fields. 1865. +Originally published in <i>North American Review</i>, July, 1865.<a name="page_083" id="page_083"></a></p> +</div> + +<h3>MATTHEW ARNOLD'S ESSAYS</h3> + +<p class="nind"><span class="letra">M</span><b>R. ARNOLD'S</b> <i>Essays in Criticism</i> 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.</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_084" id="page_084"></a> 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.</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_085" id="page_085"></a> 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.</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_086" id="page_086"></a> 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.</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_087" id="page_087"></a> 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.</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_088" id="page_088"></a> 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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>was uns alle bändigt, das Gemeine</i>, 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<a name="page_089" id="page_089"></a> 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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>Another illustration of the nicety of Mr. Arnold's feeling is furnished +by his remarks upon the quality of <i>distinction</i> 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<a name="page_090" id="page_090"></a> 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 <i>Centaur</i>; 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.</p> + +<p>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,</p> + +<div class="blockquott"><p>"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,<a name="page_091" id="page_091"></a> +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."</p></div> + +<p>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 +<i>Philistine</i>. 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 <i>épicier</i>, used by Mr. Arnold as a French +synonyme, is not so good as <i>bourgeois</i>, and to those who know that +<i>bourgeois</i> 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<a name="page_092" id="page_092"></a> 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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>la verité vraie</i>. +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.<a name="page_093" id="page_093"></a> 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 <i>régime</i> of Whig and Tory, High-Church and Low-Church +organs.</p> + +<p>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 +<i>practical</i> is almost identical with the word <i>useful</i>, against which, +on the other hand, they erect the word <i>ornamental</i>. 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<a name="page_094" id="page_094"></a> fancies; but it deals with +them only for the sake of the truth which is in them, and not for <i>your</i> +sake, reader, and that of your party. It takes <i>high ground</i>, 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<a name="page_095" id="page_095"></a> 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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>subject</i>. Each essay +is <i>about</i> 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<a name="page_096" id="page_096"></a> 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.</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_097" id="page_097"></a> seriously, which for an Englishman is a good deal.</p> + +<p>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 <i>naïveté</i>, but which +knows it has lost it.</p> + +<p><a name="page_098" id="page_098"></a></p> + +<p><a name="page_099" id="page_099"></a></p> + +<h3><a name="MR_WALT_WHITMAN" id="MR_WALT_WHITMAN"></a>MR. WALT WHITMAN</h3> + +<p><a name="page_100" id="page_100"></a></p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>An unsigned review of <i>Walt Whitman's</i> Drum-Taps, New York, 1865. +Originally published in <i>The Nation</i>, November 16, 1865.</p> + +<p>As this review has long been familiar to students of Whitman, and +its authorship quite generally known, the original title has been +retained here.</p></div> + +<p><a name="page_101" id="page_101"></a></p> + +<h3>MR. WALT WHITMAN</h3> + +<p class="nind"><span class="letra">I</span><b>T</b> 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 +<i>Philosophy</i> 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 <i>Rebellion +Record</i>.<a name="page_102" id="page_102"></a></p> + +<p><i>Of course</i> 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. <i>Of course</i> 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 <i>ore rotundo</i>. 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 <i>accidents</i> 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.</p> + +<p>Mr. Whitman is very fond of blowing his own trumpet, and he has made +very explicit claims for<a name="page_103" id="page_103"></a> his books. "Shut not your doors," he exclaims +at the outset—</p> + +<p class="poemm"> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">"Shut not your doors to me, proud libraries,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">For that which was lacking among you all, yet needed most, I bring;</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">A book I have made for your dear sake, O soldiers,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">And for you, O soul of man, and you, love of comrades;</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">The words of my book nothing, the life of it everything;</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">A book separate, not link'd with the rest, nor felt by the intellect;</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">But you will feel every word, O Libertad! arm'd Libertad!</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">It shall pass by the intellect to swim the sea, the air,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;">With joy with you, O soul of man."</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>These are great pretensions, but it seems to us that the following are +even greater:</p> + +<p class="poemmm"> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">"From Paumanok starting, I fly like a bird,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Around and around to soar, to sing the idea of all;</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">To the north betaking myself, to sing there arctic songs,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">To Kanada, 'till I absorb Kanada in myself—to Michigan then,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">To Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, to sing their songs (they are inimitable);</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Then to Ohio and Indiana, to sing theirs—to Missouri and Kansas and Arkansas to sing theirs,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">To Tennessee and Kentucky—to the Carolinas and Georgia, to sing theirs,<a name="page_104" id="page_104"></a></span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">To Texas, and so along up toward California, to roam accepted everywhere;</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">To sing first (to the tap of the war-drum, if need be)</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">The idea of all—of the western world, one and inseparable,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">And then the song of each member of these States."</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 name="page_105" id="page_105"></a> 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 +<i>chansonnier</i>. 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.</p> + +<p>But what if, in form, it <i>is</i> 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 <i>may</i> 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.</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_106" id="page_106"></a> +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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>To this instinct Mr. Whitman's attitude seems monstrous. It is monstrous +because it pretends<a name="page_107" id="page_107"></a> 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 <i>on theory</i>, 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:—</p> + +<p>"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<a name="page_108" id="page_108"></a> 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.</p> + +<p>"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.</p> + +<p>"But all this is a mistake. To become adopted as a national poet, it is +not enough to discard<a name="page_109" id="page_109"></a> 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.</p> + +<p>"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<a name="page_110" id="page_110"></a> your nature, the tenderness of your +heart—these facts are impertinent. You must be <i>possessed</i>, 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."<a name="page_111" id="page_111"></a></p> + +<h3><a name="THE_POETRY_OF_GEORGE_ELIOT" id="THE_POETRY_OF_GEORGE_ELIOT"></a>THE POETRY OF GEORGE ELIOT<a name="page_112" id="page_112"></a></h3> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>I. A review of <i>The Spanish Gypsy</i>. <i>A Poem.</i> By George Eliot. +Boston: Ticknor and Fields. 1868. Originally published in <i>North +American Review</i>, October, 1868.</p> + +<p>II. A review of <i>The Legend of Jubal, and other Poems</i>. By George +Eliot. Wm. Blackwood and Sons: Edinburgh and London. 1874. +Originally published in <i>North American Review</i>, October, 1874.</p></div> + +<p><a name="page_113" id="page_113"></a></p> + +<h3>THE POETRY OF GEORGE ELIOT</h3> + +<h4>I. <a name="THE_SPANISH_GYPSY" id="THE_SPANISH_GYPSY"></a>THE SPANISH GYPSY</h4> + +<p class="nind"><span class="letra">I</span><b>KNOW</b> 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<a name="page_114" id="page_114"></a> +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 <i>The Spanish +Gypsy</i>, it was quite possible that she might injure its fair +proportions.</p> + +<p>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 <i>Silas Marner</i> and +of <i>Romola</i>,—the author, too, of <i>Felix Holt</i>. 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, <i>The Spanish Gypsy</i> 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<a name="page_115" id="page_115"></a> 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.</p> + +<p>But here, meanwhile, is the book before me, to arrest all this <i>a +priori</i> 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 <i>The Spanish Gypsy</i>, but +the<a name="page_116" id="page_116"></a> 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.</p> + +<p>The most striking quality in <i>The Spanish Gypsy</i>, 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<a name="page_117" id="page_117"></a> 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</p> + +<p class="poem"> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">"Broad-breasted Spain, leaning with equal love</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">(A calm earth-goddess crowned with corn and vines)</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">On the Mid Sea that moans with memories,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">And on the untravelled Ocean, <i>whose vast tides</i></span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;"><i>Pant dumbly passionate with dreams of youth</i>."</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>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:—</p> + +<p class="poem"> +<span style="margin-left: 7em;">"A spirit framed</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Too proudly special for obedience,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Too subtly pondering for mastery:</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Born of a goddess with a mortal sire,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Heir of flesh-fettered, weak divinity,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><i>Doom-gifted with long resonant consciousness</i></span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><i>And perilous heightening of the sentient soul</i>."</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>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,<a name="page_118" id="page_118"></a> 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:—</p> + +<p class="poem"> +<span style="margin-left: 11em;">"I was right!</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;">These gems have life in them: their colours speak,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Say what words fail of. So do many things,—</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;">The scent of jasmine and the fountain's plash,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;">The moving shadows on the far-off hills,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;">The slanting moonlight and our clasping hands.</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;">O Silva, there's an ocean round our words,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;">That overflows and drowns them. Do you know.</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Sometimes when we sit silent, and the air</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Breathes gently on us from the orange-trees,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;">It seems that with the whisper of a word</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Our souls must shrink, get poorer, more apart?</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Is it not true?</span><br /> +<br /> +<span style="margin-left: 10em;"><small>DON SILVA.</small></span><br /> +<br /> +<span style="margin-left: 11em;">Yes, dearest, it is true.</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Speech is but broken light upon the depth</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Of the unspoken: even your loved words</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Float in the larger meaning of your voice</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;">As something dimmer."</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>I may say in general, that the author's admirers must have found in <i>The +Spanish Gypsy</i> 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<a name="page_119" id="page_119"></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.<a name="page_120" id="page_120"></a></p> + +<p>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</p> + +<p class="poem"> +<span style="margin-left: 6em;">"He is one of those</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Who steal the keys from snoring Destiny,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;">And make the prophets lie."</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>Zarca himself, speaking of "the steadfast mind, the undivided will to +seek the good," says most admirably,—</p> + +<p class="poem"> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">"'Tis that compels the elements, <i>and wrings</i></span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;"><i>A human music from the indifferent air</i>."</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>When the Prior pronounces Fedalma's blood "unchristian as the +leopard's," Don Silva retorts with,—</p> + +<p class="poem"> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">"Unchristian as the Blessed Virgin's blood.</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Before the angel spoke the word, 'All hail!'"</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>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</p> + +<p class="poem"> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">"A woman's dream,—who thinks by smiling well</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">To ripen figs in frost."</span><br /> +</p> + +<p><a name="page_121" id="page_121"></a></p> + +<p>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:—</p> + +<p class="poem"> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">"And bells make Catholic the trembling air";</span><br /> +</p> + +<p class="nind">and,</p> + +<p class="poem"> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">"Sad as the twilight, all his clothes ill-girt";</span><br /> +</p> + +<p class="nind">and again</p> + +<p class="poem"> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">"Mournful professor of high drollery."</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>Here is a very good line and a half:—</p> + +<p class="poem"> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">"The old rain-fretted mountains in their robes</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Of shadow-broken gray."</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>Here, finally, are three admirable pictures:—</p> + +<p class="poem"> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">"The stars thin-scattered made the heavens large,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Bending in slow procession; in the east,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Emergent from the dark waves of the hills,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Seeming a little sister of the moon,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Glowed Venus all unquenched."</span><br /> +<br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">"Spring afternoons, when delicate shadows fall</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Pencilled upon the grass; high summer morns,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">When white light rains upon the quiet sea,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">And cornfields flush for ripeness."</span><br /> +<br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">"Scent the fresh breath of the height-loving herbs,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">That, trodden by the pretty parted hoofs<a name="page_122" id="page_122"></a></span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Of nimble goats, sigh at the innocent bruise,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">And with a mingled difference exquisite</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Pour a sweet burden on the buoyant air."</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>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 <i>The Spanish +Gypsy</i> 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 <a name="page_123" id="page_123"></a>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.</p> + +<p>It misses it, I think, thanks to that circumstance which in reading and +criticising <i>The Spanish Gypsy</i> we must not cease to bear in mind, the +fact that the work is emphatically a <i>romance</i>. 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 <i>Gypsy</i> chieftain. They are<a name="page_124" id="page_124"></a> 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.</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_125" id="page_125"></a> 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.</p> + +<p class="poem"> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">"Our dear young love,—its breath was happiness!</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">But it had grown upon a larger life,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Which tore its roots asunder."</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_126" id="page_126"></a> +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:—</p> + +<p class="poem"> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">"All gathering influences culminate</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">And urge Fedalma. Earth and heaven seem one,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Life a glad trembling on the outer edge</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Of unknown rapture. Swifter now she moves,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Filling the measure with a double beat</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">And widening circle; now she seems to glow</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">With more declaréd presence, glorified.</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Circling, she lightly bends, and lifts on high</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">The multitudinous-sounding tambourine,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">And makes it ring and boom, then lifts it higher,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Stretching her left arm beauteous."</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>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 <a name="page_127" id="page_127"></a>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 <i>The Spanish Gypsy</i> should, all unassisted, attempt to relate the +other.</p> + +<p>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 <i>The Spanish Gypsy</i> 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,<a name="page_128" id="page_128"></a> 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<a name="page_129" id="page_129"></a> fancying this admirable performance as anything other +than it is.</p> + +<p>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 <i>père +noble</i> 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:—</p> + +<p class="poem"> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">"Wanderers whom no God took knowledge of,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">To give them laws, to fight for them, or blight</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Another race to make them ampler room;</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">A people with no home even in memory,<a name="page_130" id="page_130"></a></span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">No dimmest lore of giant ancestors</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">To make a common hearth for piety";</span><br /> +</p> + +<p class="nind">a people all ignorant of</p> + +<p class="poem"> +<span style="margin-left: 4em;">"The rich heritage, the milder life,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Of nations fathered by a mighty Past."</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>Like Don Silva, like Juan, like Sephardo, Zarca is decidedly a man of +intellect.</p> + +<p>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.<a name="page_131" id="page_131"></a> 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:—</p> + +<p class="poem"> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">"Such titles with their blazonry are his</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Who keeps this fortress, sworn Alcaÿde,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Lord of the valley, master of the town,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Commanding whom he will, himself commanded</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">By Christ his Lord, who sees him from the cross,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">And from bright heaven where the Mother pleads;</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">By good Saint James, upon the milk-white steed,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Who leaves his bliss to fight for chosen Spain;</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">By the dead gaze of all his ancestors;</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">And by the mystery of his Spanish blood,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Charged with the awe and glories of the past."</span><br /> +</p> + +<p><a name="page_132" id="page_132"></a></p> + +<p>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:—</p> + +<p class="poem"> +<span style="margin-left: 17em;">"Now awful Night,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Ancestral mystery of mysteries, came down</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Past all the generations of the stars,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;">And visited his soul with touch more close</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Than when he kept that closer, briefer watch,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Under the church's roof, beside his arms,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;">And won his knighthood."</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_133" id="page_133"></a> with which a great painter represents the +expression of a countenance.</p> + +<p>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:—</p> + +<p class="poem"> +<span style="margin-left: 3em;">"Juan was a troubadour revived,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Freshening life's dusty road with babbling rills</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Of wit and song, living 'mid harnessed men</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">With limbs ungalled by armour, ready so</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">To soothe them weary and to cheer them sad.</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Guest at the board, companion in the camp,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">A crystal mirror to the life around:</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Flashing the comment keen of simple fact</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Defined in words; lending brief lyric voice</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">To grief and sadness; hardly taking note</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Of difference betwixt his own and others';</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">But, rather singing as a listener<a name="page_134" id="page_134"></a></span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">To the deep moans, the cries, the wildstrong joys</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Of universal Nature, old, yet young."</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>When Juan talks at his ease, he strikes the note of poetry much more +surely than when he lifts his voice in song:—</p> + +<p class="poem"> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">"Yet if your graciousness will not disdain</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">A poor plucked songster, shall he sing to you?</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;"><i>Some lay of afternoons,—some ballad strain</i></span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;"><i>Of those who ached once, but are sleeping now</i></span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;"><i>Under the sun-warmed flowers?</i>"</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>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:—</p> + +<p class="poem"> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">"O lady, constancy has kind and rank.</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">One man's is lordly, plump, and bravely clad,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Holds its head high, and tells the world its name:</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Another man's is beggared, must go bare,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">And shiver through the world, the jest of all,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">But that it puts the motley on, and plays</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Itself the jester."</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>Nor are his merits lost upon her, as she declares, with no small +force,—</p> + +<p class="poem"> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">"No! on the close-thronged spaces of the earth</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">A battle rages; Fate has carried me</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">'Mid the thick arrows: I will keep my stand,—<a name="page_135" id="page_135"></a></span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Nor shrink, and let the shaft pass by my breast</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">To pierce another. O, 'tis written large,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">The thing I have to do. But you, dear Juan,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Renounce, endure, are brave, unurged by aught</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Save the sweet overflow of your good-will."</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>Of the different parts of <i>The Spanish Gypsy</i> 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<a name="page_136" id="page_136"></a> 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:—</p> + +<p class="poem"> +<span style="margin-left: 15em;">"All her being paused</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;">In resolution, <i>as some leonine wave</i>," etc.</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_137" id="page_137"></a> smoked +by the flame of meditative vigils, just as we saw the outward aspect of +Florence in <i>Romola</i>. 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.</p> + +<p>The great merit of the characters is that they are marvellously well +<i>understood</i>,—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 <i>amateurs</i><a name="page_138" id="page_138"></a> 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 <i>réussi</i> 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.</p> + +<h4>II. <a name="THE_LEGEND_OF_JUBAL_AND_OTHER_POEMS" id="THE_LEGEND_OF_JUBAL_AND_OTHER_POEMS"></a>THE LEGEND OF JUBAL AND OTHER POEMS</h4> + +<p>When the author of <i>Middlemarch</i> 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<a name="page_139" id="page_139"></a> 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 <i>Adam Bede</i> 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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>Odyssey</i>, 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.</p> + +<p>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. <i>Middlemarch</i> +has made us demand even finer<a name="page_140" id="page_140"></a> things of her than we did before, and +whether, as patented readers of <i>Middlemarch</i>, we like "Jubal" and its +companions the less or the more, we must admit that they are +characteristic products of the same intellect.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_141" id="page_141"></a> 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.</p> + +<p>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":—</p> + +<p class="poem"> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">"But were another childhood-world my share,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">I would be born a little sister there!"</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>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 <i>The Mill on the Floss</i>. The finest thing +in<a name="page_142" id="page_142"></a> 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.</p> + +<p>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:—</p> + +<p class="poem"> +<span style="margin-left: 9em;">"'Tis God gives skill,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;">But not without men's hands: He could not make</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Antonio Stradivari's violins</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Without Antonio."</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>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 <i>ensemble</i>.</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_143" id="page_143"></a> +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 <i>Red-Cotton Night-caps</i> 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 +<i>Middlemarch</i>?</p> + +<p>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":—</p> + +<p class="poem"> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">"And when all earth is vegetarian,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">When, lacking butchers, quadrupeds die out,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">And less Thought-atmosphere is re-absorbed</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">By nerves of insects parasitical,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Those higher truths, seized now by higher minds,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">But not expressed (the insects hindering),</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Will either flash out into eloquence,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Or, better still, be comprehensible,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">By rappings simply, without need of roots."</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>The author proceeds to give a sketch of the beatific state of things +under the vegetarian <i>régime</i> prophesied by her friend in<a name="page_144" id="page_144"></a></p> + +<p class="poem"> +<span style="margin-left: 4em;">"Mildly nasal tones,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;">And vowels stretched to suit the widest views."</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>How, for instance,</p> + +<p class="poem"> +<span style="margin-left: 4em;">"Sahara will be populous</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;">With families of gentlemen retired</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;">From commerce in more Central Africa,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Who order coolness, as we order coal,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;">And have a lobe anterior strong enough</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;">To think away the sand-storms."</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>Or how, as water is probably a non-conductor of the Thought-atmosphere,</p> + +<p class="poem"> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">"Fishes may lead carnivorous lives obscure,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">But must not dream of culinary rank</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Or being dished in good society."</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>Then follows the author's own melancholy head-shake and her reflections +on the theme that there can be no easy millennium, and that</p> + +<p class="poem"> +<span style="margin-left: 10em;">"Bitterly</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">I feel that every change upon this earth</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Is bought with sacrifice";</span><br /> +</p> + +<p class="nind">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<a name="page_145" id="page_145"></a> 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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.<a name="page_146" id="page_146"></a></p> + +<p class="poem"> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">"The immortal name of Jubal filled the sky,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">While Jubal, lonely, laid him down to die."</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p class="poem"> +<span style="margin-left: 5em;">"A quenched sun-wave,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">The all-creating Presence for his grave."</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_147" id="page_147"></a> neglect +than in the certainty that humanity is really assimilating his +productions.</p> + +<p>"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 +<i>Decameron</i>. "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:—</p> + +<p class="poem"> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">"That empty cup so neatly ciphered, 'Time,'</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Handed me as a cordial for despair.<a name="page_148" id="page_148"></a></span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Time—what a word to fling in charity!</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Bland, neutral word for slow, dull-beating pain,—</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Days, months, and years!"</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_149" id="page_149"></a> this notion, the author of +<i>Romola</i> and <i>Middlemarch</i> 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.</p> + +<p><a name="page_150" id="page_150"></a></p> + +<p><a name="page_151" id="page_151"></a></p> + +<h3><a name="THE_LIMITATIONS_OF_DICKENS" id="THE_LIMITATIONS_OF_DICKENS"></a>THE LIMITATIONS OF DICKENS<a name="page_152" id="page_152"></a></h3> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>A review of <i>Our Mutual Friend</i>. By Charles Dickens. New York: Harper +Brothers. 1865. Originally published in <i>The Nation</i>, December 21, +1865.<a name="page_153" id="page_153"></a></p></div> + +<h3>THE LIMITATIONS OF DICKENS</h3> + +<p class="nind"><span class="letra">O</span><b><i>UR</i></b> +<i>Mutual Friend</i> 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. <i>Bleak House</i> was forced; <i>Little Dorrit</i> was laboured; +the present work is dug out as with a spade and pickaxe.</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_154" id="page_154"></a> 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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>written</i>, so little seen, known, or +felt.</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_155" id="page_155"></a> 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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_156" id="page_156"></a> 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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>humanity</i> strikes us as<a name="page_157" id="page_157"></a> strangely discordant, in +the midst of these pages; for, let us boldly declare it, there is no +humanity here.</p> + +<p>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 <i>Our Mutual Friend</i> 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?</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_158" id="page_158"></a> cannot find them among his stronger—that +is, his artificial creations.</p> + +<p>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 <i>be</i> +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.</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_159" id="page_159"></a> 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 <i>men</i>, of two characters, of two +passions, produces stronger sparks than Wrayburn's boyish repartees and +Headstone's melodramatic commonplaces.</p> + +<p>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;<a name="page_160" id="page_160"></a> 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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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, <i>et hoc genus omne</i>, 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 <i>man</i> as well as <i>men</i>, and +to know man is to be a philosopher.</p> + +<p>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.<a name="page_161" id="page_161"></a> 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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p><a name="page_162" id="page_162"></a></p> + +<p><a name="page_163" id="page_163"></a></p> + +<h3><a name="TENNYSONS_DRAMA" id="TENNYSONS_DRAMA"></a>TENNYSON'S DRAMA<a name="page_164" id="page_164"></a></h3> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>I. A review of <i>Queen Mary</i>. <i>A Drama.</i> By Alfred Tennyson. Boston: +J. R. Osgood. 1875. Originally published in <i>The Galaxy</i>, +September, 1875.</p> + +<p><i>Queen Mary</i> 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. <span class="smcap">Ed.</span></p> + +<p>II. A review of <i>Harold</i>. <i>A Drama.</i> By Alfred Tennyson. London. +1877. Originally published in <i>The Nation</i>, January 18, 1877.</p></div> + +<p><a name="page_165" id="page_165"></a></p> + +<h3>TENNYSON'S DRAMA</h3> + +<h4>I. <a name="QUEEN_MARY" id="QUEEN_MARY"></a>QUEEN MARY</h4> + +<p class="nind"><span class="letra">A</span><b>NEW</b> 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.</p> + +<p>Few poets seemed less dramatic than Tennyson, even in his most dramatic +attempts—in "Maud," in "Enoch Arden," or in certain of the <i>Idyls of +the King</i>. 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,<a name="page_166" id="page_166"></a> while shallower tendencies waxed and waned above it, it was +not unjust to expect that the consummate fruit would prove magnificent.</p> + +<p>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 <i>Queen +Mary</i> 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 <i>Times</i> 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.</p> + +<p>Every one, it seems to us, has been justified—those who hoped (that is, +expected), those who feared, and those who were mainly surprised. <i>Queen +Mary</i> 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 <i>Queen Mary</i>, as a drama, had<a name="page_167" id="page_167"></a> 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.</p> + +<p>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!</p> + +<p><i>Queen Mary</i> 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<a name="page_168" id="page_168"></a></p> + +<p class="poemm"> +<span style="margin-left: 10em;">——"that same tide</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Which, coming with our coming, seemed to smile</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">And sparkle like our fortune as thou saidest,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Ran sunless down and moaned against the piers,"</span><br /> +</p> + +<p class="nind">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:</p> + +<p class="poemm"> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">"Last night I climbed into the gate-house, Brett,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">And scared the gray old porter and his wife."</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>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 <i>Queen Mary</i> 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:</p> + +<p class="poemm"> +<span style="margin-left: 10em;">"What, my Lord!</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">The Church on Petra's rock? Never! I have seen</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">A pine in Italy that cast its shadow</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Athwart a cataract; firm stood the pine—</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">The cataract shook the shadow. To my mind</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">The cataract typed the headlong plunge and fall</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Of heresy to the pit: the pine was Rome.<a name="page_169" id="page_169"></a></span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">You see, my Lords,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">It was the shadow of the Church that trembled."</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>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 <i>Queen +Mary</i>—the only one, it seems to me, very sensibly warmed by the "fire" +commemorated by the London <i>Times</i>—is the passionate monologue of Mary +when she feels what she supposes to be the intimations of maternity:</p> + +<p class="poemm"> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">"He hath awaked, he hath awaked!</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">He stirs within the darkness!</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Oh Philip, husband! how thy love to mine</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Will cling more close, and those bleak manners thaw,<a name="page_170" id="page_170"></a></span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">That make me shamed and tongue-tied in my love.</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">The second Prince of Peace—</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">The great unborn defender of the Faith,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Who will avenge me of mine enemies—</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">He comes, and my star rises.</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">The stormy Wyatts and Northumberlands</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">And proud ambitions of Elizabeth,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">And all her fiercest partisans, are pale</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Before my star!</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">His sceptre shall go forth from Ind to Ind!</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">His sword shall hew the heretic peoples down!</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">His faith shall clothe the world that will be his,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Like universal air and sunshine! Open,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Ye everlasting gates! The King is here!—</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">My star, my son!"</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<p class="poemm"> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">"Yet hold me not for ever in thine East;</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">How can my nature longer mix with thine?</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Coldly thy rosy shadows bathe me, cold</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Are all thy lights, and cold my wrinkled feet</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Upon thy glimmering thresholds, where the stream</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Floats up from those dim fields about the homes</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Of happy men that have the power to die,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">And grassy barrows of the happier dead.</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Release me and restore me to the ground;</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Thou seëst all things, thou wilt see my grave;</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Thou wilt renew thy beauty morn by morn;<a name="page_171" id="page_171"></a></span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">I, earth in earth, forget these empty courts,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">And thee returning on thy silver wheels."</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<p class="poemm"> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">"For once when Arthur, walking all alone,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Vext at a rumour rife about the Queen,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Had met her, Vivien being greeted fair,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Would fain have wrought upon his cloudy mood</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">With reverent eyes mock-loyal, shaken voice,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">And fluttered adoration."</span><br /> +</p> + +<p><a name="page_172" id="page_172"></a></p> + +<p>That perhaps is a subtle illustration; the allusion to Teolin's dog in +"Aylmer's Field" is a franker one:</p> + +<p class="poemm"> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">——"his old Newfoundlands, when they ran</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">To lose him at the stables; for he rose,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Two-footed, at the limit of his chain,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Roaring to make a third."</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>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 <i>tableaux vivants</i>. 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 <i>à pieds joints</i>, +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<a name="page_173" id="page_173"></a> the <i>Idyls +of the King</i>. 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 <i>Marble Faun</i>, 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</p> + +<p class="poemm"> +<span style="margin-left: 10em;">——"at first indeed</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Thro' many a fair sea-circle, day by day,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Scarce rocking, her full-busted figure-head</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Stared o'er the ripple feathering from her bows."</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>I turn the page and read of</p> + +<p class="poemm"> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">"The myriad shriek of wheeling ocean fowl,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">The league-long roller thundering on the reef,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">The moving whisper of huge trees that branched</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">And blossomed in the zenith";</span><br /> +</p> + +<p><a name="page_174" id="page_174"></a></p> + +<p class="nind">of</p> + +<p class="poemm"> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">"The sunrise broken into scarlet shafts</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Among the palms and ferns and precipices;</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">The blaze upon the waters to the east;</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">The blaze upon his island overhead;</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">The blaze upon the waters to the west;</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Then the great stars that globed themselves in Heaven,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">The hollower-bellowing Ocean, and again</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">The scarlet shafts of sunrise."</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>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 <i>Idyls</i> generally, and +especially in the later ones, while the words strike one as having been +pondered and collated with an almost miserly care.</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_175" id="page_175"></a> 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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_176" id="page_176"></a> 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.</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_177" id="page_177"></a> 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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>Tennyson's various <i>Idyls</i> 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<a name="page_178" id="page_178"></a> there is a way of reading the +<i>Idyls</i>, 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 <i>Idyls</i> 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,</p> + +<p class="poemm"> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">"He like a lover down through all his blood</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Drew in the dewy, meadowy morning breath</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Of England, blown across her ghostly wall."</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_179" id="page_179"></a> graces +which it would take almost his own "daintiness" to formulate, make him, +it seems to me, the most charming of the <i>entertaining</i> 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.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<p class="poemm"> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">"So dark a forethought rolled about his brain,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">As on a dull day in an Ocean cave</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">The blind wave feeling round his long sea-hall</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">In silence."</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>Or of that which puts in vivid form the estrangement of Enid and +Geraint:</p> + +<p class="poemm"> +<span style="margin-left: 9em;">"The two remained</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Apart by all the chamber's width, and mute<a name="page_180" id="page_180"></a></span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">As creatures voiceless through the fault of birth,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Or two wild men, supporters of a shield,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Painted, who stare at open space, nor glance</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">The one at other, parted by the shield."</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>Happy, in short, the poet who can offer his heroine for her dress</p> + +<p class="poemm"> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;">——"a splendid silk of foreign loom,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Where, like a shoaling sea, the lovely blue</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Played into green."</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>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 <i>Queen Mary</i>. +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.</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_181" id="page_181"></a> 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."</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_182" id="page_182"></a> 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.</p> + +<p>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 +<i>is</i> the work. If it is feeble, the work can have no force; if it is +shapeless, the work must be amorphous.</p> + +<p><i>Queen Mary</i>, 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<a name="page_183" id="page_183"></a> 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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>A work of this sort may have a great many merits<a name="page_184" id="page_184"></a> (those of <i>Queen Mary</i> +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. <i>Henry IV.</i> and +the others of its group, <i>Richard III.</i>, <i>Henry VIII.</i>, <i>Antony and +Cleopatra</i>, <i>Julius Cæsar</i>, 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 <i>Hamlet</i> +and <i>Othello</i>, <i>Macbeth</i> and <i>Lear</i>. 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.</p> + +<p>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.<a name="page_185" id="page_185"></a> 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.</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_186" id="page_186"></a> 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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>Marie +Tudor</i>, and it has suggested a good many reflections. I think it +probable that many of the readers of <i>Queen Mary</i> 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.</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_187" id="page_187"></a> 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 <i>Marie Tudor</i> has known no +such scruples; he has slashed into the sacred chart with the shears of a +<i>romantique</i> 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 <i>Marie Tudor</i> 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.</p> + +<p>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,<a name="page_188" id="page_188"></a> 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.</p> + +<p><i>Marie Tudor</i>, 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 <i>Queen Mary</i> 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.</p> + +<p>Mr. Tennyson has very frankly fashioned his<a name="page_189" id="page_189"></a> 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 +<i>Henry IV.</i> or <i>Henry VIII.</i>:</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>"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."</p></div> + +<p>The poet, however, is modern when he chooses to be:</p> + +<p class="poemm"> +<span style="margin-left: 10em;">"Action and reaction,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">The miserable see-saw of our child-world,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Make us despise it at odd hours, my Lord."</span><br /> +</p> + +<p><a name="page_190" id="page_190"></a></p> + +<p>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 +<i>pros</i> and <i>cons</i>, 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.<a name="page_191" id="page_191"></a></p> + +<p>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</p> + +<p class="poemm"> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">"Far liefer had I in my country hall</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Been reading some old book, with mine old hound</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Couch'd at my hearth, and mine old flask of wine</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Beside me,"</span><br /> +</p> + +<p class="nind">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</p> + +<p class="poemm"> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;">"To read and rhyme in solitary fields,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;">The lark above, the nightingale below,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;">And answer them in song."</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_192" id="page_192"></a> +heretic whole, roasted, or raw;" and Gardiner, who can say,</p> + +<p class="poemm"> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">"I've gulpt it down; I'm wholly for the Pope,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Utterly and altogether for the Pope,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">The Eternal Peter of the changeless chair,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Crowned slave of slaves and mitred king of kings.</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">God upon earth! What more? What would you have?"</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>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—</p> + +<p class="poemm"> +<span style="margin-left: 8em;">"I would I were a milkmaid,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">To sing, love, marry, churn, brew, bake, and die,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">And have my simple headstone by the church,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">And all things lived and ended honestly"—</span><br /> +</p> + +<p class="nind">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":</p> + +<p class="poemm"> +<span style="margin-left: 10em;">"But with Cecil's aid</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">And others', if our person be secured</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">From traitor stabs, we will make England great!"</span><br /> +</p> + +<p><a name="page_193" id="page_193"></a></p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<p class="poemm"> +<span style="margin-left: 9em;">"I thank you heartily, sir,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">But I am royal, tho' your prisoner,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">And God hath blessed or cursed me with a nose—</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Your boots are from the horses."</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<p class="poemm"> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">"Our altar is a mound of dead men's clay,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Dug from the grave that yawns for us beyond;</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">And there is one Death stands beside the Groom,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">And there is one Death stands beside the Bride."</span><br /> +</p> + +<p><a name="page_194" id="page_194"></a></p> + +<p><i>Queen Mary</i>, 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:</p> + +<p class="poemm"> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">"God change the pebble which his kingly foot</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">First presses into some more costly stone</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 4em;">Than ever blinded eye. I'll have one mark it</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">And bring it me. I'll have it burnished firelike;</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">I'll set it round with gold, with pearl, with diamond.</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Let the great angel of the Church come with him,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Stand on the deck and spread his wings for sail!"</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>Mary is not only vividly conceived from within, but her physiognomy, as +seen from without, is indicated with much pictorial force:</p> + +<p class="poemm"> +<span style="margin-left: 4em;">"Did you mark our Queen?</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">The colour freely played into her face,<a name="page_195" id="page_195"></a></span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">And the half sight which makes her look so stern</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Seemed, through that dim, dilated world of hers,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">To read our faces."</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>In the desolation of her last days, when she bids her attendants go to +her sister and</p> + +<p class="poem"> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">"Tell her to come and close my dying eyes</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">And wear my crown and dance upon my grave,"</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<p class="poem"> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">"Good Lord! how grim and ghastly looks her Grace,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">With both her knees drawn upward to her chin.</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">There was an old-world tomb beside my father's,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">And this was opened, and the dead were found</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Sitting, and in this fashion; she looks a corpse."</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_196" id="page_196"></a> to +add in conclusion that <i>Queen Mary</i> seems to me a work of rare ability +rather than great inspiration; a powerful <i>tour de force</i> 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.</p> + +<h4>II. <a name="HAROLD" id="HAROLD"></a>HAROLD</h4> + +<p>The author of <i>Queen Mary</i> 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 <i>Harold</i> +has come into the world more quietly than its predecessor.</p> + +<p>It is singular how soon the public gets used to unfamiliar notions. By +the time the reader has finished <i>Harold</i> 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 <i>Idyls</i> +with the great poets, and not with the small. <i>Harold</i> 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.<a name="page_197" id="page_197"></a></p> + +<p><i>Queen Mary</i> was not, on the whole, pronounced a success, and <i>Harold</i>, +roughly speaking, is to <i>Queen Mary</i> what that work is to the author's +earlier masterpieces. <i>Harold</i> 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.</p> + +<p><i>Harold</i> seems at first to have little, in form, that is characteristic +of the author—little of the thoroughly familiar Tennysonian quality. +Nevertheless,<a name="page_198" id="page_198"></a> 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.</p> + +<p>Meeting in the early pages such a line as</p> + +<p class="poem"> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">"What, with this flaming horror overhead?"</span><br /> +</p> + +<p class="nind">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:</p> + +<p class="poem"> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">"Taken the rifted pillars of the wood."</span><br /> +<br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">"My greyhounds fleeting like a beam of light."</span><br /> +<br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">"Suffer a stormless shipwreck in the pools."</span><br /> +<br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">"That scared the dying conscience of the king."</span><br /> +</p> + +<p><i>Harold</i> is interesting as illustrating, in addition to <i>Queen Mary</i>, +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 <i>Harold</i> than it was to imagine acting <i>Queen Mary</i>; 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<a name="page_199" id="page_199"></a> has +here laid his hand is eminently interesting.</p> + +<p>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</p> + +<p class="poem"> +<span style="margin-left: 6em;">"Waltham, my foundation</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">For men who serve their neighbour, not themselves,"</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>—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<a name="page_200" id="page_200"></a> 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.</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_201" id="page_201"></a> 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.</p> + +<p>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</p> + +<p class="poem"> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">"Each stands full face with all he did below."</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>The drama closes with a scene on the field, after<a name="page_202" id="page_202"></a> 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 <i>him</i>. 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—</p> + +<p class="poem"> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">"For there was more than sister in my kiss."</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>Mr. Tennyson, moreover, has not the dramatic touch; he rarely finds the +phrase or the movement<a name="page_203" id="page_203"></a> 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</p> + +<p class="poem"> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">"My old fast friend the shore, and clinging thus</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Felt the remorseless outdraught of the deep</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Haul like a great strong fellow at my legs."</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>Such are the words in which Wulfnoth, Harold's young brother, detained +in Normandy, laments his situation:</p> + +<p class="poem"> +<span style="margin-left: 8em;">"Yea, and I</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Shall see the dewy kiss of dawn no more</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Make blush the maiden-white of our tall cliffs,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Nor mark the sea-bird rouse himself and hover</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Above the windy ripple, and fill the sky</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">With free sea-laughter."</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>In two or three places the author makes, in a few words, a picture, an +image, of considerable felicity.<a name="page_204" id="page_204"></a> Harold wishes that he were like Edward +the Confessor,</p> + +<p class="poem"> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">"As holy and as passionless as he!</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">That I might rest as calmly! Look at him—</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">The rosy face, and long, down-silvering beard,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">The brows unwrinkled as a summer mere."</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>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—</p> + +<p class="poem"> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">"A conscience for his own soul, not his realm;</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">A twilight conscience lighted thro' a chink;</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Thine by the sun."</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>And the same character hits upon a really vigorous image in describing, +as he watches them, Harold's exploits on the battle-fields:</p> + +<p class="poem"> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">"Yea, yea, for how their lances snap and shiver,</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Against the shifting blaze of Harold's axe!</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">War-woodman of old Woden, how he fells</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 0em;">The mortal copse of faces!"</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>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.<a name="page_205" id="page_205"></a></p> + +<h3><a name="CONTEMPORARY_NOTES_ON_WHISTLER_VS_RUSKIN" id="CONTEMPORARY_NOTES_ON_WHISTLER_VS_RUSKIN"></a>CONTEMPORARY NOTES ON<br /> +WHISTLER VS. RUSKIN<a name="page_206" id="page_206"></a></h3> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>I. Originally published as an unsigned note in <i>The Nation</i>, December +19, 1878. The jury allowed Whistler one farthing damages.</p> + +<p>II. Originally published as an unsigned note in <i>The Nation</i>, February +13, 1879.</p> + +<p>The pamphlet here referred to was entitled <i>Whistler vs. Ruskin: Art and +Art-Critics</i>. London: Chatto & Windus. 1878. This essay was afterwards +reprinted in <i>The Gentle Art of Making Enemies</i>, London, 1890.<a name="page_207" id="page_207"></a></p> +</div> + +<h3>CONTEMPORARY NOTES ON WHISTLER <span class="smcap">VS.</span> RUSKIN</h3> + +<h4>I. <a name="THE_SUIT_FOR_LIBEL" id="THE_SUIT_FOR_LIBEL"></a>THE SUIT FOR LIBEL</h4> + +<p class="nind"><span class="letra">T</span><b>HE</b> London public is never left for many days without a <i>cause célèbre</i> +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 <i>Fors Clavigera</i>, 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<a name="page_208" id="page_208"></a> foul of Mr. Whistler, he alluded to him +in these terms:</p> + +<p>"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."</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_209" id="page_209"></a> 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.</p> + +<p>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.<a name="page_210" id="page_210"></a> 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.</p> + +<p>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.<a name="page_211" id="page_211"></a></p> + +<h4>II. <a name="MR_WHISTLERS_REJOINDER" id="MR_WHISTLERS_REJOINDER"></a>MR. WHISTLER'S REJOINDER</h4> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_212" id="page_212"></a> presence of the bungling and +incompetent disquisitions of certain members of the fraternity who sit +in judgment upon their works.</p> + +<p>"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 <i>Times</i>, and +who had the misfortune, fifteen years ago, to express himself rather +unintelligently about Velasquez.</p> + +<p>"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<a name="page_213" id="page_213"></a> 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?"</p> + +<p>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 <i>feuilleton</i> in one of the Parisian journals is like passing +from a primitive to a very high civilisation. Even, however, if the +reviews of pictures<a name="page_214" id="page_214"></a> were very much better, the protest of the producer +as against the critic would still have a considerable validity.</p> + +<p>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 name="page_215" id="page_215"></a></p> + +<h3><a name="A_NOTE_ON_JOHN_BURROUGHS" id="A_NOTE_ON_JOHN_BURROUGHS"></a>A NOTE ON JOHN BURROUGHS<a name="page_216" id="page_216"></a></h3> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>An unsigned review of <i>Winter Sunshine</i>. By John Burroughs. New York: +Hurd & Houghton. 1876. Originally published in <i>The Nation</i>, January 27, +1876.<a name="page_217" id="page_217"></a></p></div> + +<h3>A NOTE ON JOHN BURROUGHS</h3> + +<p class="nind"><span class="letra">T</span><b>HIS</b> 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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>The first half of his volume, and the least substantial,<a name="page_218" id="page_218"></a> 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.</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_219" id="page_219"></a> +appreciativeness. All this is delightfully <i>naïf</i>, frank, and natural.</p> + +<p>"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.</p> + +<p>"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."<a name="page_220" id="page_220"></a></p> + +<p>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 +<i>nil admirari</i>. 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."</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_221" id="page_221"></a> 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.</p> + +<p>It must be added that although Mr. Burroughs is shrewd as well as +<i>naïf</i>, 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.</p> + +<p><a name="page_222" id="page_222"></a></p> + +<p><a name="page_223" id="page_223"></a></p> + +<h3><a name="MR_KIPLINGS_EARLY_STORIES" id="MR_KIPLINGS_EARLY_STORIES"></a>MR. KIPLING'S EARLY STORIES<a name="page_224" id="page_224"></a></h3> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>Originally published as an <i>Introduction</i> to the Continental edition of +<i>Soldiers Three</i>. By Rudyard Kipling; volume 59 of the <i>English +Library</i>, Leipzig, Heinemann and Balestier Limited, London. 1891.<a name="page_225" id="page_225"></a></p> +</div> + +<h3>MR. KIPLING'S EARLY STORIES</h3> + +<p class="nind"><span class="letra">I</span><b>T</b> 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 <i>tour de +force</i> 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<a name="page_226" id="page_226"></a> 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.</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_227" id="page_227"></a> +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.</p> + +<p>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, +<i>à priori</i>, 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<a name="page_228" id="page_228"></a> 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.</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_229" id="page_229"></a> words, how much he +appeals to us—depends on whether they form it solidly.</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_230" id="page_230"></a> 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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>fioriture</i> of his form, which are so oddly independent of +any distinctively literary note in him,<a name="page_231" id="page_231"></a> 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<a name="page_232" id="page_232"></a> 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.</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_233" id="page_233"></a> 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, <i>capable +de tout</i>) 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<a name="page_234" id="page_234"></a> +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.</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_235" id="page_235"></a> 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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>his</i> want of awe. An abject humility is not his +strong point, but he gives us something instead<a name="page_236" id="page_236"></a> 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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>flair</i>. 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<a name="page_237" id="page_237"></a> 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.</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_238" id="page_238"></a> 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<a name="page_239" id="page_239"></a> 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.</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_240" id="page_240"></a> +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.</p> + +<p>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<a name="page_241" id="page_241"></a> +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.</p> + +<hr class="full" /> + + + + + + + + +<pre> + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Views and Reviews, by Henry James + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VIEWS AND REVIEWS *** + +***** This file should be named 37424-h.htm or 37424-h.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + http://www.gutenberg.org/3/7/4/2/37424/ + +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.) + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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