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diff --git a/39447.txt b/39447.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..08e2843 --- /dev/null +++ b/39447.txt @@ -0,0 +1,7046 @@ +The Project Gutenberg eBook, Shelburne Essays, Third Series, by Paul Elmer +More + + +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: Shelburne Essays, Third Series + + +Author: Paul Elmer More + + + +Release Date: April 14, 2012 [eBook #39447] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII) + + +***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SHELBURNE ESSAYS, THIRD SERIES*** + + +E-text prepared by Bryan Ness and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team +(http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by the +Google Books Library Project (http://books.google.com) + + + +Note: Images of the original pages are available through + the the Google Books Library Project. See + http://books.google.com/books?vid=DfK64Q_zmAUC&id + + +Transcriber's note: + + A carat character followed by text enclosed by curly + brackets indicates that the enclosed text is + superscripted (example: w^{ch.}). + + + + + +SHELBURNE ESSAYS + +by + +PAUL ELMER MORE + +THIRD SERIES + + +[Greek: Tini chre krinesthai ta mellonta kalos krithesesthai; +ar' ouk empeiriai te kai phronesei kai logoi;] + PLATO, _Republic_. + + + + + + + +G. P. Putnam's Sons +New York and London +The Knickerbocker Press +1905 + +Copyright, 1905 +by +Paul Elmer More + +The Knickerbocker Press, New York + + * * * * * + +ADVERTISEMENT + + The last essay in this volume, though written several years + ago, has never before been printed. For permission to reprint + the other essays thanks are due to the publishers of the + _Atlantic Monthly_, the _Independent_, and the New York + _Evening Post_. + + * * * * * + + + +CONTENTS + + + PAGE + THE CORRESPONDENCE OF WILLIAM COWPER 1 + WHITTIER THE POET 28 + THE CENTENARY OF SAINTE-BEUVE 54 + THE SCOTCH NOVELS AND SCOTCH HISTORY 82 + SWINBURNE 100 + CHRISTINA ROSSETTI 124 + WHY IS BROWNING POPULAR? 143 + A NOTE ON BYRON'S "DON JUAN" 166 + LAURENCE STERNE 177 + J. HENRY SHORTHOUSE 213 + THE QUEST OF A CENTURY 244 + + + + +SHELBURNE ESSAYS + +THIRD SERIES + + + + +THE CORRESPONDENCE OF WILLIAM COWPER + + +If, as I sometimes think, a man's interest in letters is almost the +surest measure of his love for Letters in the larger sense of the word, +the busy schoolmaster of Olney ought to stand high in favour for the +labour he has bestowed on completing and rearranging the _Correspondence +of William Cowper_.[1] It may be that Mr. Wright's competence as an +editor still leaves something to be desired. Certainly, if I may speak +for my own taste, he has in one respect failed to profit by a golden +opportunity; it needed only to print the more intimate poems of Cowper +in their proper place among the letters to have produced a work doubly +interesting and perfectly unique. The correspondence itself would have +been shot through by a new light, and the poetry might have been +restored once more to its rightful seat in our affections. The fact is +that not many readers to-day can approach the verse of the eighteenth +century in a mood to enjoy or even to understand it. We have grown so +accustomed to over-emphasis in style and wasteful effusion in sentiment +that the clarity and self-restraint of that age repel us as ungenuine; +we are warned by a certain _frigus_ at the heart to seek our comfort +elsewhere. And just here was the chance for an enlightened editor. So +much of Cowper's poetry is the record of his own simple life and of the +little adventures that befell him in the valley of the Ouse, that it +would have lost its seeming artificiality and would have gained a fresh +appeal by association with the letters that relate the same events and +emotions. How, for example, the quiet grace of the fables (and good +fables are so rare in English!) would be brought back to us again if we +could read them side by side with the actual stories out of which they +grew. There is a whole charming natural history here of beast and bird +and insect and flower. The nightingale which Cowper heard on New Year's +Day sings in a letter as well as in the poem; and here, to name no +others, are the incidents of the serpent and the kittens, and of that +walk by the Ouse when the poet's dog Beau brought him the water lily. +Or, to turn to more serious things, how much the pathetic stanzas _To +Mary_ would gain in poignant realism if we came upon them immediately +after reading the letters in which Cowper lays bare his remorse for the +strain his malady had imposed upon her. + +A still more striking example would be the lines written _On the Receipt +of My Mother's Picture_. By a literary tradition these are reckoned +among the most perfect examples of pathos in the language, and yet how +often to-day are they read with any deep emotion? I suspect no tears +have fallen on that page for many a long year. + + Oh that those lips had language! Life has passed + With me but roughly since I heard thee last. + Those lips are thine--thy own sweet smile I see, + The same that oft in childhood solaced me; + Voice only fails, else how distinct they say, + "Grieve not, my child, chase all thy fears away!" + + * * * * * + + Short-lived possession! but the record fair, + That memory keeps of all thy kindness there, + Still outlives many a storm that has effaced + A thousand other themes less deeply traced. + Thy nightly visits to my chamber made, + That thou mightst know me safe and warmly laid; + Thy morning bounties as I left my home, + The biscuit or confectionary plum: + The fragrant waters on my cheeks bestowed + By thy own hand, till fresh they shone and glowed: + All this, and more enduring still than all, + Thy constant flow of love, that knew no fall,-- + +do you not feel the expression here, the very balance of the rhymes, +to stand like a barrier between the poet's emotion and your own +susceptibility? And that _confectionary plum_--somehow the savour of +it has long ago evaporated. Even the closing lines-- + + Me howling blasts drive devious, tempest-tost, + Sails ripped, seams opening wide, and compass lost-- + +need some allowance to cover their artificial mode. And it is just this +allowance that association with the letters would afford; the mind would +pass without a shock from the simple recital in prose of Cowper's ruined +days to these phrases at once so metaphorical and so conventional, and +would find in them a new power to move the heart. Or compare with the +sentiment of the poem this paragraph from the letter to his cousin, Mrs. +Bodham--all of it a model of simple beauty: + + The world could not have furnished you with a present so + acceptable to me, as the picture you have so kindly sent me. + I received it the night before last, and viewed it with a + trepidation of nerves and spirits somewhat akin to what I should + have felt, had the dear original presented herself to my embraces. + I kissed it and hung it where it is the last object that I see at + night, and, of course, the first on which I open my eyes in the + morning. She died when I completed my sixth year; yet I remember + her well, and am an ocular witness of the great fidelity of the + copy. I remember, too, a multitude of the maternal tendernesses + which I received from her, and which have endeared her memory to + me beyond expression. + +To read together the whole of this letter and of the poem is something +more than a demonstration of what might be accomplished by a skilful +editor; it is a lesson, too, in that quality of restrained dignity, I +had almost said of self-respect, which we find it so difficult to +impress on our broken modern style. + +Some day, no doubt, we shall have such an interwoven edition of Cowper's +prose and verse, to obtain which we would willingly sacrifice a full +third of the letters if this were necessary. Meanwhile, let us be +thankful for whatever fresh light our Olney editor has thrown on the +correspondence, and take the occasion to look a little more closely into +one of the strangest and most tragic of literary lives. William Cowper +was born at Great Berkhampstead in 1731. His father, who was rector of +the parish, belonged to a family of high connections, and his mother, +Anne Donne, was also of noble lineage, claiming descent through four +different lines from Henry III. The fact is of some importance, for the +son was very much the traditional gentleman, and showed the pride of +race both in his language and manners. He himself affected to think more +of his kinship to John Donne, of poetical memory, than of his other +forefathers, and, half in play, traced the irritability of his temper +and his verse-mongering back to that "venerable ancestor, the Dean of +St. Paul's."[2] It is fanciful, but one is tempted to lay upon the old +poet's meddling with coffins and ghastly thoughts some of the +responsibility for the younger man's nightly terrors. "That which we +call life is but _Hebdomada mortium_, a week of death, seven days, seven +periods of life spent in dying," preached Donne in his last sermon, and +an awful echo of the words might seem to have troubled his descendant's +nerves. But that is not yet. As a boy and young man Cowper appears to +have been high-spirited and natural. At Westminster School he passed +under the instruction of Vincent Bourne, so many of whose fables he was +to translate in after years, and who, with Milton and Prior, was most +influential in forming his poetical manner. + + I love the memory of Vinny Bourne [he wrote in one of his + letters]. I think him a better Latin poet than Tibullus, + Propertius, Ausonius, or any of the writers in his way, except + Ovid.... He was so good-natured, and so indolent, that I lost more + than I got by him; for he made me as idle as himself. He was such + a sloven, as if he had trusted to his genius as a cloak for + everything that could disgust you in his person.... I remember + seeing the Duke of Richmond set fire to his greasy locks and box + his ears to put it out again. + +After leaving Westminster he spent a few months at Berkhampstead, and +then came to London under the pretext of studying law, living first +with an attorney in Southampton Row and afterwards taking chambers in +the Middle Temple. Life went merrily for a while. He was a fellow +student with Thurlow, and there he was, he "and the future Lord +Chancellor, constantly employed from morning to night in giggling and +making giggle, instead of studying the law. Oh, fie, cousin!" he adds, +"how could you do so?" This pretty "Oh fie!" introduces us to one who +was to be his best and dearest correspondent, his cousin Harriet Cowper, +afterwards Lady Hesketh, and who was to befriend him and cheer him in a +thousand ways. It may introduce us also to Harriet's sister, Theodora, +with whom Cowper, after the fashion of idle students, fell thoughtlessly +in love. He would have married her, too, bringing an incalculable +element into his writing which I do not like to contemplate; for it is +the way of poets to describe most ideally what fortune has denied them +in reality, and Cowper's task, we know, was to portray in prose and +verse the quiet charms of the family. But the lady's father, for reasons +very common in such cases, put an end to that danger. Cowper took the +separation easily enough, if we may judge from the letters of the +period; but to Theodora, one fancies, it meant a life of sad memories. +They never exchanged letters, but in after years, when Lady Hesketh +renewed correspondence with Cowper and brought him into connection with +his kinsfolk, Theodora, as "Anonymous," sent money and other gifts to +eke out his slender living. It is generally assumed that the recipient +never guessed the name of his retiring benefactress, but I prefer to +regard it rather as a part of his delicacy and taste to affect ignorance +where the donor did not wish to be revealed, and think that his +penetration of the secret added a kind of wistful regret to his +gratitude. "On Friday I received a letter from dear Anonymous," he +writes to Lady Hesketh, "apprising me of a parcel that the coach would +bring me on Saturday. Who is there in the world that has, or thinks he +has, reason to love me to the degree that he does? But it is no matter. +He chooses to be unknown, and his choice is, and ever shall be, so +sacred to me, that if his name lay on the table before me reversed, I +would not turn the paper about that I might read it. Much as it would +gratify me to thank him, I would turn my eyes away from the forbidden +discovery." Could there be a more tactful way of conveying his thanks +and insinuating his knowledge while respecting Theodora's reserve? + +But all this was to come after the great change in Cowper's life. As +with Charles Lamb, a name one likes to link with his, the terrible +shadow of madness fell upon him one day, never wholly to rise. The story +of that calamity is too well known to need retelling in detail. A first +stroke seized him in his London days, but seems not to have been +serious. He recovered, and took up again the easy life that was in +retrospect to appear to him so criminally careless. In order to +establish him in the world, his cousin, Major Cowper, offered him the +office of Clerk of the Journals to the House of Lords. There was, +however, some dispute as to the validity of the donor's powers, and it +became necessary for Cowper to prove his competency at the bar of the +House. The result was pitiable. Anxiety and nervous dread completely +prostrated him. After trying futilely to take his own life, he was +placed by his family in a private asylum at St. Albans, where he +remained about a year and a half. His recovery took the form of +religious conversion and a rapturous belief in his eternal salvation. +Instead of returning to London, he went to live in the town of +Huntingdon, drawn thither both by the retirement of the place and its +nearness to Cambridge, where his brother John resided. Here he became +acquainted with the Unwins: + + ... the most agreeable people imaginable; quite sociable, and as + free from the ceremonious civility of country gentlefolks as any I + ever met with. They treat me more like a near relation than a + stranger, and their house is always open to me. The old gentleman + carries me to Cambridge in his chaise. He is a man of learning and + good sense, and as simple as Parson Adams. His wife has a very + uncommon understanding, has read much to excellent purpose, and is + more polite than a duchess. The son, who belongs to Cambridge, is + a most amiable young man, and the daughter quite of a piece with + the rest of the family. They see but little company, which suits + me exactly; go when I will, I find a house full of peace and + cordiality in all its parts. + +The intimacy ripened and Cowper was taken into the family almost as one +of its members. But trouble and change soon broke into this idyllic +home. Mr. Unwin was thrown from his horse and killed; the son was called +away to a charge; the daughter married. Meanwhile, Mrs. Unwin and Cowper +had gone to live at Olney, a dull town on the Ouse, where they might +enjoy the evangelical preaching of that reformed sea-captain and +slave-dealer, the Rev. John Newton. + +The letters of this period are filled with a tremulous joy; it was as if +one of the timid animals he loved so well had found concealment in the +rocks and heard the baying of the hounds, thrown from the scent and far +off. "For my own part," he writes to Lady Hesketh, "who am but as a +Thames wherry, in a world full of tempest and commotion, I know so well +the value of the creek I have put into, and the snugness it affords me, +that I have a sensible sympathy with you in the pleasure you find in +being once more blown to Droxford." Books he has in abundance, and happy +country walks; friends that are more than friends to occupy his heart, +and quaint characters to engage his wit. He finds an image of his days +in Rousseau's description of an English morning, and his evenings differ +from them in nothing except that they are still more snug and quieter. +His talk is of the mercies and deliverance of God; he is eager to +convert the little world of his correspondents to his own exultant +peace; and, it must be confessed, only the charm and breeding of his +language save a number of these letters from the wearisomeness of +misplaced preaching. + +Cowper removed with Mrs. Unwin to Olney in 1767. Six years later came +the miraculous event which changed the whole tenor of his life and which +gave the unique character to all the letters he was to write thereafter. +He was seized one night with a frantic despondency, and again for a year +and a half, during all which time Mr. Newton cared for him as for a +brother, suffered acute melancholia. He recovered his sanity in ordinary +matters, but the spring of joy and peace had been dried up within him. +Thenceforth he never, save for brief intervals, could shake off the +conviction that he had been abandoned by God--rather that for some +inscrutable reason God had deliberately singled him out as a victim of +omnipotent wrath and eternal damnation. No doubt there was some physical +origin, some lesion of the nerves, at the bottom of this disease, but +the peculiar form of his mania and its virulence can be traced to causes +quite within the range of literary explanation. He was a scapegoat of +his age; he accepted with perfect faith what other men talked about, and +it darkened his reason. Those were the days when a sharp and unwholesome +opposition had arisen between the compromise of the Church with worldly +forms and the evangelical absolutism of Wesley and Whitefield and John +Newton. Cowper himself, on emerging from his melancholia at St. Albans, +had adopted the extreme Calvinistic tenets in regard to the divine +omnipotence. Man was but a toy in the hands of an arbitrary Providence; +conversion was first a recognition of the utter nullity of the human +will; and there was no true religion, no salvation, until Grace had +descended freely like a fire from heaven and devoured this offering of a +man's soul. To understand Cowper's faith one should read his letter of +March 31, 1770, in which he relates the death-bed conversion of his +brother at Cambridge. Now John was a clergyman in good standing, a man +apparently of blameless life and Christian faith, yet to himself and to +William he was without hope until the miracle of regeneration had been +wrought upon him. After reading Cowper's letter one should turn to +Jonathan Edwards's treatise on _The Freedom of the Will_, and follow the +inexorable logic by which the New England divine proves that God must be +the source of all good and evil, of this man's salvation and that man's +loss: "If once it should be allowed that things may come to pass without +a Cause, we should not only have no proof of the Being of God, but we +should be without evidence of anything whatsoever but our own +immediately present ideas and consciousness. For we have no way to prove +anything else but by arguing from effects to causes." Yet the +responsibility of a man abides through all his helplessness: "The Case +of such as are given up of God to Sin and of fallen Man in general, +proves moral Necessity and Inability to be consistent with +blameworthiness." Good Dr. Holmes has said somewhere in his jaunty way +that it was only decent for a man who believed in this doctrine to go +mad. Well, Cowper believed in it; there was no insulating pad of worldly +indifference between his faith and his nerves, and he went mad. + +And he was in another way the victim of his age. We have heard him +comparing his days at Huntingdon with _Rousseau's description of an +English morning_. Unfortunately, the malady also which came into the +world with Rousseau, the morbid exaggeration of personal consciousness, +had laid hold of Cowper. Even when suffering from the earlier stroke he +had written these words to his cousin: "I am of a very singular temper, +and very unlike all the men that I have ever conversed with"; and this +sense of his singularity follows him through life. During the Huntingdon +days it takes the form of a magnified confidence that Heaven is +peculiarly concerned in his rescue from the fires of affliction; after +the overthrow at Olney it is reversed, and fills him with the certainty +that God has marked him out among all mankind for the special display of +vengeance: + + This all-too humble soul would arrogate + Unto itself some signalising hate + From the supreme indifference of Fate! + +Writing to his mentor, John Newton (who had left Olney), he declares +that there is a mystery in his destruction; and again to Lady Hesketh: +"Mine has been a life of wonders for many years, and a life of wonders I +in my heart believe it will be to the end." More than once in reply to +those who would console him he avers that there is a singularity in his +case which marks it off from that of all other men, that Providence has +chosen him as a special object of its hostility. In Rousseau, whose +mission was to preach the essential goodness of mankind, the union of +aggravated egotism with his humanitarian doctrine brought about the +conviction that the whole human race was plotting his ruin. In Cowper, +whose mind dwelt on the power and mercies of Providence, this +self-consciousness united with his Calvinism to produce the belief that +God had determined to ensnare and destroy his soul. Such was the strange +twist that accompanied the birth of romanticism in France and in +England. + +The conviction came upon Cowper through the agency of dreams and +imaginary voices. The depression first seized him on the 24th of +January, 1773. About a month later a vision of the night troubled his +sleep, so distinct and terrible that the effect on his brain could never +be wholly dispelled. Years afterwards he wrote to a friend: + + My thoughts are clad in a sober livery, for the most part as grave + as that of a bishop's servants. They turn upon spiritual subjects; + but the tallest fellow and the loudest among them all is he who + is continually crying with a loud voice, _Actum est de te; + periisti!_ You wish for more attention, I for less. Dissipation + [distraction] itself would be welcome to me, so it were not a + vicious one; but however earnestly invited, is coy, and keeps at a + distance. Yet with all this distressing gloom upon my mind, I + experience, as you do, the slipperiness of the present hour, and + the rapidity with which time escapes me. Every thing around us, + and every thing that befalls us, constitutes a variety, which, + whether agreeable or otherwise, has still a thievish propensity, + and steals from us days, months, and years, with such unparalleled + address, that even while we say they are here, they are gone. + +That apparently was the sentence which sounded his doom on the night of +dreams: _Actum est de te; periisti_--it is done with thee, thou hast +perished! and no domestic happiness, or worldly success, or wise counsel +could ever, save for a little while, lull him to forgetfulness. He might +have said to his friends, as Socrates replied to one who came to offer +him deliverance from jail: "Such words I seem to hear, as the mystic +worshippers seem to hear the piping of flutes; and the sound of this +voice so murmurs in my ears that I can hear no other." + +But it must not be supposed from all this that Cowper's letters are +morbid in tone or filled with the dejection of melancholia. Their merit, +on the contrary, lies primarily in their dignity and restraint, in a +certain high-bred ease, which is equally manifest in the language and +the thought. Curiously enough, after the fatal visitation religion +becomes entirely subordinate in his correspondence, and only at rare +intervals does he allude to his peculiar experience. He writes for the +most part like a man of the world who has seen the fashions of life and +has sought refuge from their vanity. If I were seeking for a comparison +to relieve the quality of these Olney letters (and it is these that form +the real charm of Cowper's correspondence), I would turn to Charles +Lamb. The fact that both men wrote under the shadow of insanity brings +them together immediately, and there are other points of resemblance. +Both are notable among English letter-writers for the exquisite grace of +their language, but if I had to choose between the two the one whose +style possessed the most enduring charm, a charm that appealed to the +heart most equally at all seasons and left the reader always in that +state of quiet satisfaction which is the office of the purest taste, I +should name Cowper. The wit is keener in Lamb and above all more artful; +there is a certain petulance of humour in him which surprises us oftener +into laughter, the pathos at times is more poignant; but the effort to +be entertaining is also more apparent, and the continual holding up of +the mind by the unexpected word or phrase becomes a little wearisome in +the end. The attraction of Cowper's style is in the perfect balance of +the members, an art which has become almost lost since the eighteenth +century, and in the spirit of repose which awakens in the reader such a +feeling of easy elevation as remains for a while after the book is laid +down. Lamb is of the city, Cowper of the fields. Both were admirers of +Vincent Bourne; Lamb chose naturally for translation the poems of city +life--_The Ballad Singers_, _The Rival Bells_, the _Epitaph on a Dog_: + + Poor Irus' faithful wolf-dog here I lie, + That wont to tend my old blind master's steps, + His guide and guard; nor, while my service lasted, + Had he occasion for that staff, with which + He now goes picking out his path in fear + Over the highways and crossings, but would plant + Safe in the conduct of my friendly string, + A firm foot forward still, till he had reached + His poor seat on some stone, nigh where the tide + Of passers-by in thickest confluence flowed: + To whom with loud and passionate laments + From morn to eve his dark estate he wailed. + +Cowper just as inevitably selected the fables and country-pieces--_The +Glowworm_, _The Jackdaw_, _The Cricket:_ + + Little inmate, full of mirth, + Chirping on my kitchen hearth, + Wheresoe'er be thine abode, + Always harbinger of good, + Pay me for thy warm retreat, + With a song more soft and sweet; + In return thou shalt receive + Such a strain as I can give. + + * * * * * + + Though in voice and shape they be + Formed as if akin to thee, + Thou surpassest, happier far, + Happiest grasshoppers that are; + Theirs is but a summer song, + Thine endures the winter long, + Unimpaired, and shrill, and clear, + Melody throughout the year. + + Neither night nor dawn of day + Puts a period to thy play: + Sing, then--and extend thy span + Far beyond the date of man; + Wretched man, whose years are spent + In repining discontent, + Lives not, aged though he be, + Half a span, compared with thee. + +There is in the blind beggar something of the quality of Lamb's own +life, with its inherent loneliness imposed by an ever-present grief in +the midst of London's noisy streets; and in the verses to the cricket it +is scarcely fanciful to find an image of Cowper's "domestic life in +rural leisure passed." Lamb was twenty-five when Cowper died, in the +year 1800. One is tempted to continue in the language of fable and ask +what would have happened had the city mouse allured the country mouse to +visit his chambers in Holborn or Southampton buildings. To be sure there +was no luxury of purple robe and mighty feast in that abode; but I think +the revelry and the wit, and that hound of intemperance which always +pursued poor Lamb, would have frightened his guest back to his +hiding-place in the wilderness: + + ... me silva cavusque + Tutus ab insidiis tenui solabitur ervo! + +Cowper, in fact, was the first writer to introduce that intimate union +of the home affections with the love of country which, in the works of +Miss Austen and a host of others, was to become one of the unique charms +and consolations of English literature. And the element of austere gloom +in his character, rarely exposed, but always, we know, in the +background, is what most of all relieves his letters from insipidity. +Lamb strove deliberately by a kind of crackling mirth to drown the sound +of the grave inner voice; Cowper listened reverently to its admonitions, +even to its threatenings; he spoke little of what he heard, but it +tempered his wit and the snug comfort of his life with that profounder +consciousness of what, disguise it as we will, lies at the bottom of the +world's experience. We call him mad because he believed himself +abandoned of God, and shuddered with remorseless conviction. Put aside +for a moment the language of the market place, and be honest with +ourselves: is there not a little of our fate, of the fate of mankind, in +Cowper's desolation? After all, was his melancholy radically different +from the state of that great Frenchman, a lover of his letters withal, +Sainte-Beuve, who dared not for a day rest from benumbing labour lest +the questionings of his own heart should make themselves heard, and who +wrote to a friend that no consolation could reach that settled sadness +which was rooted in _la grande absence de Dieu?_ + +It is not strange that the society from which Cowper fled should have +seemed to him whimsical and a little mad. "A line of Bourne's," he says, +"is very expressive of the spectacle which this world exhibits, +tragi-comical as the incidents of it are, absurd in themselves, but +terrible in their consequences: + + Sunt res humanae flebile ludibrium." + +Nor is it strange that he wondered sometimes at the gayety of his own +letters: "It is as if Harlequin should intrude himself into the gloomy +chamber, where a corpse is deposited in state. His antic gesticulations +would be unseasonable, at any rate, but more especially so if they +should distort the features of the mournful attendants into laughter." +But it is not the humour of the letters that attracts us so much as +their picture of quiet home delights in the midst of a stormy world. We +linger most over the account of those still evenings by the fireside, +while Mrs. Unwin, and perhaps their friend Lady Austen, was busy with +her needles-- + + Thy needles, once a shining store, + For my sake restless heretofore, + Now rust disused, and shine no more, + My Mary!-- + +and while Cowper read aloud from some book of travels and mingled his +comments with the story of the wanderer: + + My imagination is so captivated upon these occasions that I seem + to partake with the navigators in all the dangers they + encountered. I lose my anchor; my mainsail is rent into shreds; I + kill a shark, and by signs converse with a Patagonian, and all + this without moving from the fireside. + +And here I cannot but regret again that we have not an edition of these +letters interspersed with the passages of _The Task_, which describe the +same scenes. I confess that two-thirds at least of that poem is indeed a +task to-day. The long tirades against vice, and the equally long +preaching of virtue, all in blank verse, lack, to my ear, the vivacity +and the sustaining power of the earlier rhymed poems, such as _Hope_ +(that superb moralising on the poet's own life) and _Retirement_, to +name the best of the series. But the fourth book of _The Task_, and, +indeed, all the exquisite genre pictures of the poem: + + Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast, + Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round, + And while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn + Throws up a steamy column, and the cups + That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each, + So let us welcome peaceful evening in-- + +all this intimate correspondence with the world in verse is not only +interesting in itself, but gains a double charm by association with the +letters. "We were just sitting down to supper," writes Cowper to Mrs. +Unwin's son, "when a hasty rap alarmed us. I ran to the hall window, for +the hares being loose, it was impossible to open the door." It is +fortunate for the reader if his memory at these words calls up those +lines of _The Task_: + + One sheltered hare + Has never heard the sanguinary yell + Of cruel man, exulting in her woes. + Innocent partner of my peaceful home, + Whom ten long years' experience of my care + Has made at last familiar; she has lost + Much of her vigilant instinctive dread, + Not needful here beneath a roof like mine. + Yes--thou mayst eat thy bread, and lick the hand + That feeds thee; _thou mayst frolic on the floor + At evening_, and at night retire secure + To thy straw couch, and slumber unalarmed; + For I have gained thy confidence, have pledged + All that is human in me, to protect + Thine unsuspecting gratitude and love. + If I survive thee, I will dig thy grave; + And when I place thee in it, sighing say, + I knew at least one hare that had a friend. + +How much of the letters could be illustrated in this way--the walks +about Olney, the gardening, the greenhouse, the lamentations over the +American Rebellion, the tirades against fickle fashions, and a thousand +other matters that go to make up their quiet yet variegated substance. +For it must not be supposed that Cowper, in these Olney days at least, +was ever dull. I will quote the opening paragraph of one other +letter--to his friend the Rev. William Bull, great preacher of Newport +Pagnell, and, alas! great smoker,[3] "smoke-inhaling Bull," "Dear +Taureau"--as a change from the more serious theme, and then pass on: + + _Mon aimable et tres cher Ami_--It is not in the power of chaises + or chariots to carry you where my affections will not follow you; + if I heard that you were gone to finish your days in the Moon, I + should not love you the less; but should contemplate the place of + your abode, as often as it appeared in the heavens, and + say--Farewell, my friend, forever! Lost, but not forgotten! Live + happy in thy lantern, and smoke the remainder of thy pipes in + peace! Thou art rid of Earth, at least of all its cares, and so + far can I rejoice in thy removal. + +Might not that have been written by Lamb to one of his cronies--by a +Lamb still of the eighteenth century? + +But the Olney days must come to a close. After nineteen years of +residence there Cowper and his companion (was ever love like theirs, +that was yet not love!) were induced to move to Weston Lodge, a more +convenient house in the village of Weston Underwood, not far away. +Somehow, with the change, the letters lose the freshness of their +peculiar interest. We shall never again find him writing of his home as +he had written before of Olney: + + The world is before me; I am not shut up in the Bastille; there + are no moats about my castle, _no locks upon my gates of which I + have not the key_; but an invisible, uncontrollable agency, a + local attachment, an inclination more forcible than I ever felt, + even to the place of my birth, serves me for prison-walls, and for + bounds which I cannot pass.... The very stones in the garden-walls + are my intimate acquaintance. I should miss almost the minutest + object, and be disagreeably affected by its removal, and am + persuaded that, were it possible I could leave this incommodious + nook for a twelvemonth, I should return to it again with rapture, + and be transported with the sight of objects which to all the + world beside would be at least indifferent; some of them perhaps, + such as the ragged thatch and the tottering walls of the + neighbouring cottages, disgusting. But so it is, and it is so, + because here is to be my abode, and because such is the + appointment of Him that placed me in it. + +Often while reading the letters from Weston one wishes he had never +turned the key in the lock of that beloved enclosure. Fame had come to +him now. His correspondence is distributed among more people; he is +neither quite of the world, nor of the cloister. Above all, he is +busy--endlessly, wearisomely busy--with his translation of Homer. I have +often wondered what the result would have been had his good friends and +neighbours the Throckmortons converted him from his rigid Calvinism to +their own milder Catholic faith, and set him in spiritual comfort to +writing another _Task_. Idle conjecture! For the rest of his life he +toiled resolutely at a translation which the world did not want and +which brought its own tedium into his letters. And then comes the +pitiful collapse of Mrs. Unwin, broken at last by the long vigil over +her sick companion: + + The twentieth year is well-nigh past, + Since first our sky was overcast; + Ah would that this might be the last! + My Mary! + + Thy spirits have a fainter flow, + I see thee daily weaker grow-- + 'T was my distress that brought thee low, + My Mary! + +The end is tragic, terrible. In 1794, Cowper sank into a state of +melancholia, in which for hours he would walk backward and forward in +his study like a caged tiger. Mrs. Unwin was dying. At last a cousin, +the Rev. John Johnson, took charge of the invalids and carried them away +into Norfolk. The last few letters, written in Cowper's ever-dwindling +moments of sanity, are without a parallel in English. The contrast of +the wild images with the stately and restrained language leaves an +impression of awe, almost of fear, on the mind. "My thoughts," he writes +to Lady Hesketh, "are like loose and dry sand, which the closer it is +grasped slips the sooner away"; and again to the same faithful friend +from Mundesley on the coast: + + The cliff is here of a height that it is terrible to look down + from; and yesterday evening, by moonlight, I passed sometimes + within a foot of the edge of it, from which to have fallen would + probably have been to be dashed in pieces. But though to have been + dashed in pieces would perhaps have been best for me, I shrunk + from the precipice, and am waiting to be dashed in pieces by other + means. At two miles distance on the coast is a solitary pillar of + rock, that the crumbling cliff has left at the high-water mark. I + have visited it twice, and have found it an emblem of myself. Torn + from my natural connections, I stand alone and expect the storm + that shall displace me. + +There is in this that sheer physical horror which it is not good to +write or to read. Somewhere in his earlier letters he quotes the +well-known line of Horace: "We and all ours are but a debt to death." +How the commonplace words come back with frightfully intensified meaning +as we read this story of decay! It is not good, I say, to see the +nakedness of human fate so ruthlessly revealed. The mind reverts +instinctively from this scene to the homely life at Olney. Might it not +be that if Cowper had remained in that spot where the very stones of the +garden walls were endeared to him, if he had never been torn from his +natural connections--might it not be that he would have passed from the +world in the end saddened but not frenzied by his dreams? At least in +our thoughts let us leave him, not standing alone on the crumbling cliff +over a hungry sea, but walking with his sympathetic companion arm in arm +in the peaceful valley of the Ouse. + + + + +WHITTIER THE POET + + +Last month we took the new edition of Cowper's Letters as an occasion to +consider the life of the poet, who brought the quiet affections of the +home into English literature, and that may be our excuse for waiving the +immediate pressure of the book-market and turning to the American poet +whose inspiration springs largely from the same source. Different as the +two writers are in so many respects, different above all in their +education and surroundings, yet it would not be difficult to find points +of resemblance to justify such a sequence. In both the spirit of +religion was bound up with the cult of seclusion; to both the home was a +refuge from the world; to both this comfort was sweetened by the care of +a beloved companion, though neither of them ever married. But, after +all, no apology is needed, I trust, for writing about a poet who is very +dear to me as to many others, and who has suffered more than most at the +hands of his biographers and critics. + +It should seem that no one could go through Whittier's poems even +casually without remarking the peculiar beauty of the idyl called _The +Pennsylvania Pilgrim_. It is one of the longest and, all things +considered, quite the most characteristic of his works. Yet Mr. Pickard +in his official biography brings the poem into no relief; Professor +Carpenter names it in passing without a word of comment; and Colonel +Higginson in his volume in the English Men of Letters Series does not +mention it at all--but then he has a habit of omitting the essential. +Among those who have written critically of American literature the poem +is not even named, so far as I am aware, by Mr. Stedman or by Professors +Richardson, Lawton, Wendell, and Trent. I confess that this conspiracy +of silence, as I hunted through one historian and critic after another, +grew disconcerting, and I began to distrust my own judgment until I +chanced upon a confirmation in two passages of Whittier's letters. +Writing of _The Pennsylvania Pilgrim_ to his publisher in May, 1872, he +said: "I think honestly it is as good as (if not better than) any long +poem I have written"; and a little later to Celia Thaxter: "It is as +long as _Snow-Bound_, and better, but nobody will find it out." One +suspects that all these gentlemen in treating of Whittier have merely +followed the line of least resistance, without taking much care to form +an independent opinion; and the line of least resistance has a miserable +trick of leading us astray. In the first place, Whittier's share in the +Abolition and other reforming movements bulks so large in the +historians' eyes that sometimes they seem almost to forget Whittier the +poet. And the critics have taken the same cue. "Whittier," says one of +them, "will be remembered even more as the trumpet-voice of Emancipation +than as the peaceful singer of rural New England." + +The error, if it may be said with reverence, can be traced even higher, +and in Whittier we meet only one more witness to the unconcern of Nature +over the marring of her finer products. The wonder is not that he turned +out so much that is faulty, but that now and then he attained such +exquisite grace. Whittier was born, December 17, 1807, in East +Haverhill, in the old homestead which still stands, a museum now, hidden +among the hills from any other human habitation. It is a country not +without quiet charm, though the familiar lines of _Snow-Bound_ make us +think of it first as beaten by storm and locked in by frost. And, +notwithstanding the solace of an affectionate home, life on the farm was +unnecessarily hard. The habits of the grim pioneers had persisted and +weighed heavily on their dwindled descendants. Thus the Whittiers, who +used to drive regularly to the Quaker meeting at Amesbury, eight miles +distant, are said to have taken no pains to protect themselves from the +bleakest weather. The poet suffered in body all his life from the rigour +of this discipline; nor did he suffer less from insufficiency of mental +training. Not only was the family poor, but it even appears that the +sober tradition of his people looked askance at the limited means of +education at hand. Only at the earnest solicitation of outsiders was the +boy allowed to attend the academy at Haverhill. Meanwhile, he was a +little of everything: farm worker, shoemaker, teacher--he seems to have +shifted about as chance or necessity directed. There were few--he has +told us how few--books in the house, and little time for reading those +he could borrow. But if he read little, he wrote prodigiously. The story +of his first printed poem in the _Free Press_ of Newburyport and of the +encouragement given him by the far-sighted editor, William Lloyd +Garrison, is one of the best known and most picturesque incidents in +American letters. The young poet--he was then nineteen--was launched; +from that time he became an assiduous writer for the press, and was at +intervals editor of various country or propagandist newspapers. + +The great currents of literary tradition reached him vaguely from afar +and troubled his dreams. Burns fell early into his hands, and the +ambition was soon formed of transferring the braes and byres of Scotland +to the hills and folds of New England. The rhythms of Thomas Moore rang +seductively in his ears. Byron, too, by a spirit of contrast, appealed +to the Quaker lad, and one may read in Mr. Pickard's capital little +book, _Whittier-Land_, verses and fragments of letters which show how +deeply that poison of the age had bitten into his heart. But the +influence of those sons of fire was more than counteracted by the gentle +spirit of Mrs. Hemans--indeed, the worst to be said of Whittier is that +never, to the day of his death, did he quite throw off allegiance to +the facile and innocent muse of that lady. It is only right to add that +in his later years, especially in the calm that followed the civil war, +he became a pretty widely read man, a man of far more culture than he is +commonly supposed to have been. + +Such was the boy, then--thirsting for fame, scantily educated, totally +without critical guidance or environment, looking this way and that--who +was thrust under the two dominant influences of his time and place. To +one of these, transcendentalism, we owe nearly all that is highest, and +unfortunately much also that is most inchoate, in New England +literature. Its spirit of complacent self-dependence was dangerous at +the best, although in Whittier I cannot see that it did more than +confirm his habit of uncritical prolixity; it could offer no spiritual +seduction to one who held liberally the easy doctrine of the Friends. +But to the other influence he fell a natural prey. The whole tradition +of the Quakers--the memory of Pastorius, whom he was to sing as the +Pennsylvania Pilgrim; the inheritance of saintly John Woolman, whose +Journal he was to edit--prepared him to take part in the great battle of +the Abolitionists. From that memorable hour when he met Garrison face to +face on his Haverhill farm to the ending of the war in 1865, he was no +longer free to develop intellectually, but was a servant of reform and +politics. I am not, of course, criticising that movement or its +achievement; I regret only that one whose temper and genius called for +fostering in quiet fields should have been dragged into that stormy +arena. As he says in lines that are true if not elegant: + + Hater of din and riot, + He lived in days unquiet; + And, lover of all beauty, + Trod the hard ways of duty. + +It is not merely that political interests absorbed the energy which +would otherwise have gone to letters; the knowledge of life acquired +might have compensated and more than compensated for less writing, and, +indeed, he wrote too much as it was. The difficulty is rather that "the +pledged philanthropy of earth" somehow militates against art, as +Whittier himself felt. Not only the poems actually written to forward +the propaganda are for the most part dismal reading, but something of +their tone has crept into other poems, with an effect to-day not far +from cant. Twice the cry of the liberator in Whittier rose to noble +writing. But in both cases it is not the mere pleading of reform but a +very human and personal indignation that speaks. In _Massachusetts to +Virginia_ this feeling of outrage calls forth one of the most stirring +pieces of personification ever written, nor can I imagine a day when a +man of Massachusetts shall be able to read it without a tingling of the +blood, or a Virginian born hear it without a sense of unacknowledged +shame; in _Ichabod_ he uttered a word of individual scorn that will rise +up for quotation whenever any strong leader misuses, or is thought to +misuse, his powers. Every one knows the lines in which Webster is +pilloried for his defection: + + Of all we loved and honoured, naught + Save power remains; + A fallen angel's pride of thought, + Still strong in chains. + + All else is gone; from those great eyes + The soul has fled; + When faith is lost, when honour dies, + The man is dead! + + Then pay the reverence of old days + To his dead fame; + Walk backward, with averted gaze, + And hide the shame! + +It is instructive that only when his note is thus pierced by individual +emotion does the reformer attain to universality of appeal. +Unfortunately most of Whittier's slave songs sink down to a dreary +level--down to the almost humorous pathos of the lines suggested by +_Uncle Tom's Cabin_: + + Dry the tears for holy Eva, + With the blessed angels leave her.... + +What he needed above everything else, what his surroundings were least +of all able to give him, was a canon of taste, which would have driven +him to stiffen his work, to purge away the flaccid and set the genuinely +poetical in stronger relief--a purely literary canon which would have +offset the moralist and reformer in him, and made it impossible for him +(and his essays show that the critical vein was not absent by nature) to +write of Longfellow's _Psalm of Life_: "These nine simple verses are +worth more than all the dreams of Shelley, and Keats, and Wordsworth. +They are alive and vigorous with the spirit of the day in which we +live--the moral steam enginery of an age of action." While Tennyson and +Matthew Arnold were writing in England, the earlier tradition had not +entirely died out in America that the first proof of genius is an +abandonment of one's mind to temperament and "inspiration." Byron had +written verse as vacillating and formless as any of Whittier's; Shelley +had poured forth page after page of effusive vapourings; Keats learned +the lesson of self-restraint almost too late; Wordsworth indulged in +platitudes as simpering as "holy Eva"; but none of these poets suffered +so deplorably from the lack of criticism as the finest of our New +England spirits. The very magnificence of their rebellion, the depth and +originality of their emotion, were a compensation for their licence, +were perhaps inevitably involved in it. The humbler theme of Whittier's +muse can offer no such apology; he who sings the commonplace joys and +cares of the heart needs above all to attain that _simplex munditiis_ +which is the last refinement of taste; lacking that, he becomes himself +commonplace. And Whittier knew this. In the Proem to the first general +collection of his poems, he wrote: + + Of mystic beauty, dreamy grace, + No rounded art the lack supplies; + Unskilled the subtle line to trace, + Or softer shades of Nature's face, + I view her common forms with unanointed eyes. + + Nor mine the seer-like power to show + The secrets of the heart and mind; + _To drop the plummet line below + Our common world of joy and woe, + A more intense despair or brighter hope to find._ + +But at this point we must part company with his confession. His reward +is not that he showed "a hate of tyranny intense" or laid his gifts on +the shrine of Freedom, but that more completely than any other poet he +developed the peculiarly English _ideal of the home_ which Cowper first +brought intimately into letters, and added to it those _homely comforts +of the spirit_ which Cowper never felt. With Longfellow he was destined +to throw the glamour of the imagination over "our common world of joy +and woe." + +Perhaps something in his American surroundings fitted him peculiarly for +this humbler role. The fact that the men who had made the new colony +belonged to the middle class of society tended to raise the idea of +home into undisputed honour, and the isolation and perils of their +situation in the earlier years had enhanced this feeling into something +akin to a cult. America is still the land of homes. That may be a lowly +theme for a poet; to admire such poetry may, indeed it does, seem to +many to smack of a bourgeois taste. And yet there is an implication here +that carries a grave injustice. For myself, I admit that Whittier is one +of the authors of my choice, and that I read him with ever fresh +delight; I even think there must be something spurious in that man's +culture whose appreciation of Milton or Shelley dulls his ear to the +paler but very refined charm of Whittier. If truth be told, there is +sometimes a kind of exquisite content in turning from the pretentious +poets who exact so much of the reader to the more immediate appeal of +our sweet Quaker. In comparison with those more exalted muses his nymph +is like the nut-brown lass of the old song-- + + But when we come where comfort is, + She never will say No. + +And often, after fatiguing the brain with the searchings and inquisitive +flight of the Masters, we are ready to say with Whittier: + + I break my pilgrim staff, I lay + Aside the toiling oar; + The angel sought so far away + I welcome at my door. + +There, to me at least, and not in the ballads which are more generally +praised, lies the rare excellence of Whittier. True enough, some of +these narrative poems are spirited and admirably composed. Now and then, +as in _Cassandra Southwick_, they strike a note which reminds one +singularly of the real ballads of the people; in fact, it would not be +fanciful to discover a certain resemblance between the manner of their +production and of the old popular songs. Their publication in obscure +newspapers, from which they were copied and gradually sent the rounds of +the country, is not essentially different from the way in which many of +the ballads were probably spread abroad. The very atmosphere that +surrounded the boy in a land where the traditions of border warfare and +miraculous events still ran from mouth to mouth prepared him for such +balladry. Take, for example, this account of his youth from the +Introduction to _Snow-Bound_: + + Under such circumstances story-telling was a necessary resource in + the long winter evenings. My father when a young man had traversed + the wilderness to Canada, and could tell us of his adventures with + Indians and wild beasts, and of his sojourn in the French + villages. My uncle was ready with his record of hunting and + fishing, and, it must be confessed, with stories, which he at + least half-believed, of witchcraft and apparitions. My mother, who + was born in the Indian-haunted region of Somersworth, New + Hampshire, between Dover and Portsmouth, told us of the inroads + of the savages, and the narrow escape of her ancestors. + +No doubt this legendary training helped to give more life to Whittier's +ballads and border tales than ordinarily enters into that rather +factitious form of composition; and for a while he made a deliberate +attempt to create out of it a native literature. But the effect was +still deeper, by a kind of contrast, on his poetry of the home. After +several incursions into the world as editor and agitator, he was +compelled by ill health to settle down finally in the Amesbury house, +which he had bought in 1836; and there with little interruption he lived +from his thirty-third to his eighty-fifth year, the year of his death. +In _Snow-Bound_ his memory called up a picture of the old Haverhill +homestead, unsurpassed in its kind for sincerity and picturesqueness; in +poem after poem he celebrated directly or indirectly "the river hemmed +with leaning trees," the hills and ponds, the very roads and bridges of +the land about these sheltered towns. On the one hand, the recollection +of the wilder life through which his parents had come added to the +snugness and intimacy of these peaceful scenes, and, on the other hand, +the encroachment of trade and factories into their midst lent a +poignancy of regret for a grace that was passing away. Mr. Pickard's +little guide-book, to which I have already referred, brings together +happily the innumerable allusions of local interest; there is no spot in +America, not even Concord, where the light of fancy lies so +entrancingly: + + A tender glow, exceeding fair, + A dream of day without its glare. + +For it must be seen that the crudeness of Whittier's education, and the +thorny ways into which he was drawn, marred a large part, but by no +means all, of his work. There are a few poems in his collection of an +admirable craftsmanship in that genre which is none the less +difficult--which I sometimes think is almost more difficult--because it +lies so perilously near the trivial and mean. There are others which +need only a little pruning, perhaps a little heightening here and there, +to approach the same perfection of charm. Especially they have that +harmony of tone which arises from the unspoiled sincerity of the writer +and ends by subduing the reader to a restful sympathy with their mood. +No one can read much in Whittier without feeling that these hills and +valleys about the Merrimac have become one of the inalienable domiciles +of the spirit--a familiar place where the imagination dwells with +untroubled delight. Even the little things, the flowers and birds of the +country, are made to contribute to the sense of homely content. There is +one poem in particular which has always seemed to me significant of +Whittier's manner, and a comparison of it with the famous flower poems +of Wordsworth will show the difference between what I call the poetry +of the hearth and the poetry of intimate nature. It was written to +celebrate a gift of _Pressed Gentian_ that hung at the poet's window, +presenting to wayside travellers only a "grey disk of clouded glass": + + They cannot from their outlook see + The perfect grace it hath for me; + For there the flower, whose fringes through + The frosty breath of autumn blew, + Turns from without its face of bloom + To the warm tropic of my room, + As fair as when beside its brook + The hue of bending skies it took. + + So from the trodden ways of earth + Seem some sweet souls who veil their worth, + And offer to the careless glance + The clouding grey of circumstance.... + +There is not a little of self-portraiture in this image of the flower, +and it may be that some who have written of Whittier patronisingly are +like the hasty passer-by--they see only the _grey disk of clouded +glass_. + +And the emotion that furnishes the loudest note to most poets is subdued +in Whittier to the same gentle tone. To be sure, there is evidence +enough that his heart in youth was touched almost to a Byronic +melancholy, and he himself somewhere remarks that "Few guessed beneath +his aspect grave, What passions strove in chains." But was there not a +remnant of self-deception here? Do not the calmest and wisest of us +like to believe we are calm and wise by virtue of vigorous +self-repression? Wordsworth, we remember, explained the absence of love +from his poetry on the ground that his passions were too violent to +allow any safe expression of them. Possibly they were. Certainly, in +Whittier's verse we have no reflection of those tropic heats, but only +"the Indian summer of the heart." The very title, _Memories_, of his +best-known love poem (based on a real experience, the details of which +have recently been revealed) suggests the mood in which he approaches +this subject. It is not the quest of desire he sings, but the +home-coming after the frustrate search and the dreaming recollection by +the hearth of an ancient loss. In the same way, his ballad _Maud +Muller_, which is supposed to appeal only to the unsophisticated, is +attuned to that shamelessly provincial rhyme, + + For of all sad words of tongue or pen, + The saddest are these: "It might have been!" + +It is a little so with us all, perhaps, as it was with the judge and the +maiden; only, as we learn the lesson of years, the disillusion is likely +to be mingled strangely with relief, and the sadness to take on a most +comfortable and flattering Quaker drab--as it did with our "hermit of +Amesbury." + +If love was a memory, religion was for Whittier a hope and an +ever-present consolation--peculiarly a consolation, because he brought +into it the same thought of home-coming that marks his treatment of +nature and the passions. Partly, this was due to his inherited creed, +which was tolerant enough to soften theological dispute: "Quakerism," he +once wrote to Lucy Larcom, "has no Church of its own--it belongs to the +Church Universal and Invisible." In great part the spirit of his faith +was private to him; it even called for a note of apology to the sterner +of his brethren: + + O friends! with whom my feet have trod + The quiet aisles of prayer, + Glad witness to your zeal for God + And love of man I bear. + + I trace your lines of argument; + Your logic linked and strong + I weigh as one who dreads dissent, + And fears a doubt as wrong. + + But still my human hands are weak + To hold your iron creeds: + Against the words ye bid me speak + My heart within me pleads.... + +And the inimitably tender conclusion: + + And so beside the Silent Sea + I wait the muffled oar; + No harm from Him can come to me, + On ocean or on shore. + + I know not where His islands lift + Their fronded palms in air; + I only know I cannot drift + Beyond His love and care. + + O brothers! if my faith is vain, + If hopes like these betray, + Pray for me that my feet may gain + The sure and safer way. + + And Thou, O Lord! by whom are seen + Thy creatures as they be, + Forgive me if too close I lean + My human heart on Thee! + +Not a strenuous mood it may be, or very exalted--not the mood of the +battling saints, but one familiar to many a troubled man in his hours of +simpler trust. We have been led to Whittier through the familiar poetry +of Cowper; consider what it would have been to that tormented soul if +for one day he could have forgotten the awe of his divinity and _leaned +his human heart on God_. It is not good for any but the strongest to +dwell too much with abstractions of the mind. And, after all, change the +phrasing a little, substitute if you choose some other intuitive belief +for the poet's childlike faith, and you will be surprised to find how +many of the world's philosophers would accept the response of Whittier: + + We search the world for truth; we cull + The good, the pure, the beautiful, + From graven stone and written scroll, + From all old flower-fields of the soul; + And, weary seekers of the best, + We come back laden from our quest, + To find that all the sages said + Is in the Book our mothers read. + +Such a rout of the intellect may seem ignominious, but is it any more so +than the petulance of Renan because all his learning had only brought +him to the same state of skepticism as that of the gamin in the streets +of Paris? Our tether is short enough, whichever way we seek escape. It +is worth noting that in his essay on Baxter (he who conceived of the +saints' rest in a very different spirit) Whittier blames that worthy +just for the exaltation of his character. "In our view," he says, "this +was its radical defect. He had too little of humanity, he felt too +little of the attraction of this world, and lived too exclusively in the +spiritual and the unearthly." + +And if Whittler's faith was simple and human, his vision of the other +world was strangely like the remembrance of a home that we have left in +youth. There is a striking expression of this in one of his prose tales, +now almost forgotten despite their elements of pale but very genuine +humour and pathos, as if written by an attenuated Hawthorne. The good +physician, Dr. Singletary, and his friends are discussing the future +life, and says one of them: + + "Have you not felt at times that our ordinary conceptions of + heaven itself, derived from the vague hints and Oriental imagery + of the Scriptures, are sadly inadequate to our human wants and + hopes? How gladly would we forego the golden streets and gates of + pearl, the thrones, temples, and harps, for the sunset lights of + our native valleys; the woodpaths, where moss carpets are woven + with violets and wild flowers; the songs of birds, the low of + cattle, the hum of bees in the apple-blossoms--the sweet, familiar + voices of human life and nature! In the place of strange + splendours and unknown music, should we not welcome rather + whatever reminded us of the common sights and sounds of our old + home?" + +It was eminently proper that, as the poet lay awaiting death, with his +kinsfolk gathered about him, one of them should have recited the stanzas +of his psalm _At Last_: + + When on my day of life the night is falling, + And, in the winds from unsunned spaces blown, + I hear far voices out of darkness calling + My feet to paths unknown, + + Thou who hast made my home of life so pleasant, + Leave not its tenant when its walls decay; + O Love Divine, O Helper ever present, + Be Thou my strength and stay! + + * * * * * + + I have but Thee, my Father! let Thy spirit + Be with me then to comfort and uphold; + No gate of pearl, no branch of palm I merit, + Nor street of shining gold. + + Suffice it if--my good and ill unreckoned, + And both forgiven through Thy abounding grace-- + I find myself by hands familiar beckoned + Unto my fitting place. + +I would not call this the highest religious poetry, pure and sweet as it +may be. Something still is lacking, but to see that want fulfilled one +must travel out of Whittier's age, back through all the eighteenth +century, back into the seventeenth. There you will find it in Vaughan +and Herbert and sometimes in Marvell--poets whom Whittier read and +admired. Take two poems from these two ages, place them side by side, +and the one thing needed fairly strikes the eyes. The first poem +Whittier wrote after the death of his sister Elizabeth (who had been to +him what Mrs. Unwin had been to Cowper) was _The Vanishers_, founded on +a pretty superstition he had read in Schoolcraft: + + Sweetest of all childlike dreams + In the simple Indian lore + Still to me the legend seems + Of the shapes who flit before. + + Flitting, passing, seen, and gone, + Never reached nor found at rest, + Baffling search, but beckoning on + To the Sunset of the Blest. + + From the clefts of mountain rocks, + Through the dark of lowland firs, + Flash the eyes and flow the locks + Of the mystic Vanishers! + +Now Vaughan, too, wrote a poem on those gone from him: + + They are all gone into the world of light, + And I alone sit lingering here; + Their very memory is fair and bright, + And my sad thoughts doth clear. + + It glows and glitters in my cloudy breast, + Like stars upon some gloomy grove, + Or those faint beams in which this hill is dress'd, + After the sun's remove. + + I see them walking in an air of glory, + Whose light doth trample on my days: + My days, which are at best but dull and hoary, + Mere glimmering and decays. + +It is not a fair comparison to set one of Whittier's inferior +productions beside this superbest hymn of an eloquent age; but would any +religious poem of the nineteenth century, even the best of them, fare +much better? There is indeed one thing lacking, and that is _ecstasy_. +But ecstasy demands a different kind of faith from that of Whittier's +day or ours, and, missing that, I do not see why we should begrudge our +praise to a genius of pure and quiet charm. + +I have already intimated that too complete a preoccupation with the +reforming and political side of Whittier's life has kept the biographers +from recognising that charm in what he himself regarded as his best +poem. In 1872, in the full maturity of his powers and when the national +peace had allowed him to indulge the peace in his own heart, he wrote +his exquisite idyl, _The Pennsylvania Pilgrim_. Perhaps the mere name of +the poem may suggest another cause why it has been overlooked. Whittier +has always stood pre-eminently as the exponent of New England life, and +for very natural reasons. And yet it would not be difficult to show +from passages in his prose works that his heart was never quite at ease +in that Puritan land. The recollection of the sufferings which his +people had undergone for their faith' sake rankled a little in his +breast, and he was never in perfect sympathy with the austerity of New +England traditions. We catch a tone of relief as he turns in imagination +to the peace that dwelt "within the land of Penn": + + Who knows what goadings in their sterner way + O'er jagged ice, relieved by granite grey, + Blew round the men of Massachusetts Bay? + + What hate of heresy the east-wind woke? + What hints of pitiless power and terror spoke + In waves that on their iron coast-line broke? + +It was no doubt during his early residence in Philadelphia that he +learned the story of the good Pastorius, who, in 1683, left the +fatherland and the society of the mystics he loved to lead a colony of +Friends to Germantown. The Pilgrim's life in that bountiful valley +between the Schuylkill and the Delaware-- + + Where, forest-walled, the scattered hamlets lay + Along the wedded rivers-- + +offered to Whittier a subject admirably adapted to his powers. Here the +faults of taste that elsewhere so often offend us are sunk in the +harmony of the whole and in the singular unity of impression; and the +lack of elevation that so often stints our praise becomes a suave and +mellow beauty. All the better elements of his genius are displayed here +in opulent freedom. The affections of the heart unfold in unembittered +serenity. The sense of home seclusion is heightened by the presence of +the enveloping wilderness, but not disturbed by any harsher contrast. +Within is familiar joy and retirement unassailed--not without a touch of +humour, as when in the evening, "while his wife put on her look of +love's endurance," Pastorius took down his tremendous manuscript-- + + And read, in half the languages of man, + His _Rusca Apium_, which with bees began, + And through the gamut of creation ran. + +(The manuscript still exists; pray heaven it be never published!) Now +and then the winter evenings were broken by the coming of some welcome +guest--some traveller from the Old World bringing news of fair Von +Merlau and the other beloved mystics; some magistrate from the young +city, + + Lovely even then + With its fair women and its stately men + Gracing the forest court of William Penn; + +or some neighbour of the country, the learned Swedish pastor who, like +Pastorius, "could baffle Babel's lingual curse," + + Or painful Kelpius, from his forest den + By Wissahickon, maddest of good men. + +Such was the life within, and out of doors were the labours of the +gardener and botanist, while + + the seasons went + Their rounds, and somewhat to his spirit lent + Of their own calm and measureless content. + +The scene calls forth some of Whittier's most perfect lines of +description. Could anything be more harmonious than this, with its +economy of simple grace, + + Slow, overhead, the dusky night-birds sailed? + +No poem would be thoroughly characteristic of Whittier without some echo +of the slavery dispute, and our first introduction to Pastorius is, +indeed, as to a baffled forerunner of John Woolman. But the question +here takes on its most human and least political form; it lets in just +enough of the outside world of action to save the idyl from unreality. +Nor could religion well be absent; rather, the whole poem may be called +an illustration through the Pilgrim's life of that Inner Guide, speaking +to him not with loud and controversial tones, as it spoke to George Fox, +but with the still, small voice of comfortable persuasion: + + A Voice spake in his ear, + And lo! all other voices far and near + Died at that whisper, full of meanings clear. + The Light of Life shone round him; one by one + The wandering lights, that all misleading run, + Went out like candles paling in the sun. + +The account of the grave Friends, unsummoned by bells, walking +meeting-ward, and of the gathered stillness of the room into which only +the songs of the birds penetrated from without, is one of the happiest +passages of the poem. How dear those hours of common worship were to +Whittier may be understood from another poem, addressed to a visitor who +asked him why he did not seek rather the grander temple of nature: + + But nature is not solitude; + She crowds us with her thronging wood; + Her many hands reach out to us, + Her many tongues are garrulous; + Perpetual riddles of surprise + She offers to our ears and eyes. + + * * * * * + + And so I find it well to come + For deeper rest to this still room, + For here the habit of the soul + Feels less the outer world's control; + The strength of mutual purpose pleads + More earnestly our common needs; + And from the silence multiplied + By these still forms on every side, + The world that time and sense have known + Falls off and leaves us God alone. + +For the dinner given to Whittier on his seventieth birthday Longfellow +wrote a sonnet on _The Three Silences of Molinos_--the silence of +speech, of desire, and of thought, through which are heard "mysterious +sounds from realms beyond our reach." Perhaps only one who at some time +in his life has caught, or seemed to catch, those voices and melodies is +quite able to appreciate the charm of Whittier through the absence of so +much that calls to us in other poets. + + + + +THE CENTENARY OF SAINTE-BEUVE + + +It is a hundred years since Sainte-Beuve was born in the Norman city +that looks over toward England, and more than a generation has passed +since his death just before the war with Germany.[4] Yesterday three +countries--France, Belgium, and Switzerland--were celebrating his +centenary with speeches and essays and dinners, and the singing of +hymns. At Lausanne, where he had given his lectures on _Port-Royal_, and +had undergone not a little chagrin for his pains, the University +unveiled a bronze medallion of his head,--a Sainte-Beuve disillusioned +and complex, writes a Parisian journalist, with immoderate forehead +radiating a cold serenity, while the lips are contracted into a smile at +once voluptuous and sarcastic, as it were an Erasmus grown fat, with a +reminiscence of Baudelaire in the ironic mask of the face. It is +evidently the "Pere Beuve" as we know him in the portraits, and it is +not hard to imagine the lips curling a little more sardonically at the +thought of the change that has come since he was a poverty-stricken +hack and his foibles were the ridicule of Paris. + +Yet through all these honours I cannot help observing a strain of +reluctance, as so often happens with a critic who has made himself +feared by the rectitude of his judgments. There has, for one thing, been +a good deal of rather foolish scandal-mongering and raking up of old +anecdotes about his gross habits. Well, Sainte-Beuve was sensual. "Je +suis du peuple ainsi que mes amours," he was wont to hum over his work; +and when that work was finished, his secretary tells us how he used to +draw a hat down over his face (that face _dont le front demesurement +haut rayonne de serenite froide_), and go out on the street for any +chance liaison. There is something too much of these stories in what is +written of Sainte-Beuve to-day; and in the estimate of his intellectual +career too little emphasis is laid on what was stable in his opinions, +and too much emphasis on the changes of his religious and literary +creed. To be sure, these mutations of belief are commonly cited as his +preparation for the art of critic, and in a certain sense this is right. +But even then, if by critic is meant one who merely decides the value of +this or that book, the essential word is left unsaid. He was a critic, +and something more; he was, if any man may claim such a title, the +_maitre universel_ of the century, as, indeed, he has been called. + +And the time of his life contributed as much to this position of Doctor +Universalis as did his own intelligence. France, during those years from +the Revolution of 1830 to the fall of the Second Empire, was the +seething-pot of modern ideas, and the impression left by the history of +the period is not unlike that of watching the witch scenes in _Macbeth_. +The eighteenth century had been earnest, mad in part, but its intention +was comparatively single,--to tear down the fabric of authority, whether +political or religious, and allow human nature, which was fundamentally +good, though depraved by custom, to assert itself. And human nature did +assert itself pretty vigorously in the French Revolution, proving, one +might suppose, if it proved anything, that its foundation, like its +origin, is with the beasts. To the men who came afterward that +tremendous event stood like a great prism between themselves and the +preceding age; the pillar of light toward which they looked for guidance +was distorted by it and shattered into a thousand coloured rays. For +many of them, as for Sainte-Beuve, it meant that the old humanitarian +passion remained side by side with a profound distrust of the popular +heart; for all, the path of reform took the direction of some individual +caprice or ideal. There were democrats and monarchists and imperialists; +there was the rigid Catholic reaction led by Bonald and de Maistre, and +the liberal Catholicism of Lamennais; there was the socialism of +Saint-Simon, mixed with notions of a religious hierarchy, and other +schemes of socialism innumerable; while skepticism took every form of +condescension or antagonism. Literature also had its serious mission, +and the battle of the romanticists shook Paris almost as violently as a +political revolution. Through it all science was marching with steady +gaze, waiting for the hour when it should lay its cold hand on the heart +of society. + +And with all these movements Sainte-Beuve was more or less intimately +concerned. As a boy he brought with him to Paris the pietistic +sentiments of his mother and an aunt on whom, his father being dead, his +training had devolved. Upon these sentiments he soon imposed the +philosophy of the eighteenth century, followed by a close study of the +Revolution. It is noteworthy that his first journalistic work on the +_Globe_ was a literary description of the places in Greece to which the +war for independence was calling attention, and the reviewing of various +memoirs of the French Revolution. From these influences he passed to the +_cenacle_ of Victor Hugo, and became one of the champions of the new +romantic school. Meanwhile literature was mingled with romance of +another sort, and the story of the critic's friendship for the haughty +poet and of his love for the poet's wife is of a kind almost +incomprehensible to the Anglo-Saxon mind. It may be said in passing that +the letters of Sainte-Beuve to M. and Mme. Hugo, which have only to-day +been recovered and published in the _Revue de Paris_, throw rather a +new light on this whole affair. They do not exculpate Sainte-Beuve, but +they at least free him from ridicule. His successful passion for Mme. +Hugo, with its abrupt close when Mme. Hugo's daughter came to her first +confession, and his tormented courtship of Mme. d'Arbouville in later +years, were the chief elements in that _education sentimentale_ which +made him so cunning in the secrets of the feminine breast. + +But this is a digression. Personal and critical causes carried him out +of the camp of Victor Hugo into the ranks of the Saint-Simonians, whom +he followed for a while with a kind of half-detached enthusiasm. +Probably he was less attracted by the hopes of a mystically regenerated +society, with Enfantin as its supreme pontiff, than by the desire of +finding some rest for the imagination in this religion of universal +love. At least he perceived in the new brotherhood a relief from the +strained individualism of the romantic poets, and the same instinct, no +doubt, followed him from Saint-Simonism into the fold of Lamennais. +There at last he thought to see united the ideals of religion and +democracy, and some of the bitterest words he ever wrote were in memory +of the final defalcation of Lamennais, who, as Sainte-Beuve said, saved +himself but left his disciples stranded in the mire. Meanwhile this +particular disciple had met new friends in Switzerland, and through +their aid was brought at a critical moment to Lausanne to lecture on +_Port-Royal_. There he learned to know and respect Vinet, the +Protestant theologian and critic, who, with the help of his good friends +the Oliviers, undertook to convert the wily Parisian to Calvinism. +Saint-Beuve himself seems to have gone into the discussion quite +earnestly, but for one who knows the past experiences of that subtle +twister there is something almost ludicrous in the way these anxious +missionaries reported each accession and retrogression of his faith. He +came back to Paris a confirmed and satisfied doubter, willing to +sacrifice to the goddess Chance as the blind deity of this world, +convinced of materialism and of the essential baseness of human nature, +yet equally convinced that within man there rules some ultimate +principle of genius or individual authority which no rationalism can +explain, and above all things determined to keep his mind open to +whatever currents of truth may blow through our murky human atmosphere. +He ended where he began, in what may be called a subtilised and refined +philosophy of the eighteenth century, with a strain of melancholy quite +peculiar to the baffled experience of the nineteenth. His aim henceforth +was to apply to the study of mankind the analytical precision of +science, with a scientific method of grouping men into spiritual +families. + +Much has been made of these varied twistings of Sainte-Beuve's, both for +his honour and dishonour. Certainly they enabled him to insinuate +himself into almost every kind of intelligence and report of each +author as if he were writing out a phase of his own character; they made +him in the end the spokesman of that eager and troubled age whose +ferment is to-day just reaching America. France scarcely holds the place +of intellectual supremacy once universally accorded her, yet to her +glory be it said that, if we look anywhere for a single man who summed +up within himself the life of the nineteenth century, we instinctively +turn to that country. And more and more it appears that to Sainte-Beuve +in particular that honour must accrue. His understanding was more +comprehensive than Taine's or Renan's, more subtle than that of the +former, more upright than that of the latter, more single toward the +truth and more accurate than that of either. He never, as did Taine, +allowed a preconceived idea to warp his arrangement of facts, nor did he +ever, at least in his mature years, allow his sentimentality, as did +Renan, to take the place of judgment. Both the past and the present are +reflected in his essays with equal clearness. + +On the other hand, this versatility of experience has not seldom been +laid to lightness and inconsistency of character. I cannot see that the +charge holds good, unless it be directed also against the whole age +through which he passed. If any one thing has been made clear by the +publishing of Sainte-Beuve's letters and by the closer investigation of +his life, it is that he was in these earlier years a sincere seeker +after religion, and was only held back at the last moment by some +invincible impotence of faith from joining himself finally with this or +that sect. And he was thus an image of the times. What else is the +meaning of all those abortive attempts to amalgamate religion with the +humanitarianism left over from the eighteenth century, but a searching +for faith where the spiritual eye had been blinded? I should suppose +that Sainte-Beuve's refusal in the end to speak the irrevocable word of +adhesion indicated rather the clearness of his self-knowledge than any +lightness of procedure. Nor is his inconsistency, whether religious or +literary, quite so great as it is sometimes held up to be. The +inheritance of the eighteenth century was strong upon him, while at the +same time he had a craving for the inner life of the spirit. Naturally +he felt a powerful attraction in the preaching of such men as +Saint-Simon and Lamennais, who boasted to combine these two tendencies; +but the mummery of Saint-Simonism and the instability of Mennaisianism, +when it came to the test, too soon exposed the lack of spiritual +substance in both. With this revelation came a growing distrust of human +nature, caused by the political degeneracy of France, and by a kind of +revulsion he threw himself upon the Jansenism which contained the +spirituality the other creeds missed, and which based itself frankly on +the total depravity of mankind. He was too much a child of the age to +breathe in that thin air, and fell back on all that remained to +him,--inquisitive doubt and a scientific demand for positive truth. It +is the history of the century. + +And in literature I find the same inconstancy on the surface, while at +heart he suffered little change. Only here his experience ran counter to +the times, and most of the opprobrium that has been cast on him is due +to the fact that he never allowed the clamour of popular taste and the +warmth of his sympathy with present modes to drown that inner critical +voice of doubt. As a standard-bearer of Victor Hugo and the romanticists +he still maintained his reserves, and, on the other hand, long after he +had turned renegade from that camp he still spoke of himself as only +_demi-converti_. The proportion changed with his development, but from +beginning to end he was at bottom classical in his love of clarity and +self-restraint, while intensely interested in the life and aspirations +of his own day. There is in one of the recently published letters to +Victor Hugo a noteworthy illustration of this steadfastness. It was, in +fact, the second letter he wrote to the poet, and goes back to 1827, the +year of _Cromwell_. On the twelfth of February, Hugo read his new +tragi-comedy aloud, and Sainte-Beuve was evidently warm in expressions +of praise. But in the seclusion of his own room the critical instinct +reawoke in him, and he wrote the next day a long letter to the +dramatist, not retracting what he had said, but adding certain +reservations and insinuating certain admonitions. "Toutes ces critiques +rentrent dans une seule que je m'etais deja permis d'adresser a votre +talent, l'exces, l'abus de la _force_, et passez-moi le mot, la +_charge_." Is not the whole of his critical attitude toward the men of +his age practically contained in this rebuke of excess, and +over-emphasis, and self-indulgence? And Sainte-Beuve when he wrote the +words was just twenty-three, was in the first ardour of his attachment +to the giant--the Cyclops, he seemed to Sainte-Beuve later--of the +century. + +But after all, it is not the elusive seeker of these years that we think +of when Sainte-Beuve is named, nor the author of those many +volumes,--the _Portraits_, the _Chateaubriand_, even the +_Port-Royal_,--but the writer of the incomparable _Lundis_. In 1849 he +had returned from Liege after lecturing for a year at the University, +and found himself abounding in ideas, keen for work, and without regular +employment. He was asked to contribute a critical essay to the +_Constitutionnel_ each Monday, and accepted the offer eagerly. "It is +now twenty-five years," he said, "since I started in this career; it is +the third form in which I have been brought to give out my impressions +and literary judgments." These first _Causeries_ continued until 1860, +and are published in fourteen solid volumes. There was a brief respite +then, and in 1861 he began the _Nouveaux Lundis_, which continued in the +_Moniteur_ and the _Temps_ until his last illness in 1869, filling +thirteen similar volumes. Meanwhile his mother had died, leaving him a +house in Paris and a small income, and in 1865 he had been created a +senator by Napoleon III. at the instigation of the Princesse Mathilde. + +In his earlier years he had been poor and anxious, living in a student's +room, and toiling indefatigably to keep the wolf from the door. At the +end he was rich, and had command of his time, yet the story of his +labours while writing the latest _Lundis_ is one of the heroic examples +of literature. "Every Tuesday morning," he once wrote to a friend, "I go +down to the bottom of a pit, not to reascend until Friday evening at +some unknown hour." Those were the days of preparation and plotting. +From his friend M. Cheron, who was librarian of the Bibliotheque +Imperiale, came memoirs and histories and manuscripts,--whatever might +serve him in getting up his subject. Late in the week he wrote a rough +draft of the essay, commonly about six thousand words long, in a hand +which no one but himself could decipher. This task was ordinarily +finished in a single day, and the essay was then dictated off rapidly to +a secretary to take down in a fair copy. That must have been a strenuous +season for the copyist, for Sainte-Beuve read at a prodigious rate, +showing impatience at any delay, and still greater impatience at any +proposed alteration. Indeed, during the whole week of preparation he was +so absorbed in his theme as to ruffle up at the slightest opposition. +In the evening he would eat a hearty dinner, and then walk out with his +secretary to the outer Boulevards, the Luxembourg, or the Place +Saint-Sulpice, for his digestion, talking all the while on the coming +_Lundi_ with intense absorption. And woe to the poor companion if he +expressed any contradiction, or hinted that the subject was trivial,--as +indeed it often was, until the critic had clothed it with the life of +his own thought. "In a word," Sainte-Beuve would cry out savagely, "you +wish to hinder me in writing my article. The subject has not the honour +of your sympathy. Really it is too bad." Whereupon he would turn angrily +on his heel and stride home. The story explains the nature of +Sainte-Beuve's criticism. For a week he lived with his author; "he +belonged body and soul to his model! He embraced it, espoused it, +exalted it!"--with the result that some of this enthusiasm is +transmitted to the reader, and the essays are instinct with life as no +other critic's work has ever been. The strain of living thus +passionately in a new subject week after week was tremendous, and it is +not strange that his letters are filled with complaints of fatigue, and +that his health suffered in spite of his robust constitution. Nor was +the task ended with the dictation late Friday night. Most of Saturday +and Sunday was given up to proofreading, and at this time he invited +every suggestion, even contradiction, often practically rewriting an +essay before it reached the press. Monday he was free, and it was on +that day occurred the famous Magny dinners, when Sainte-Beuve, Flaubert, +Renan, the Goncourts, and a few other chosen spirits, met and talked as +only Frenchmen can talk. Every conceivable subject was passed under the +fire of criticism; nothing was held sacred. Only one day a luckless +guest, after faith in religion and politics and morals had been laughed +away, ventured to intimate that Homer as a canon of taste was merely a +superstition like another; whereupon such a hubbub arose as threatened +to bring the dinners to an end at once and for all. The story is told in +the _Journal_ of the Goncourts, and it was one of the brothers, I +believe, who made the perilous insinuation. Imagine, if you can, a party +of Englishmen taking Homer, or any other question of literary faith, +with tragic seriousness. Such an incident explains many things; it +explains why English literature has never been, like the French, an +integral part of the national life. + +And the integrity of mind displayed in the _Lundis_ is as notable as the +industry. From the beginning Sainte-Beuve had possessed that inquisitive +passion for the truth, without which all other critical gifts are as +brass and tinkling cymbals. Nevertheless, it is evident that he did not +always in his earlier writings find it expedient to express his whole +thought. He was, for example, at one time the recognised herald of the +romantic revolt, and naturally, while writing about Victor Hugo, he did +not feel it necessary to make in public such frank reservations as his +letters to that poet contain. His whole thought is there, perhaps, but +one has to read between the lines to get it. And so it was with the +other men and movements with which he for a while allied himself. With +the _Lundis_ came a change; he was free of all entanglements, and could +make the precise truth his single aim. No doubt a remnant of personal +jealousy toward those who had passed him in the race of popularity +embittered the critical reservations which he felt, but which might +otherwise have been uttered more genially. But quite as often this +seeming rancour was due to the feeling that he had hitherto been +compelled to suppress his full convictions, to a genuine regret for the +corrupt ways into which French literature was deviating. How nearly the +exigencies of a hack writer had touched him is shown by a passage in a +letter to the Oliviers written in 1838. His Swiss friend was debating +whether he should try his fortunes in Paris as a contributor to the +magazines, and had asked for advice. "But where to write? what to +write?" replied Sainte-Beuve; "if one could only choose for himself! You +must wait on opportunity, and in the long run this becomes a transaction +in which conscience may be saved, but every ideal perishes,"--_dans +laquelle la conscience peut toujours etre sauve mais ou tout ideal +perit._ Just about this time he was thinking seriously of migrating with +the Oliviers to this country. It would be curious to hear what he might +have written from New York to one who contemplated coming there as a +hack writer. As for the loss of ideals, his meaning, if it needs any +elucidation, may be gathered from a well-known passage in one of his +books: + + The condition of man ordinarily is no more than a succession of + servitudes, and the only liberty that remains is now and then to + effect a change. Labour presses, necessity commands, circumstances + sweep us along: at the risk of seeming to contradict ourselves or + give ourselves the lie, we must go on and for ever recommence; we + must accept whatever employments are offered, and even though we + fill them with all conscientiousness and zeal we raise a dust on + the way, we obscure the images of the past, we soil and mar our + own selves. And so it is that before the goal of old age is + reached, we have passed through so many lives that scarcely, as we + go back in memory, can we tell which was our true life, that for + which we were made and of which we were worthy, the life which we + would have chosen. + +Those were the words with which he had closed his chapters on +_Chateaubriand_; yet through all his deviations he had borne steadily +toward one point. In after years he could write without presumption to a +friend: "If I had a device, it would be the _true_, the _true_ alone; +and the beautiful and the good might come out as best they could." There +are a number of anecdotes which show how precious he held this integrity +of mind. The best known is the fact that, in the days before he was +appointed senator, and despite the pressure that was brought to bear on +him, he still refused to write a review of the Emperor's _History of +Caesar_. + +Both the sense of disillusion, which was really inherent in him from his +youth, and the passion for truth hindered him in his "creative" work, +while they increased his powers as a critic. He grew up, it must be +remembered, in the midst of the full romantic tide, and as a writer of +verse there was really no path of great achievement open to him save +that of Victor Hugo and Lamartine and the others of whose glory he was +so jealous. Whatever may have been the differences of those poets, in +one respect they were alike: they all disregarded the subtle _nuance_ +wherein the truth resides, and based their emotions on some grandiose +conception, half true and half false; nor was this mingling of the false +and true any less predominant in one of Hugo's political odes than in +Lamartine's personal and religious meditations. Now, the whole bent of +Sainte-Beuve's intellect was toward the subtle drawing of distinctions, +and even to-day a reader somewhat romantically and emotionally inclined +resents the manner in which his scalpel cuts into the work of these +poets and severs what is morbid from what is sound. That is criticism; +but it may easily be seen that such a habit of mind when carried to +excess would paralyse the poetic impulse. The finest poetry, perhaps, is +written when this discriminating principle works in the writer strongly +but unconsciously; when a certain critical atmosphere about him +controls his taste, while not compelling him to dull the edge of impulse +by too much deliberation. Boileau had created such an atmosphere about +Moliere and Racine; Sainte-Beuve had attempted, but unsuccessfully, to +do the same for the poets of the romantic renaissance. His failure was +due in part to a certain lack of impressiveness in his own personality, +but still more to the notions of individual licence which lay at the +very foundation of that movement. There is a touch of real pathos in his +superb tribute to Boileau: + + Let us salute and acknowledge to-day the noble and mighty harmony + of the _grand siecle_. Without Boileau, and without Louis XIV., + who recognised Boileau as his Superintendent of Parnassus, what + would have happened? Would even the most talented have produced in + the same degree what forms their surest heritage of glory? Racine, + I fear, would have made more plays like _Berenice_; La Fontaine + fewer _Fables_ and more _Contes_; Moliere himself would have run + to _Scapins_, and might not have attained to the austere eminence + of _Le Misanthrope_. In a word, each of these fair geniuses would + have abounded in his natural defects. Boileau, that is to say, the + common sense of the poet-critic authorised and confirmed by that + of a great king, constrained them and kept them, by the respect + for his presence, to their better and graver tasks. And do you + know what, in our days, has failed our poets, so strong at their + beginning in native ability, so filled with promise and happy + inspiration? There failed them a Boileau and an enlightened + monarch, the twain supporting and consecrating each other. So it + is these men of talent, seeing themselves in an age of anarchy + and without discipline, have not hesitated to behave accordingly; + they have behaved, to be perfectly frank, not like exalted + geniuses, or even like men, but like schoolboys out of school. We + have seen the result. + +Nobler tribute to a great predecessor has not often been uttered, and in +contrast one remembers the outrage that has been poured on Boileau's +name by the later poets of France and England. One recalls the scorn of +the young Keats, in those days when he took licence upon himself to +abuse the King's English as only a wilful genius can: + + Ill-fated, impious race! + That blasphemed the bright Lyrist face to face, + And did not know it,--no, they went about, + Holding a poor decrepit standard out + Marked with most flimsy mottoes, and in large + The name of one Boileau! + +I am not one to fling abuse on the school of Dryden and Pope, yet the +eighteenth century may to some minds justify the charge of Keats and the +romanticists. Certainly the critical restraint of French rules, passing +to England at a time when the tide of inspiration had run low, induced a +certain aridity of manner. But consider for a moment what might have +been the result in English letters if the court of Elizabeth had +harboured a man of authority such as Boileau, or, to put it the other +way, if the large inspiration of those poets and playwrights had not +come before the critical sense of the land was out of its swaddling +clothes. What might it have been for us if a Boileau and an Elizabeth +together had taught Shakespeare to prune his redundancies, to +disentangle his language at times, to eliminate the relics of barbarism +in his denouements; if they had compelled the lesser dramatists to +simplify their plots and render their characters conceivable moral +agents; if they had instructed the sonneteers in common sense and in the +laws of the sonnet; if they had constrained Spenser to tell a +story,--consider what this might have meant, not only to the writers of +that day, but to the tradition they formed for those that were to come +after. We should have had our own classics, and not been forced to turn +to Athens for our canons of taste. There would not have been for our +confusion the miserable contrast between the "correctness" of Queen +Anne's day and the creative genius of Elizabeth's, but the two together +would have made a literature incomparable for richness and judgment. It +is not too much to say that the absence of such a controlling influence +at the great expansive moment of England is a loss for which nothing can +ever entirely compensate in our literature. + +Such was the office which Sainte-Beuve sought to fulfil in the France of +his own day. That conscious principle of restraint might, he thought, +when applied to his own poetical work, introduce into French literature +a style like that of Cowper's or Wordsworth's in England; and to a +certain extent he was successful in this attempt. But in the end he +found the Democritean maxim too strong for him: _Excludit sanos Helicone +poetas_; and, indeed, the difference between the poet and the critic may +scarcely be better defined than in this, that in the former the +principle of restraint works unconsciously and from without, whereas in +the latter it proceeds consciously and from within. And finding himself +debarred from Helicon (not by impotence, as some would say, but by +excess of self-knowledge), he deliberately undertook to introduce a +little more sanity into the notions of his contemporaries. I have shown +how at the very beginning of his career he took upon himself privately +such a task with Hugo. It might almost be said that the history of his +intellect is summed up in his growth toward the sane and the simple; +that, like Goethe, from whom so much of his critical method derives, his +life was a long endeavour to supplant the romantic elements of his taste +by the classical. What else is the meaning of his attack on the excesses +of Balzac? or his defence of Erasmus (_le droit, je ne dis des tiedes, +mais des neutres_), and of all those others who sought for themselves a +governance in the law of proportion? In one of his latest volumes he +took the occasion of Taine's _History of English Literature_ to speak +out strongly for the admirable qualities of Pope: + + I insist on this because the danger to-day is in the sacrifice of + the writers and poets whom I will call the moderate. For a long + time they had all the honours: one pleaded for Shakespeare, for + Milton, for Dante, even for Homer; no one thought it necessary to + plead for Virgil, for Horace, for Boileau, Racine, Voltaire, Pope, + Tasso,--these were accepted and recognised by all. To-day the + first have completely gained their cause, and matters are quite + the other way about: the great and primitive geniuses reign and + triumph; even those who come after them in invention, but are + still naive and original in thought and expression, poets such as + Regnier and Lucretius, are raised to their proper rank; while the + moderate, the cultured, the polished, those who were the classics + to our fathers, we tend to make subordinate, and, if we are not + careful, to treat a little too cavalierly. Something like disdain + and contempt (relatively speaking) will soon be their portion. It + seems to me that there is room for all, and that none need be + sacrificed. Let us render full homage and complete reverence to + those great human forces which are like the powers of nature, and + which like them burst forth with something of strangeness and + harshness; but still let us not cease to honour those other forces + which are more restrained, and which, in their less explosive + expression, clothe themselves with elegance and sweetness. + +And this love of the golden mean, joined with the long wanderings of his +heart and his loneliness, produced in him a preference for scenes near +at hand and for the quiet joys of the hearth. So it was that the idyllic +tales of George Sand touched him quickly with their strange romance of +the familiar. Chateaubriand and the others of that school had sought out +the nature of India, the savannahs of America, the forests of Canada. +"Here," he says, "are discoveries for you,--deserts, mountains, the +large horizons of Italy; what remained to discover? That which was +nearest to us, here in the centre of our own France. As happens always, +what is most simple comes at the last." In the same way he praised the +refined charm of a poet like Cowper, and sought to throw into relief the +purer and more homely verses of a Parny: "If a little knowledge removes +us, yet greater knowledge brings us back to the sentiment of the +beauties and graces of the hearth." Indeed, there is something almost +pathetic in the contrast between the life of this laborious recluse, +with his sinister distrust of human nature, and the way in which he +fondles this image of a sheltered and affectionate home. + +But the nineteenth century was not the seventeenth, neither was +Sainte-Beuve a Boileau, to stem the current of exaggeration and egotism. +His innate sense of proportion brought him to see the dangerous +tendencies of the day, and, failing to correct them, he sank deeper into +that disillusion from which his weekly task was a long and vain labour +of deliverance. He took to himself the saying of the Abbe Galiani: +"Continue your works; it is a proof of attachment to life to compose +books." Yet it may be that this very disillusion was one of the elements +of his success; for after all, the real passion of literature, that +perfect flower of the contemplative intellect, hardly comes to a man +until the allurement of life has been dispelled by many experiences, +each bringing its share of disappointment. Only, perhaps, when the hope +of love (the _spes animi credula mutui_) and the visions of ambition, +the belief in pleasure and the luxury of grief, have lost their sting, +do we turn to books with the contented understanding that the shadow is +the reality, and the seeming reality of things is the shadow. At least +for the critic, however it may be for the "creative" writer, this final +deliverance from self-deception would seem to be necessary. Nor do I +mean any invidious distinction when I separate the critic from the +creative writer in this respect. I know there is a kind of hostility +between the two classes. The poet feels that the critic by the very +possession of this self-knowledge sets himself above the writer who +accepts the inspiration of his emotions unquestioningly, while the +critic resents the fact that the world at large looks upon his work as +subordinate, if not superfluous. And yet, in the case of criticism, such +as Sainte-Beuve conceived it, this distinction almost ceases to exist. +No stigma attaches to the work of the historian who recreates the +political activities of an age, to a Gibbon who raises a vast bridge +between the past and the present. Yet, certainly, the best and most +durable acts of mankind are the ideals and emotions that go to make up +its books, and to describe and judge the literature of a country, to +pass under review a thousand systems and reveries, to point out the +meaning of each, and so write the annals of the human spirit, to pluck +out the heart of each man's mystery and set it before the mind's eye +quivering with life,--if this be not a labour of immense creative energy +the word has no sense to my ears. We read and enjoy, and the past slips +unceasingly from our memory. We are like the foolish peasant: the river +of history rolls at our feet, and for ever will roll, while we stand and +wait. And then comes this magician, who speaks a word, and suddenly the +current is stopped; who has power like the wizards of old to bid the +tide turn back upon itself, and the past becomes to us as the present, +and we are made the lords of time. I do not know how it affects others, +but for me, as I look at the long row of volumes which hold the +interpretation of French literature, I am almost overwhelmed at the +magnitude of this man's achievement. + +Nor is it to be supposed that Sainte-Beuve, because he was primarily a +critic, drew his knowledge of life from books only, and wrote, as it +were, at second hand. The very contrary is true. As a younger man, he +had mixed much with society, and even in his later years, when, as he +says, he lived at the bottom of a well, he still, through his friendship +with the Princesse Mathilde and others of the great world, kept in close +touch with the active forces of the Empire. As a matter of fact, every +one knows, who has read at all in his essays, that he was first of all a +psychologist, and that his knowledge of the human breast was quite as +sure as his acquaintance with libraries. He might almost be accused of +slighting the written word in order to get at the secret of the writer. +What attracted him chiefly was that middle ground where life and +literature meet, where life becomes self-conscious through expression, +and literature retains the reality of association with facts. "A little +poesy," he thought, "separates us from history and the reality of +things; much of poesy brings us back." Literature to him was one of the +arts of society. Hence he was never more at his ease, his touch was +never surer and his eloquence more communicable, than when he was +dealing with the great ladies who guided the society of the eighteenth +century and retold its events in their letters and memoirs,--Mme. du +Deffand, Mme. de Grafigny, Mlle. de Lespinasse, and those who preceded +and followed. Nowhere does one get closer to the critic's own +disappointment than when he says with a sigh, thinking of those +irrecoverable days: "Happy time! all of life then was turned to +sociability." And he was describing his own method as a critic, no less +than the character of Mlle. de Lespinasse, when he wrote: "Her great art +in society, one of the secrets of her success, was to feel the +intelligence _(l'esprit)_ of others, to make it prevail, and to seem to +forget her own. Her conversation was never either above or below those +with whom she spoke; she possessed measure, proportion, rightness of +mind. She reflected so well the impressions of others, and received so +visibly the influence of their intelligence, that they loved her for the +success she helped them to attain. She raised this disposition to an +art. 'Ah!' she cried one day, 'how I long to know the foible of every +one!'" And this love of the social side of literature, this hankering +after _la bella scuola_ when men wrote under the sway of some central +governance, explains Sainte-Beuve's feeling of desolation amidst the +scattered, individualistic tendencies of his own day. + +There lie the springs of Sainte-Beuve's critical art,--his treatment of +literature as a function of social life, and his search in all things +for the golden mean. There we find his strength, and there, too, his +limitation. If he fails anywhere, it is when he comes into the presence +of those great and imperious souls who stand apart from the common +concerns of men, and who rise above our homely mediocrities, not by +extravagance or egotism, but by the lifting wings of inspiration. He +could, indeed, comprehend the ascetic grandeur of a Pascal or the +rolling eloquence of a Bossuet, but he was distrustful of that fervid +breath of poesy that comes and goes unsummoned and uncontrolled. It is a +common charge against him that he was cold to the sublime, and he +himself was aware of this defect, and sought to justify it. "Il ne faut +donner dans le sublime," he said, "qu'a la derniere extremite et a son +corps defendant." Something of this, too, must be held to account for +the haunting melancholy that he could forget, but never overcome. He +might have lived with a kind of content in the society of those refined +and worldly women of the eighteenth century, but, missing the solace of +that support, he was unable amid the dissipated energies of his own age +to rise to that surer peace that needs no communion with others for its +fulfilment. Like the royal friend of Voltaire, he still lacked the +highest degree of culture, which is religion. He strove for that during +many years, but alone he could not attain to it. As early as 1839 he +wrote, while staying at Aigues-Mortes: "My soul is like this beach, +where it is said Saint Louis embarked: the sea and faith, alas! have +long since drawn away." One may excuse these limitations as the "defect +of his quality," as indeed they are. But more than that, they belong to +him as a French critic, as they are to a certain degree inherent in +French literature. That literature and language, we have been told by no +less an authority than M. Brunetiere, are pre-eminently social in their +strength and their weakness. And Sainte-Beuve was indirectly justifying +his own method when he pointed to the example of Voltaire, Moliere, La +Fontaine, and Rabelais and Villon, the great ancestors. "They have all," +he said, "a corner from which they mock at the sublime." I am even +inclined to think that these qualities explain why England has never +had, and may possibly never have, a critic in any way comparable to +Sainte-Beuve; for the chief glory of English literature lies in the very +field where French is weakest, in the lonely and unsociable life of the +spirit, just as the faults of English are due to its lack of discipline +and uncertainty of taste. And after all, the critical temperament +consists primarily in just this linking together of literature and life, +and in the levelling application of common sense. + +Yet if Sainte-Beuve is essentially French, indeed almost inconceivable +in English, he is still immensely valuable, perhaps even more valuable, +to us for that very reason. There is nothing more wholesome than to dip +into this strong and steady current of wise judgment. It is good for us +to catch the glow of his masterful knowledge of letters and his faith in +their supreme interest. His long row of volumes are the scholar's Summa +Theologiae. As John Cotton loved to sweeten his mouth with a piece of +Calvin before he went to sleep, so the scholar may turn to Sainte-Beuve, +sure of his never-failing abundance and his ripe intelligence. + + + + +THE SCOTCH NOVELS AND SCOTCH HISTORY + + +Like many another innocent, no doubt, I was seduced not long ago by the +potent spell of Mr. Andrew Lang's name into reading his voluminous +_History of Scotland_. Being too, like Mr. Lang, sealed of the tribe of +Sir Walter, and knowing in a general way some of the romantic features +of Scotch annals, I was led to suppose that these bulky volumes would be +crammed from cover to cover with the pageantry of fair Romance. Alas, I +soon learned, as I have so often learned before, that a little knowledge +is a dangerous thing; and I was taught, moreover, a new application of +several well-worn lines of Milton. Amid the inextricable feuds of +Britons, Scots, Picts, and English; amid the incomprehensible medley of +Bruces, Balliols, Stuarts, Douglases, Plantagenets, and Tudors; amid the +horrid tumult of Roberts, Davids, Jameses, Malcolms (may their tribes +decrease!), Mr. Lang's reader, if he be of alien blood and foreign +shores, wanders helpless and utterly bewildered. On leaving that _selva +oscura_ I felt not unlike Milton's courageous hero (in courage only, I +trust) before the realm of Chaos and eldest Night, where naught was +perceptible but eternal anarchy and noise of endless wars. Yet with +this bold adventurer it might be said by me: + + I come no spy, + With purpose to explore or to disturb + The secrets of your realm; but by constraint + Wandering this darksome desert, as my way + Led through your spacious empire up to light. + +For throughout the labyrinth of all this anfractuous narrative +there was indeed one guiding ray of light. As often as the author +by way of anecdote or allusion--and happily this occurred pretty +frequently--mentioned the works of Scott, a new and powerful interest +was given to the page. The very name of Scott seemed providentially +symbolical of his office in literature, and through him Scots history +has become a theme of significance to all the world. + +On the other hand, one is equally impressed by the fact that the novels +owe much of their vitality to the manner in which they voice the spirit +of the national life; and we recognise the truth, often maintained and +as often disputed, that the final verdict on a novelist's work is +generally determined by the authenticity of his portraiture, not of +individuals, but of a people, and consequently by the lasting +significance of the phase of society or national life portrayed. + +The conditions of the novel should seem in this respect to be quite +different from those of the poem. We are conscious within ourselves of +some principle of isolation and exclusion--the _principium +individuationis_, as the old schoolmen called it--that obstructs the +completion of our being, of some contracting force of nature that dwarfs +our sympathies with our fellow-men, that hinders the development of our +full humanity, and denies the validity of our hopes; and the office of +the imagination and of the imaginative arts is for a while to break down +the walls of this narrowing individuality and to bestow on us the +illusion of unconfined liberty. + +But if the end of the arts is the same, their methods are various, and +this variety extends even to the different genres of literature. The +manner of the epic, and in a still higher degree of the tragedy, is so +to arouse the will and understanding that their clogging limitations +seem to be swept away, until through our sympathy with the hero we feel +ourselves to be acting and speaking the great passions of humanity in +their fullest and freest scope; for this reason we call the characters +of the poem types, and we believe that the poet under the impulse of his +inspiration is carried into a region above our vision, where, like the +exalted souls in Plato's dream, he beholds face to face the great ideas +of which our worldly life and circumstances are but faulty copies. In +this way Achilles stands as the perfect warrior, and Odysseus as the +enduring man of wiles; Hamlet is the man of doubts, and Satan the +creature of rebellious pride. It may be that this effort or inspiration +of the poet to represent mankind in idealised form will account in part +for the peculiar tinge of melancholy that is commonly an attribute of +the artistic temperament,--for the brooding uncertainty of Shakespeare, +if as many think Hamlet is the true voice of his heart, for the feeling +of baffled despair which led Goethe to create Faust, and for the +self-tormenting of Childe Harold. It is because the dissolving power of +genius and the personality of the man can never be quite reconciled; he +is detached from nature and attached to her at the same time. On the one +hand his genius draws him to contemplate life with the disinterestedness +of a mind free from the attachments of the individual, while on the +other hand his own personality, often of the most ardent character, +drags him irresistibly to seek the satisfaction of individual emotions. +Like the Empedocles of Matthew Arnold, baffled in the ineffable longing +to escape themselves, these bearers of the divine light are haled +unwillingly + + Back to this meadow of calamity, + This uncongenial place, this human life. + +What to the reader is merely a pleasant and momentary illusion, or a +salutary excitation from without, is in the creative poet a partial +dissolution of his own personality. Shakespeare was not dealing in empty +words when he likened the poet to the lover and the lunatic as being of +imagination all compact; nor was Plato speaking mere metaphor when he +said that "the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is +no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses +and the mind is no longer in him." In the hour of inspiration some +darkened window is opened on the horizon to eyes that are ordinarily +confined within the four walls of his meagre self, a door is thrown open +to the heaven-sweeping gales, he hears for a brief while the voice of +the Over-soul speaking a language that with all his toil he can barely +render into human speech;--and when at last the door is closed, the +vision gone, and the voice hushed, he sits in the darkened chamber of +his own person, silent and forlorn. + +I would not presume to describe absolutely the inner state of the poet +when life appears to him in its ideal form, but the means by which he +conveys his illusion to the reader is quite clear. The rhythm of his +verse produces on the mind something of the stimulating effect of music +and this effect is enhanced by the use of language and metaphor lifted +out of the common mould. Prose, however, has no such resources to impose +on the fancy a creation of its own, in which the individual will is +raised above itself. On the contrary, the office of the novel--and this +we see more clearly as fiction grows regularly more realistic--is to +represent life as controlled by environment and to portray human beings +as the servants of the flesh. This, I take it, was the meaning of +Goethe in his definition of the genres: "In the novel sentiments and +events chiefly are exhibited, in the drama characters and deeds." The +procedure of the novel must be, so to speak, a passive one. It depicts +man as a creature of circumstance, and its only method of escape is so +to encompass the individual in circumstance as to lend to his separate +life something of the pomp of universality. It effects its purpose by +breadth rather than by exaltation. Its truest aim is not to represent +the actions of a single man as noteworthy in themselves, but to +represent the life of a people or a phase of society; in the great sweep +of human activity something of the same largeness and freedom is +produced as in the poetic idealisation of the individual will in the +drama. Thus it happens that the artistic validity of a novel depends +first of all on the power of the author to portray broadly and +veraciously some aspect of this wider existence. + +Balzac, in some respects the master novelist, was clearly conscious of +this aim of his art; and his _Comedie Humaine_ is a supreme effort to +grasp the whole range of French society. Nor would it be difficult in +the case of the greater English novelists to show that unwittingly--an +Englishman rarely if ever has the same knowledge of his art as a +Frenchman--they obeyed the same law. We admire Fielding and Smollett not +so much for their individual characterisations as for the joy we feel in +escaping our conventional timidity in the old-time tumultuous country +life of England, with all its rude strength and even its vulgarity. By a +natural contrast we read Jane Austen for her picture of rural security +and stability, and are glad to forget the vexations and uncertainties of +life's warfare in that gentle round of society, where greed and passion +are reduced to petty foibles, and where the errors of mankind only +furnish material for malicious but innocent satire. With Thackeray we +put on the veneer of artificial society which was the true idealism +inherited by him from the eighteenth century; and we move more freely +amidst that _gai monde_ because there runs through the story of it such +a biting satire of worldliness and snobbishness as flatters us with the +feeling of our own superiority. In Dickens we are carried into the very +opposite field of life, and for a while we move with those who are the +creatures of grotesque whims and emotions: caricatures we call his +people, but deep in our hearts we know that each of us longs at times to +be as humanity is in Dickens's world, the perfect and unreflecting +creature of his dearest whim--for this too is liberty. Thus it is that +the interest of the novel depends as much, or almost as much, on the +intrinsic value of the national life or phase of society reproduced as +on the skill of the writer. The prose author is in this respect far less +a free agent than the poet and far more the subject of his environment; +for he deals less with the unchanging laws of character and more with +what he perceives outwardly about him. It is this fact which leads many +readers to prefer the English novelists to the French, although the +latter are unquestionably the greater masters of their craft. + +Now the peculiar good fortune of Scott in this matter was most strongly +brought home to me in reading the narrative work of Mr. Lang. Fine and +entertaining as are Scott's more professedly historical novels, such as +_Ivanhoe_ and _Quentin Durward_, I do not believe they could ever have +resisted the invasion of time were they not bolstered up by the stories +that deal more directly with the realities of Scotch life. There is, to +be sure, in the foreign tales a wonderfully pure vein of romance; but +romantic writing in prose cannot endure unless firmly grounded in +realism, or unless, like Hawthorne's work, it is surcharged with +spiritual meanings. Not having the power possessed by verse to convey +illusion, it lacks also the vitality of verse. Younger readers may take +naturally to _Ivanhoe_ or _The Talisman_, because very little is +required to evoke illusion with them. More mature readers turn oftenest +to _Guy Mannering_ and those tales in which the romance is the realism +of Scotch life, finding here a fulness of interest that is more than a +compensation for the frequent slovenliness of Scott's language and for +the haphazard construction of his plots. + +These negligences of the indifferent craftsman might, perhaps, need no +such compensation, for we have grown hardened at last to slovenliness +in fiction. But there are other limitations to Scott's powers that show +more clearly how much of his fame rests on the substratum of national +life on which he builds. An infinite variety of characters, from kings +in the council hall down to strolling half-witted gaberlunzies, move +through the pages of his novels; but, and the fact is notorious, the +great Scotchman was little better at painting the purple light of young +desire than was our own Cooper. There is something like love-making in +_Rob Roy_, and Di Vernon has been signalised by Mr. Saintsbury as one of +his five chosen heroines; but in general the scenes that form the +ecstasy of most romance are dead and perfunctory in Scott. And this is +the more remarkable since we know that he himself was a lover--and a +disappointed lover, which is vastly more to the point in art, as all the +world knows. But in fact this inability to portray the softer emotions +is not an isolated phenomenon in Scott; he skims very lightly over most +of the deeper passions of the heart, seeming to avoid them except in so +far as they express themselves in action. His novels contain no adequate +picture of remorse or hatred, love or jealousy; neither do they contain +any such psychological analysis of the emotions as has made the fame of +subsequent writers. But there is an infinite variety of characters in +action, and a perfect understanding of that form of the imagination +which displays itself in whimsicalities corresponding to the +"originals" or "humourists" of the Elizabethan comedy. + +The numberless quotations from "old plays" at the head of Scott's +chapters are not without significance. At times he approaches closer to +Shakespeare than any other writer, whether of prose or verse. In one +scene at least in _The Bride of Lammermoor_, where he describes the +"singular and gloomy delight" of the three old cummers about the body of +their contemporary, he lets us know that he has in mind the meeting of +the witches in _Macbeth_, and I think on the whole he excels the +dramatist in his own field. After all is said, the Shakespearian +witch-scene is an arbitrary exercise of the fancy, which fails to carry +with it a complete sense of reality: the illusion is not fully +maintained. The dialogue in the novelist, on the contrary, is instinct +with thrilling suggestiveness, for the very reason that it is based on +the groundwork of national character. The superstitious awe is here +simple realism, from the beginning of the scene down to the warning cry +of the paralytic hag from the cottage: + + "He's a frank man, and a free-handed man, the Master," said Annie + Winnie, "and a comely personage--broad in the shouthers, and + narrow around the lunyies. He wad mak a bonny corpse; I wad like + to hae the streiking and winding o' him." + + "It is written on his brow, Annie Winnie," returned the + octogenarian, her companion, "that hand of woman, or of man + either, will never straught him; dead-deal will never be laid on + his back, make you your market of that, for I hae it frae a sure + hand." + + "Will it be his lot to die on the battle-ground then, Ailsie + Gourlay? Will he die by the sword or the ball, as his forbears hae + dune before him, mony ane o'them?" + + "Ask nae mair questions about it--he'll no be graced sae far," + replied the sage. + + "I ken ye are wiser than ither folk, Ailsie Gourlay. But wha + tell'd ye this?" + + "Fashna your thumb about that, Annie Winnie," answered the sibyl. + "I hae it frae a hand sure eneugh." + + "But ye said ye never saw the foul thief," reiterated her + inquisitive companion. + + "I hae it frae as sure a hand," said Ailsie, "and frae them that + spaed his fortune before the sark gaed ower his head." + + "Hark! I hear his horse's feet riding aff," said the other; "they + dinna sound as if good luck was wi' them." + + "Mak haste, sirs," cried the paralytic hag from the cottage, "and + let us do what is needfu', and say what is fitting; for, if the + dead corpse binna straughted, it will girn and thraw, and that + will fear the best o' us." + +But more often Scott approaches the lesser lights of the Elizabethan +comedians, whose work is in general subject to the same laws as the +novel, and who filled their plays with whimsical creatures-- + + Bawd, squire, impostor, many persons more, + Whose manners, now called humours, feed the stage. + +You cannot read through the _dramatis personae_ of one of these plays +(Witgood, Lucre, Hoard, Limber, Kix, Lamprey, Spichcock, Dampit, etc.) +without being reminded of the long list of originals that figure in the +Scotch novels; and in one case at least, Baron Bradwardine of +_Waverley_, Scott goes out of his way to compare him with a character of +Ben Jonson's. And you cannot but feel that Scott has surpassed his +models on their own ground, partly because his genius was greater and +partly because the novel is a wider and freer field for such characters +than the drama--at least when the drama is deprived of its stage +setting. But Scott's greatest advantage is due to the fact that what in +England was mainly an exaggeration of the more unsociable traits of +character seems in Scotland to reach down to the very foundation of the +popular life. His characters are not the creation of individual +eccentricities only, but spring from an inexhaustible quaintness of the +national temper. From every standpoint we are led back to consider the +greatness of the author as depending on his happy genius in finding a +voice for a rare and noteworthy phase of society. + +Much of the Scotch temperament, its self-dependence, clan attachments, +cunning, its gloomy exaltations relieved at times by a wide and serene +prospect, may be traced, as Buckle has so admirably shown, to the +physical conditions of the land; and in reading the history of Scotland, +with its stories of the adventures of Wallace and Bruce and its battles +of Bannockburn and Prestonpans, it seems quite fitting that the wild +scenery of the country should be constantly associated with the deeds +of its heroes. There is something of charm in the very names of the +landscape--in the haughs, corries, straths, friths, burns, and braes. +The fascination of the Scotch lakes and valleys was one of the first to +awaken the world to an admiration of savage nature, as we may read in +Gray's letters; and Scott, from Waverley's excursion into the wild +fastnesses of highland robbers and chiefs to the lonely sea-scenes of +Zetland in _The Pirate_, has carried us through a succession of natural +pictures such as no other novelist ever conceived. And he has maintained +always that most difficult art of describing minutely enough to convey +the illusion of a particular scene and broadly enough to evoke those +general emotions which alone justify descriptive writing. Perhaps his +most notable success is the visit of Guy Mannering to Ellangowan, where +sea, sky, and land unite to form a picture of strangely luminous beauty. +He not only succeeded in exciting a new romantic interest in Scotch +scenery, but he has actually added to the market price of properties. It +is said that his descriptions are mentioned in the title deeds of +various estates as forming a part of their transmitted value. + +But the scenery depicted by Scott is only the setting of a curious and +paradoxical life, and it is the light thrown on this life that lends the +chief interest to Mr. Lang's History. Owing in part to the peculiar +position and formation of the land, and in part to the strain of Celtic +blood in the Highland tribes, there was bred in the Scotch people an +unusual mingling of romance and realism, of imagination and worldly +cunning, that sets them quite apart from other races; and this +paradoxical mingling of opposite tendencies shows itself in the quality +of their politics, their religion, and in all their social manners. + +Not the least interesting of Mr. Lang's chapters is that in which he +analyses the feudal chivalry of Scotland, and explains how it rested on +a more imaginative basis than in other countries; how the power of the +chief hung on unwritten rights instead of formal charters, and how the +loyalty of the clansmen was exalted to the highest pitch of personal +enthusiasm. But to complete the picture one should read Buckle's +scathing arraignment of a loyalty which was ready to sell its king and +was no purer than the faith that holds together a band of murderous +brigands. So, too, in religion the Scotch were perhaps more given to +superstition, and were more ready to sacrifice life and all else for +their belief than any other people of Europe, except the Spaniards, +while at the same time their bigotry never interfered with a vein of +caution and shrewd worldliness. There is in _Waverley_ an admirable +example at once of this paradoxical nature, and of the true basis of +Scott's strength. In the loyalism of Flora MacIvor he has attempted to +embody an ideal of the imagination not based on this national mingling +of qualities--though, of course, isolated individuals of that heroic +type may have existed in the land; and as a result he has produced a +character that leaves the reader perfectly cold and unconvinced. But the +moment Waverley comes from the MacIvors and descends to the real life of +Scotland, mark the change. We are immediately put on terra firma by the +cautious reply of Waverley's guide when asked if it is Sunday: "Could na +say just preceesely; Sunday seldom cam aboon the pass of Bally-Brough." +Consider the mixture of bigotry and worldly greed in Mr. Ebenezer +Cruikshanks, the innkeeper, who compounds for the sin of receiving a +traveller on fastday by doubling the tariff. In any other land Mr. +Ebenezer Cruikshank would have been a hypocrite and a scoundrel; in +Scotland his religious fervour is quite as genuine as his cunning; and +the very audacity of the combination carries with it the conviction of +realism. + +The same contrast of qualities will be found to mark the lesser traits +of character. Consider the long list of servants and retainers with +their stiff-necked devotion and their incorrigible self-seeking. In one +of his notes Scott relates the story of a retainer who when ordered to +leave his master's service replied: "In troth, and that will I not; if +your honour disna ken when ye hae a gude servant, I ken when I hae a +gude master, and go away I will not." At another time, when his master +cried out in vexation: "John, you and I shall never sleep under the +same roof again!" the fellow calmly retorted, "Where the deil can your +honour be ganging?" In like manner the mixture of devotion and +self-seeking in that quaintest of followers, Richie Moniplies, is worth +a thousand false idealisations. To read almost on the same page his +immovable loyalty to Nigel and his brazen treachery in presenting his +own petition first to the King, is to gain at once an entrance into a +new region of psychology and to acquire a truer understanding of Scotch +history. At another time, when catechised about the alleged spirit in +Master Heriot's house, the good Moniplies gives an example of combined +superstition, scepticism, and cunning, which must be read at length--and +all the world has read it--to be appreciated. Perhaps the most useful +illustration to be gained from this same Moniplies is the strange +contrast of solemnity and humour, of reverence and familiarity, +exhibited by him. I need not repeat the description of that +"half-pedant, half-bully," nor quote the whole of his account of meeting +with the King; let it be enough to call attention to the curious +mingling of mirth and solemnity in the way he apostrophises the royal +James: "My certie, lad, times are changed since ye came fleeing down the +backstairs of auld Holyrood House, in grit fear, having your breeks in +your hand without time to put them on, and Frank Stewart, the wild Earl +of Bothwell, hard at your haunches." There is in the temper of worthy +Moniplies something wholly different from the boisterous humour of +England and from the dry laughter of America; and this is due to the +continually upcropping substratum of imagination and romance in his +character. He would resemble the grotesque seriousness of Don Quixote, +were it not for a strain of sourness and suspicion that are quite +foreign to the generous Hidalgo. + +So we might follow the paradox of Scotch character through its union of +gloomy moroseness with homely affections, of unrestrained emotionalism +with cold calculation, of awesome second-sight with the cheapest +charlatanry. In the end, perhaps, all these contradictions would resolve +themselves into the one peculiar anomaly of seeing the free romance of +enthusiasm rising like a flower--a flower often enough of sinister +aspect--out of the most prosaic grossness. Certainly it is the chief +interest of Scotch history--by showing that these contradictions +actually exist in the national temperament and by explaining so far as +may be their origin--to confirm for us our belief in what may be called +the realism of Scott's romance. This is that guiding thread which leads +the weary voyager through the mists and chaotic confusions of Caledonian +annals up to light. And in that region of light what wonderful cheer for +the soul! Here, if anywhere in prose, the illusions of the imagination +may take pleasant possession of our heart, for they come with the +authority of a great national experience and walk hand in hand with the +soberest realities. Even the wild enthusiasm of a Meg Merrilies barely +awakens the voice of slumbering scepticism in the midst of our secure +conviction. And sojourning for a while in that world of strange +enchantment we seem to feel the limitations that vex our larger hopes +and hem in our wills broken down at the command of a magic voice. It is +as if that incompleteness of our nature, which the schoolmen called in +their fantastic jargon the _principium individuationis_ and ascribed to +the bondage of these material bodies, were for a time forgotten, while +we form a part of that free and complex existence so faithfully +portrayed in the Scotch novels. + + + + +SWINBURNE + + +It is no more than fair to confess at the outset that my knowledge of +Swinburne's work until recently was of the scantiest. The patent faults +of his style were of a kind to warn me away, and it might be equally +true that I was not sufficiently open to his peculiar excellences. +Gladly, therefore, I accepted the occasion offered by the new edition of +his Collected Poems[5] to enlarge my acquaintance with one of the +much-bruited names of the age. Nor did it seem right to trust to a hasty +impression. The six volumes of his poems, together with the plays and +critical essays, have lain on my table for several months, the +companions of many a long day of leisure and the relish thrown in +between other readings of pleasure and necessity. Yet even now I must +admit something alien to me in the man and his work; I am not sure that +I always distinguish between what is spoken with the lips only and what +springs from the poet's heart. Possibly the lack of biographical +information is the partial cause of this uncertainty, for by a curious +anomaly Swinburne, one of the most egotistical writers of the century, +has shown a fine reticence in keeping the details of his life from the +public. He was, we know, born in London, in 1837, of an ancient and +noble family, his father, as befitted one whose son was to sing of the +sea so lustily, being an admiral in the navy. His early years were +passed either at his grandfather's estate in Northumbria or at the home +of his parents in the Isle of Wight. From Eton he went, after an +interval of two years, to Balliol College, Oxford, leaving in 1860 +without a degree. The story runs that he knew more Greek than his +examiners, but failed to show a proper knowledge of Scripture. If the +tale is true, he made up well in after years for the deficiency, for few +of our poets have been more steeped in the language of the Bible. In +London he came under the influence of many of the currents moving below +the surface; the spell of that master of souls, Rossetti, touched him, +and the dominance of the ardent Mazzini. Since 1879 he has lived at "The +Pines," on the edge of Wimbledon Common, with Mr. Watts-Dunton, in what +appears to be an ideal atmosphere of sympathetic friendship. Mr. +Douglas's recent indiscretion on _Theodore Watts-Dunton_ tells nothing +of the life in this scholarly retreat, but it does contain many +photogravures of the works of art, the handicraft of Rossetti largely, +which adorn the dwelling with beautiful memories. + +Such is the meagre outline of Swinburne's life, nor do the few other +events recorded or the authentic anecdotes help us much to a more +intimate knowledge of the man. Yet he has the ambiguous gift of +awakening curiosity. Probably the first question most people ask on +laying down his _Poems and Ballads_ (that _peche de jeunesse_, as he +afterwards called it) is to know how much of the book is "true." Mr. +Swinburne has expressed a becoming contempt for "the scornful or +mournful censors who insisted on regarding all the studies of passion or +sensation attempted or achieved in it as either confessions of positive +fact or excursions of absolute fancy." One does not like to be classed +among the _scornful or mournful_, and yet I should feel much easier in +my appreciation of the _Poems and Ballads_ if I knew how far they were +based on the actual experience of the author. The reader of Swinburne +feels constantly as if his feet were swept from the earth and he were +carried into a misty mid-region where blind currents of air beat hither +and thither; he longs for some anchor to reality. In the later books +this sensation becomes almost painful, and it is because the earlier +publications, the _Atalanta_ and the first _Poems and Ballads_, contain +more of definable human emotion, whatever their relation to fact may be, +that they are likely to remain the most popular and significant of +Swinburne's works. + +The publication of _Atalanta_ at the age of twenty-eight made him +famous, _Poems and Ballads_ the next year made him almost infamous. The +alarm aroused in England by _Dolores_ and _Faustine_ still vibrates in +our ears as we repeat the wonderful rhythms. The impression is deepened +by the remarkable unity of feeling that runs through these voluble +songs--the feeling of infinite satiety. The satiety of the flesh hangs +like a fatal web about the _Laus Veneris_; the satiety of disappointment +clings "with sullen savour of poisonous pain" to _The Triumph of Time_; +satiety speaks in the _Hymn to Proserpine_, with its regret for the +passing of the old heathen gods; it seeks relief in the unnatural +passion of _Anactoria_-- + + Clothed with deep eyelids under and above-- + Yea, all thy beauty sickens me with love; + +turns to the abominations of cruelty in _Faustine_; sings enchantingly +of rest in _The Garden of Proserpine_-- + + Here, where the world is quiet, + Here, where all trouble seems + Dead winds' and spent waves' riot + In doubtful dreams of dreams; + I watch the green field growing + For reaping folk and sowing, + For harvest-time and mowing, + A sleepy world of streams. + + I am tired of tears and laughter, + And men that laugh and weep, + Of what may come hereafter + For men that sow to reap: + I am weary of days and hours, + Blown buds of barren flowers, + Desires and dreams and powers + And everything but sleep. + +Now the acquiescence of weariness may have its inner compensations, even +its sacred joys; but satiety with its torturing impotence and its +hungering for forbidden fruit, is perhaps the most immoral word in the +language; its unashamed display causes a kind of physical revulsion in +any wholesome mind. My own feeling is that Swinburne, when he wrote +these poems, had little knowledge or experience of the world, but, as +sometimes happens with unbalanced natures, had sucked poison from his +classical reading until his brain was in a kind of ferment. While in +this state he fell under the spell of Baudelaire's deliberate perversion +of the passions, with results which threw the innocent Philistines of +England into a fine bewilderment of horror. That the poet's own heart +was sound at core, and that his satiety was of the imagination and not +of the body, would seem evident from the abruptness with which he +passed, under a more wholesome stimulus, to a very different mood. +Unfortunately, his maturer productions are lacking in the quality of +human emotion which, however derived, pulsates in every line of the +_Poems and Ballads_. There is a certain contagion in such a song as +_Dolores_. Taking all things into consideration, and with all one's +repulsion for its substance, that poem is still the most effective of +Swinburne's works, a magnificent lyric of blended emotion and music. It +is a personification of the mood which produced the whole book, a cry +of the tormented heart to our Lady of Satiety. It is filled with regret +for a past of riotous pleasure; it pants with the lust of blood; it is +gorgeous and heavily scented, and the rhythm of it is the swaying of +bodies drunken with voluptuousness: + + Fruits fail and love dies and time ranges; + Thou art fed with perpetual breath, + And alive after infinite changes, + And fresh from the kisses of death; + Of languors rekindled and rallied, + Of barren delights and unclean, + Things monstrous and fruitless, a pallid + And poisonous queen. + + Could you hurt me, sweet lips, though I hurt you? + Men touch them, and change in a trice + The lilies and languors of virtue + For the raptures and roses of vice; + Those lie where thy foot on the floor is, + These crown and caress thee and chain, + O splendid and sterile Dolores, + Our Lady of Pain. + +No doubt you will find here in germ all that was to mar the poet's later +work. The rhythm lacks resistance; there is no definite vision evoked +out of the rapid flux of images; the thought has no sure control over +the words. Dolores is almost in the same breath the queen of languors +and raptures; she is pallid and rosy, and a hostile criticism might find +in the stanzas a succession of contradictions. Compare the poem with the +few lines in _Jenny_ where Rossetti has expressed the same idea of +man's inveterate lust: + + Like a toad within a stone + Seated while Time crumbles on; + Which sits there since the earth was cursed + For Man's transgression at the first-- + +and the difference is immediately apparent between that concentration of +mind which sums up a thought in a single definite image and the +fluctuating, impalpable vision of a poet carried away by the +intoxication of words. All that is true, and yet, somehow, out of this +poem of _Dolores_ there does arise in the end a very real and memorable +mood--real after the fashion of a mood excited by music rather than by +painting or sculpture. + +The _Poems and Ballads_ are splendid but _malsain_; they are impressive +and they have the strength, ambiguous it may be, of springing, directly +or indirectly, from a genuine emotion of the body. The change on passing +to the _Songs Before Sunrise_ (published in 1871) is extraordinary. +During the five years that elapsed between these volumes the two master +passions of Swinburne's life laid hold on him with devastating +effect--the passion of Liberty and the passion of the Sea. Henceforth +the influence of Mazzini and Victor Hugo was to dominate him like an +obsession. Now, heaven forbid that one should say or think anything in +despite of Liberty! The mere name conjures up recollections of glory +and pride, and in it the hopes of the future are involved. And yet the +very magnitude of its content renders it peculiarly liable to misuse. To +this man it means one thing, and to another another, and many might cry +out in the end, as Brutus did over virtue: "Thou art a naked word, and I +followed thee as though thou hadst been a substance!" Certainly nothing +is more dangerous for a poet than to fall into the habit of mouthing +those great words of liberty, virtue, patriotism, and the like, +abstracted of very definite events and very precise imagery. To +Swinburne the sound of liberty was a charm to cast him into a kind of +frothing mania. It is true that one or two of the poems on this theme +are lifted up with a superb and genuine lyric enthusiasm. The _Eve of +Revolution_, for instance, with which the _Songs Before Sunrise_ open, +rings with the stirring noise of trumpets: + + I hear the midnight on the mountains cry + With many tongues of thunders, and I hear + Sound and resound the hollow shield of sky + With trumpet-throated winds that charge and cheer, + And through the roar of the hours that fighting fly, + Through flight and fight and all the fluctuant fear.... + +But even here the reverberation of the words begins to conceal their +meaning, and such abstractions as "the roar of the hours" lead into the +worst of Swinburne's faults. Many of the longer hymns to liberty are +nearly unreadable--at least if any one can endure to the end of _A Song +of Italy_, it is not I. And as one goes through these rhapsodies that +came out year after year, one begins to feel that Swinburne's notion of +liberty, when it is not empty of meaning, is something even worse. Too +often it is Kipling's gross idolatry of England uttered in a kind of +hysterical falsetto. It was not pretty at a time of estrangement between +England and France to speak of "French hounds whose necks are aching +Still from the chain they crave"; and one needed not to sympathise with +the Boers in the South African war to feel something like disgust at +Swinburne's abuse: + + ....... the truth whose witness now draws near + To scourge these dogs, agape with jaws afoam, + Down out of life. + +Probably the poet thought he was giving voice to a righteous and +Miltonic indignation. The best criticism of such a sonnet is to turn to +Milton's "Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints." + +I have read somewhere a story of Swinburne's driving up late to a dinner +and entering into a violent altercation with the cabman, to the vast +amusement of the waiting guests within the house. That incorrigible wag +and hanger-on of genius, Charles Augustus Howell, was of the party and +acted as chorus to the dialogue outside. "The poet's got the best of +it, as usual," drawls the chorus. "He lives at the British Hotel in +Cockspur Street, and never goes anywhere except in hansoms, which, +whatever the distance, he invariably remunerates with one shilling. +Consequently, when, as to-day, it's a case of two miles beyond the +radius, there's the devil's own row; but in the matter of imprecation +the poet is more than a match for cabby, who, after five minutes of it, +gallops off as though he had been rated by Beelzebub himself." Really, +'tis a bit of gossip which may be taken as a comment on not a few of +Swinburne's dithyrambs of liberty. + +Not less noble in significance is that other word, the sea, which +Swinburne now uses with endless reiteration. In his reverence for the +weltering ocean ways, the bulwark of England's freedom, he does of +course only follow the best traditions of English poetry from _Beowulf_ +to _The Seven Seas_ of Kipling, who is again in this his imitator. Nor +is it the world of water alone that dominates his imagination, but with +it the winds and the panorama of the sky ever rolling above. Already in +the _Poems and Ballads_ there is a hint of the sympathy between the poet +and this realm of water and air. One of the finest passages in _The +Triumph of Time_ is that which begins: + + I will go back to the great sweet mother, + Mother and lover of men, the sea. + I will go down to her, I and none other, + Close with her, kiss her and mix her with me. + +But for the most part the atmosphere of those poems was too sultry for +the salt spray of ocean, and it is only with the _Songs Before Sunrise_, +with the obsession of the idea of liberty, that we are carried to the +wide sea "that makes immortal motion to and fro," and to the "shrill, +fierce climes of inconsolable air." Thenceforth the reader is like some +wave-tossed mariner who should take refuge in the cave of Aeolus; at +least he is forced to admire the genius that presides over the gusty +concourse: + + Hic vasto rex Aeolus antro + Luctantis ventos tempestatesque sonoras + Imperio premit ac vinclis et carcere frenat. + Illi indignantes magno cum murmure montis + Circum claustra fremunt. + +The comparison is not so far-fetched as it might seem. There is a +picture of Swinburne in the _Recollections_ of the late Henry Treffry +Dunn which almost personifies him as the storm-king: + + It had been a very sultry day, and with the advancing twilight, + heavy thunder-clouds were rolling up. The door opened and + Swinburne entered. He appeared in an abstracted state, and for a + few minutes sat silent. Soon, something I had said anent his last + poem set his thoughts loose. Like the storm that had just broken, + so he began in low tones to utter lines of poetry. As the storm + increased, he got more and more excited and carried away by the + impulse of his thoughts, bursting into a torrent of splendid verse + that seemed like some grand air with the distant peals of thunder + as an intermittent accompaniment. And still the storm waxed more + violent, and the vivid flashes of lightning became more frequent. + But Swinburne seemed unconscious of it all, and whilst he paced up + and down the room, pouring out bursts of passionate declamation, + faint electric sparks played round the wavy masses of his + luxuriant hair.... Amidst the rattle of the thunder he still + continued to pour out his thoughts, his voice now sinking low and + sad, now waxing louder as the storm listed. + +The scattered poems in his later books that rise above the _Poems and +Ballads_ with a kind of grandiose suggestiveness are for the most part +filled with echoes of wind and water. That haunting picture of crumbling +desolation, _A Forsaken Garden_, lies "at the sea-down's edge between +windward and lee." One of the few poems that seem to contain the cry of +a real experience, _At a Month's End_, combines this aspect of nature +admirably with human emotion: + + Silent we went an hour together, + Under grey skies by waters white. + _Our hearts were full of windy weather, + Clouds and blown stars and broken light._ + +And the sensation left from a reading of _Tristram of Lyonesse_ is of a +vast phantasmagoria, in which the beating of waves and the noise of +winds, the light of dawns breaking on the water, and the floating web of +stars, are jumbled together in splendid but inextricable confusion. So +the coming of love upon Iseult, as she sails over the sea with +Tristram, takes this magnificent comparison: + + And as the august great blossom of the dawn + Burst, and the full sun scarce from sea withdrawn + Seemed on the fiery water a flower afloat, + So as a fire the mighty morning smote + Throughout her, and incensed with the influent hour + Her whole soul's one great mystical red flower + Burst.... + +Further on the long confession of her passion at Tintagel, while +Tristram has gone over-sea to that other Iseult, will be broken by those +thundering couplets: + + And swordlike was the sound of the iron wind, + And as a breaking battle was the sea. + +But even to allude to all the passages of this kind in the poem--the +swimming of Tristram, his rowing, and the other scenes--would fill an +essay. In the end it must be confessed that this monotony of tone grows +fatiguing. The rhythmic grace of the metre is like a bubble blown into +the air, floating before our eyes with gorgeous iridescence--but when it +touches earth, it bursts. There lies the fatal weakness of all this +frenzy over liberty and this hymeneal chanting of sky and ocean; it has +no basis in the homely facts of the heart. Read the account of Tristram +and Iseult in the wilderness bower; it is all very beautiful, but you +wonder why it leaves you so cold. There is not a single detail to fix an +image of the place in the mind, not a word to denote that we are +dealing with the passion of individual human beings. Then turn to the +same episode in the old poem of Gottfried von Strassburg; read the scene +where the forsaken King Mark, through a window of their forest grotto, +beholds the lovers lying asleep with the sword of Tristram stretched +between them: + + He gazed on his heart's delight, Iseult, and deemed that never + before had he seen her so fair. She lay sleeping, with a flush as + of mingled roses on her cheek, and her red and glowing lips apart; + a little heated by her morning wandering in the dewy meadow and by + the spring. On her head was a chaplet woven of clover. A ray of + sunlight from the little window fell upon her face, and as Mark + looked upon her he longed to kiss her, for never had she seemed so + fair and so lovable as now. And when he saw how the sunlight fell + upon her he feared lest it harm her, or awaken her, so he took + grass and leaves and flowers, and covered the window therewith, + and spake a blessing on his love and commended her to God, and + went his way, weeping. + +It is good to walk with head lifted to the stars, but it is good also to +have the feet well planted on earth. If another example of Swinburne's +abstraction from human interest were desired, one might take that +rhapsody of the wind-beaten waters and "land that is lonelier than +ruin," called _By the North Sea_. The picture of desolate and barren +waste is one of the most powerful creations in his later works (it was +published in 1880), yet there is still something wanting to stamp the +impression into the mind. You turn from it, perhaps, to Browning's +similar description in _Childe Roland_ and the reason is at once clear. +You come upon the line: "One stiff, blind horse, his every bone +a-stare," and pause. There is in Swinburne's poem no single touch which +arrests the attention in this way, concentrating the effect, as it were, +to a burning point, and bringing out the symbolic relation to human +life. Yet I cannot pass from this subject without noticing what may +appear a paradoxical phase of Swinburne's character. Only when he lowers +his gaze from the furies and ecstasies of man's ambition to the +instinctive ways of little children does his art become purely human. It +would be easy to select a full dozen of the poems dealing with +child-life and the tender love inspired by a child that touch the heart +with their pure and chastened beauty. I should feel that an essential +element of his art were left unremarked if I failed to quote some such +examples as these two roundels on _First Footsteps_ and a _A Baby's +Death_: + + A little way, more soft and sweet + Than fields aflower with May, + A babe's feet, venturing, scarce complete + A little way. + + Eyes full of dawning day + Look up for mother's eyes to meet, + Too blithe for song to say. + + Glad as the golden spring to greet + Its first live leaflet's play, + Love, laughing, leads the little feet + A little way. + + * * * * * + + The little feet that never trod + Earth, never strayed in field or street, + What hand leads upward back to God + The little feet? + + A rose in June's most honied heat, + When life makes keen the kindling sod, + Was not more soft and warm and sweet. + + Their pilgrimage's period + A few swift moons have seen complete + Since mother's hands first clasped and shod + The little feet. + +Despite the artificiality of the French form and a kind of revolving +dizziness of movement, one catches in these child-lyrics a simplicity of +feeling not unlike Longfellow's cry, "O little feet! that such long +years." Swinburne himself might not relish the comparison, which is none +the less just. + +It is not often safe to attempt to sum up a large body of work in a +phrase, yet with Swinburne we shall scarcely go astray if we seek such a +characterisation in the one word _motion_. Both the beauty and the fault +of his extraordinary rhythms are exposed in that term, and certainly his +first claim to originality lies in his rhythmical innovations. There had +been nothing in English comparable to the steady swell, like the waves +of a subsiding sea, in the lines of _Atalanta_ and the _Poems and +Ballads_. They brought a new sensuous pleasure into our poetry. But with +time this cadenced movement developed into a kind of giddy race which +too often left the reader belated and breathless. Little tricks of +composition, such as a repeated caesura after the seventh syllable of the +pentameter, were employed to heighten the speed. Moreover, the longer +lines in many of the poems are not organic, but consist of two or more +short lines huddled together, the effect being to eliminate the natural +resting-places afforded by the sense. And occasionally his metre is +merely wanton. He uses one verse, for example, which with its +combination of gliding motion and internal jingles is uncommonly +irritating: + + Hills and _valleys_ where April _rallies_ his radiant squadron of + flowers and _birds_, + Steep strange _beaches_ and lustrous _reaches_ of fluctuant sea that + the land _engirds_, + Fields and _downs_ that the sunrise _crowns_ with life diviner than + lives in _words_,-- + +a page of this sets the nerves all a-jangle. + +And if Swinburne is one of the obscurest of English poets, it is due in +large part to this same element of motion. A poem may move swiftly and +still be perfectly easy to follow, so long as the thought is simple and +concrete; witness the works of Longfellow. Or, on the other hand, the +thought may be tortuous and still invite reflection, so long as the +metre forces a continual pause in the reading; witness Browning. Now, no +one will accuse Swinburne of overloading his pages with thought; it is +not there the obscurity lies. The difficulty is with the number and the +peculiarly vague quality of his metaphors. Let me illustrate what I mean +by this vagueness. I open one of the volumes at random and my eye rests +on this line in _A Channel Passage_: + + As a tune that is played by the fingers of death on the keys of life + or of sleep. + +If one were reading the poem and tried to evoke this image before his +mind, he would certainly need to pause for a moment. Or I open to +_Walter Savage Landor_ and find this passage marked: + + High from his throne in heaven Simonides, + Crowned with mild aureole of memorial tears + That the everlasting sun of all time sees + All golden, molten from the forge of years. + +The sentiment is simple enough, and it might be sufficient to feel the +force of this in a general way, were it not that the metaphorical +expression almost compels one to pause and form an image of the whole +before proceeding. Such an image is, no doubt, possible; but the +mingling of abstract and concrete terms makes the act of visualisation +slow and painful. At the same time the rhythm is swift and continuous, +so that any pause in the reading demands a deliberate effort of the +will. The result is a form of obscurity which in many of the poems is +almost prohibitive for an indolent man--and are not the best readers +always a little indolent? And there is another habit--trick, one might +say--which increases this vagueness of metaphor in a curious manner. +Constantly he uses a word in its ordinary, direct sense and then repeats +it as an abstract personification. I find an example to hand in the +stanzas written _At a Dog's Grave_: + + The shadow shed round those we love shines bright + As _love's_ own face. + +It is only a mannerism such as another, but it recurs with sufficient +frequency to have an appreciable effect on the mind. + +Indeed, if this vagueness of imagery were only an occasional appearance, +the difficulty would be slight. As a matter of fact, no inconsiderable +portion of Swinburne's work is made up of a stream of half-visualised +abstractions that crowd upon one another with the motion of clouds +driven below the moon. He is more like Walt Whitman in this respect than +any other poet in the language. Whitman is concrete and human and very +earthly, but, with this difference, there is in both writers the same +thronging procession of images which flit by without allowing the reader +to concentrate his attention upon a single impression; they are both +poets of vast and confused motion. Swinburne is notable for his want of +humour, yet he is keen enough to see how close this flux of +high-sounding words lies to the absurd. In the present collected edition +of his poems he has included _The Heptalogia, or Seven against Sense_, a +series of parodies which does not spare his own mannerisms. Some +scandalised Philistines, I doubt, might even need to be told that +_Nephelidia_ was a parody: + + Nay, for the nick of the tick of the time is a tremulous touch + on the temples of terror, + Strained as the sinews yet strenuous with strife of the dead + who is dumb as the dust-heaps of death: + Surely no soul is it, sweet as the spasm of erotic emotional + exquisite error, + Bathed in the balms of beatified bliss, beatific itself by + beatitude's breath. + +Pretty much all the traits of Swinburne's style are there--the long +breathless lines with their flowing dactyls or anapaests, the unabashed +alliteration, the stream of half-visualised images, the trick of +following an epithet with its own abstract substantive, the sense of +motion, and above all the accumulation of words. Of this last trait of +verbosity I have said nothing, for the reason that it is too notorious +to need mentioning. It may not, however, be superfluous to point out a +little more precisely the special form his tautology assumes. He is +never more graphic and nearer to nature than when he describes the +ecstasy of swimming at sea. He is himself passionately fond of the +exercise, and once at least was almost drowned in the Channel. Let us +take, then, a stanza from _A Swimmer's Dream_: + + All the strength of the waves that perish + Swells beneath me and laughs and sighs, + Sighs for love of the life they cherish, + Laughs to know that it lives and dies, + Dies for joy of its life, and lives + Thrilled with joy that its brief death gives-- + Death whose laugh or whose breath forgives + Change that bids it subside and rise. + +Pass the fault of beginning with the abstraction "strength"--the first +two lines are graphic and reproduce a real sensation; the second two +lines are an explanatory repetition; the last four dissolve both image +and emotion into a flood of words. It is the common procedure in the +later poems; it renders the regular dramas (with the exception of the +earlier _Chastelard_) almost intolerably tedious. + +And what is the impression of the man himself that remains after living +with his works for several months? The frankness with which he parodies +his own eccentricities might seem to indicate a becoming modesty, and +yet that is scarcely the word that rises first to the lips. Indeed, when +I read in the very opening of the Dedicatory Epistle that precedes the +present edition of his poems such a statement as that "he finds nothing +that he could wish to cancel, to alter, or to unsay, in any page he has +ever laid before his reader," I was prepared for a character quite the +contrary of modest, and as I turned page after page, there became fixed +in my mind a feeling that I should hesitate to call personal +repulsion--a feeling of annoyance at least, for which no explanation was +present. Only when I reached _Atalanta in Calydon_, in the fourth +volume, did the reason of this become evident. That poem, exquisite in +many ways, is filled with talk of time and gods, of love and hate, of +life and death, of all high-sounding words that lend gravity to poetry, +and yet in the end it is itself light and not grave. The very needless +reiteration of these words, their bandying from verse to verse, deprives +them of impressiveness. No, a true poet who respects the sacredness of +noble ideas, who cherishes some awe for the mysteries, does not buffet +them about as a shuttlecock; he uses them sparingly and only when the +thought rises of necessity to those heights. There is a lack of +emotional breeding, almost an indecency, in Swinburne's easy familiarity +with these great things of the spirit. + +And this judgment is confirmed by turning to his prose. I trust it is +not prejudice, but after a while the vociferous and endless praise of +Victor Hugo in his essays had a curious effect upon me. I began to ask: +Is the critic really thinking of Hugo alone, or is half of this frenzied +adulation meant for his own artistic methods? "Malignity and meanness, +platitude and perversity, decrepitude of cankered intelligence and +desperation of universal rancor," he exclaims against Sainte-Beuve; and +over the other critics of his idol he cries out, "The lazy malignity of +envious dullness is as false and fatuous as it is common and easy." Can +one avoid the surmise that he has more than Hugo to avenge in such +tirades? It is the same with every one who is opposed to his own notions +of art. Of Walt Whitman it is: "The dirty, clumsy paws of a harper whose +plectrum is a muckrake." Of a French classicist: "It is the business of +a Nisard to pass judgment and to bray." And of those who intimate (he is +ostensibly defending Rossetti) that beauty and power of expression can +accord with emptiness or sterility of matter: "This flattering unction +the very foolishest of malignants will hardly in this case be able to +lay upon the corrosive sore which he calls his soul." Sometimes, I +admit, this manner of invective rises to a sublimity of fury that sounds +like nothing so much as a combination of Carlyle and Shelley. For +example: "The affection was never so serious as to make it possible for +the most malignant imbecile to compare or to confound him [Jowett] with +such morally and spiritually typical and unmistakable apes of the Dead +Sea as Mark Pattison, or such renascent blossoms of the Italian +renascence as the Platonic amorist of blue-breeched gondoliers who is +now in Aretino's bosom." It's not criticism; it's not fair to Mark +Pattison or to John Addington Symonds, but it is sublime. It is a storm +of wind only, but it leaves a devastated track. + +Enough has been said to indicate the trait of character that prevails +through these pages of eulogy and vituperation. It is not nice to apply +so crass a word as _conceit_ to one who undoubtedly belongs to the +immortals of our pantheon, yet the expression forces itself upon me. +Listen to another of his outbursts, this time against Matthew Arnold: +"His inveterate and invincible Philistinism, his full community of +spirit and faith, in certain things of import, with the vulgarest +English mind!" Does not the quality begin to define itself more exactly? +There is a phrase they use in France, _epater le bourgeois_, of those +artistic souls who contrast themselves by a kind of ineffable contempt +with commonplace humanity, and who take pleasure in tweaking the nose, +so to speak, of the amiable plebeian. Have a care, gentlemen! The +Philistine has a curious trick of revenging himself in the long run. For +my own part, when it comes to a breach between the poetical and the +prosaic, I take my place submissively with the latter. There is at least +a humble safety in retaining one's pleasure in certain things of import +with the vulgarest English mind, and if it were obligatory to choose +between them (as, happily, it is not) I would surrender the wind-swept +rhapsodies of Swinburne for the homely conversation of Whittier. + + + + +CHRISTINA ROSSETTI + + +Probably the first impression one gets from reading the _Complete +Poetical Works_ of Christina Rossetti, now collected and edited by her +brother, Mr. W. M. Rossetti,[6] is that she wrote altogether too much, +and that it was a doubtful service to her memory to preserve so many +poems purely private in their nature. The editor, one thinks, might well +have shown himself more "reverent of her strange simplicity." For page +after page we are in the society of a spirit always refined and +exquisite in sentiment, but without any guiding and restraining artistic +impulse; she never drew to the shutters of her soul, but lay open to +every wandering breath of heaven. In comparison with the works of the +more creative poets her song is like the continuous lisping of an aeolian +harp beside the music elicited by cunning fingers. And then, suddenly, +out of this sweet monotony, moved by some stronger, clearer breeze of +inspiration, there sounds a strain of wonderful beauty and flawless +perfection, unmatched in its own kind in English letters. An anonymous +purveyor of anecdotes has recently told how one of these more exquisite +songs called forth the enthusiasm of Swinburne. It was just after the +publication of _Goblin Market and Other Poems_, and in a little company +of friends that erratic poet and critic started to read aloud from the +volume. Turning first to the devotional paraphrase which begins with +"Passing away, saith the World, passing away," he chanted the lines in +his own emphatic manner, then laid the book down with a vehement +gesture. Presently he took it up again, and a second time read the poem +through, even more impressively. "By God!" he exclaimed at the end, +"that's one of the finest things ever written!" + + Passing away, saith the World, passing away: + Chances, beauty, and youth, sapped day by day, + Thy life never continueth in one stay. + Is the eye waxen dim, is the dark hair changing to grey, + That hath won neither laurel nor bay? + I shall clothe myself in Spring and bud in May: + Thou, root-stricken, shalt not rebuild thy decay + On my bosom for aye. + Then I answered: Yea. + + Passing away, saith my Soul, passing away: + With its burden of fear and hope, of labour and play, + Hearken what the past doth witness and say: + Rust in thy gold, a moth is in thine array, + A canker is in thy bud, thy leaf must decay. + At midnight, at cockcrow, at morning, one certain day + Lo the Bridegroom shall come and shall not delay; + Watch thou and pray. + Then I answered: Yea. + + Passing away, saith my God, passing away: + Winter passeth after the long delay: + New grapes on the vine, new figs on the tender spray, + Turtle calleth turtle in Heaven's May. + Though I tarry, wait for Me, trust Me, watch and pray: + Arise, come away, night is past and lo it is day: + My love, My sister, My spouse, thou shalt hear Me say. + Then I answered: Yea. + +And Swinburne, somewhat contrary to his wont, was right. Purer +inspiration, less troubled by worldly motives, than these verses cannot +be found. Nor would it be difficult to discover in their brief compass +most of the qualities that lend distinction to Christina Rossetti's +work. Even her monotone, which after long continuation becomes monotony, +affects one here as a subtle device heightening the note of subdued +fervour and religious resignation; the repetition of the rhyming vowel +creates the feeling of a secret expectancy cherished through the +weariness of a frustrate life. If there is any excuse for publishing the +many poems that express the mere unlifted, unvaried prayer of her heart, +it is because their monotony may prepare the mind for the strange +artifice of this solemn chant. But such a preparation demands more +patience than a poet may justly claim from the ordinary reader. Better +would be a volume of selections from her works, including a number of +poems of this character. It would stand, in its own way, supreme in +English literature,--as pure and fine an expression of the feminine +genius as the world has yet heard. + +It is, indeed, as the flower of strictly feminine genius that Christina +Rossetti should be read and judged. She is one of a group of women who +brought this new note into Victorian poetry,--Louisa Shore, Jean +Ingelow, rarely Mrs. Browning, and, I may add, Mrs. Meynell. She is like +them, but of a higher, finer strain than they ([Greek: kalai de te +pasai]), and I always think of her as of her brother's Blessed Damozel, +circled with a company of singers, yet holding herself aloof in chosen +loneliness of passion. She, too, has not quite ceased to yearn toward +earth: + + And still she bowed herself and stooped + Out of the circling charm; + Until her bosom must have made + The bar she leaned on warm, + And the lilies lay as if asleep + Along her bended arm. + +I have likened the artlessness of much of her writing to the sweet +monotony of an aeolian harp; the comparison returns as expressing also +the purely feminine spirit of her inspiration. There is in her a passive +surrender to the powers of life, a religious acquiescence, which wavers +between a plaintive pathos and a sublime exultation of faith. The great +world, with its harsh indifference for the weak, passes over her as a +ruinous gale rushes over a sequestered wood-flower; she bows her head, +humbled but not broken, nor ever forgetful of her gentle mission,-- + + And strong in patient weakness till the end. + +She bends to the storm, yet no one, not the great mystics nor the +greater poets who cry out upon the sound and fury of life, is more +constantly impressed by the vanity and fleeting insignificance of the +blustering power, or more persistently looks for consolation and joy +from another source. But there is a difference. Read the masculine poets +who have heard this mystic call of the spirit, and you feel yourself in +the presence of a strong will that has grasped the world, and, finding +it insufficient, deliberately casts it away; and there is no room for +pathetic regret in their ruthless determination to renounce. But this +womanly poet does not properly renounce at all, she passively allows the +world to glide away from her. The strength of her genius is endurance: + + She stands there like a beacon through the night, + A pale clear beacon where the storm-drift is-- + She stands alone, a wonder deathly-white: + She stands there patient, nerved with inner might, + Indomitable in her feebleness, + Her face and will athirst against the light. + +It is characteristic of her feminine disposition that the loss of the +world should have come to her first of all in the personal relation of +love. And here we must signalise the chief service of the editor toward +his sister. It was generally known in a vague way, indeed it was easy to +surmise as much from her published work, that Christina Rossetti bore +with her always the sadness of unfulfilled affection. In the +introductory Memoir her brother has now given a sufficiently detailed +account of this matter to remove all ambiguity. I am not one to wish +that the reserves and secret emotions of an author should be displayed +for the mere gratification of the curious; but in this case the +revelation would seem to be justified as a needed explanation of poems +which she herself was willing to publish. Twice, it appears, she gave +her love, and both times drew back in a kind of tremulous awe from the +last step. The first affair began in 1848, before she was eighteen, and +ran its course in about two years. The man was one James Collinson, an +artist of mediocre talent who had connected himself with the +Pre-raphaelite Brotherhood. He was originally a Protestant, but had +become a Roman Catholic. Then, as Christina refused to ally herself to +one of that faith, he compliantly abandoned Rome for the Church of +England. His conscience, however, which seems from all accounts to have +been of a flabby consistency, troubled him in the new faith, and he soon +reverted to Catholicism. Christina then drew back from him finally. It +is not so easy to understand why she refused the second suitor, with +whom she became intimately acquainted about 1860, and whom she loved in +her own retiring fashion until the day of her death. This was Charles +Bagot Cayley, a brother of the famous Cambridge mathematician, himself a +scholar and in a small way a poet. Some idea of the man may be obtained +from a notice of him written by Mr. W. M. Rossetti for the _Athenaeum_ +after his death. "A more complete specimen than Mr. Charles Cayley," +says Mr. Rossetti, "of the abstracted scholar in appearance and +manner--the scholar who constantly lives an inward and unmaterial life, +faintly perceptive of external facts and appearances--could hardly be +conceived. He united great sweetness to great simplicity of character, +and was not less polite than unworldly." One might suppose that such a +temperament was peculiarly fitted to join with that of the secluded +poetess, and so, to judge from her many love poems, it actually was. Of +her own heart or of his there seems to have been no doubt in her mind. +Even in her most rapturous visions of heaven, like the yearning cry of +the Blessed Damozel, the memory of that stilled passion often breaks +out: + + How should I rest in Paradise, + Or sit on steps of heaven alone? + If Saints and Angels spoke of love, + Should I not answer from my throne, + Have pity upon me, ye my friends, + For I have heard the sound thereof? + +She seems even not to have been unfamiliar with the hope of joy, and I +would persuade myself that her best-known lyric of gladness, "My heart +is like a singing-bird," was inspired by the early dawning of this +passion. But the hope and the joy soon passed away and left her only the +solemn refrain of acquiescence: "Then I answered: Yea." Her brother can +give no sufficient explanation of this refusal on her part to accept the +happiness almost within her hand, though he hints at lack of religious +sympathy between the two. Some inner necessity of sorrow and +resignation, one almost thinks, drew her back in both cases, some +perception that the real treasure of her heart lay not in this world: + + A voice said, "Follow, follow": and I rose + And followed far into the dreamy night, + Turning my back upon the pleasant light. + It led me where the bluest water flows, + And would not let me drink: where the corn grows + I dared not pause, but went uncheered by sight + Or touch: until at length in evil plight + It left me, wearied out with many woes. + Some time I sat as one bereft of sense: + But soon another voice from very far + Called, "Follow, follow": and I rose again. + Now on my night has dawned a blessed star: + Kind steady hands my sinking steps sustain, + And will not leave me till I go from hence. + +It might seem that here was a spirit of renunciation akin to that of the +more masculine mystics; indeed, a great many of her poems are, +unconsciously I presume, almost a paraphrase of that recurring theme of +the Imitation: "Nolle consolari ab aliqua creatura," and again: "Amore +igitur Creatoris, amorem hominis superavit; et pro humano solatio, +divinum beneplacitum magis elegit." She, too, was unwilling to find +consolation in any creature, and turned from the love of man to the love +of the Creator; yet a little reading of her exquisite hymns will show +that this renunciation has more the nature of surrender than of +deliberate choice: + + He broke my will from day to day; + He read my yearnings unexprest, + And said them nay. + +The world is withheld from her by a power above her will, and always +this power stands before her in that peculiarly personal form which it +is wont to assume in the feminine mind. Her faith is a mere transference +to heaven of a love that terrifies her in its ruthless earthly +manifestation; and the passion of her life is henceforth a yearning +expectation of the hour when the Bridegroom shall come and she shall +answer, Yea. Nor is the earthly source of this love forgotten; it abides +with her as a dream which often is not easily distinguished from its +celestial transmutation: + + O dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter sweet, + Whose wakening should have been in Paradise, + Where souls brimful of love abide and meet; + Where thirsting longing eyes + Watch the slow door + That opening, letting in, lets out no more. + + Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live + My very life again though cold in death: + Come back to me in dreams, that I may give + Pulse for pulse, breath for breath: + Speak low, lean low, + As long ago, my love, how long ago. + +It is this perfectly passive attitude toward the powers that command her +heart and her soul--a passivity which by its completeness assumes the +misguiding semblance of a deliberate determination of life--that makes +her to me the purest expression in English of the feminine genius. I +know that many would think this pre-eminence belongs to Mrs. Browning. +They would point out the narrowness of Christina Rossetti's range, and +the larger aspects of woman's nature, neglected by her, which inspire +some of her rival's best-known poems. To me, on the contrary, it is the +very scope attempted by Mrs. Browning that prevents her from holding the +place I would give to Christina Rossetti. So much of Mrs. Browning--her +political ideas, her passion for reform, her scholarship--simply carries +her into the sphere of the masculine poets, where she suffers by an +unfair comparison. She would be a better and less irritating writer +without these excursions into a field for which she was not entirely +fitted. The uncouthness that so often mars her language is partly due to +an unreconciled feud between her intellect and her heart. She had +neither a woman's wise passivity nor a man's controlling will. Even +within the range of strictly feminine powers her genius is not simple +and typical. And here I must take refuge in a paradox which is like +enough to carry but little conviction. Nevertheless, it is the truth. I +mean to say that probably most women will regard Mrs. Browning as the +better type of their sex, whereas to men the honour will seem to belong +to Miss Rossetti; and that the judgment of a man in this matter is more +conclusive than a woman's. This is a paradox, I admit, yet its solution +is simple. Women will judge a poetess by her inclusion of the larger +human nature, and will resent the limiting of her range to the qualities +that we look upon as peculiarly feminine. The passion of Mrs. Browning, +her attempt to control her inspiration to the demands of a shaping +intellect, her questioning and answering, her larger aims, in a word her +effort to create,--all these will be set down to her credit by women who +are as appreciative of such qualities as men, and who will not be +annoyed by the false tone running through them. Men, on the contrary, +are apt, in accepting a woman's work or in creating a female character, +to be interested more in the traits and limitations which distinguish +her from her masculine complement. They care more for the _idea_ of +woman, and less for woman as merely a human being. Thus, for example, I +should not hesitate to say that in this ideal aspect Thackeray's +heroines are more womanly than George Eliot's,--though I am aware of +the ridicule to which such an opinion lays me open; and for the same +reason I hold that Christina Rossetti is a more complete exemplar of +feminine genius, and, as being more perfect in her own sphere, a better +poet than Mrs. Browning. That disconcerting sneer of Edward +FitzGerald's, which so enraged Robert Browning, would never have +occurred to him, I think, in the case of Miss Rossetti. + +There is a curious comment on this contrast in the introduction to +Christina Rossetti's _Monna Innominata_, a sonnet-sequence in which she +tells her own story in the supposed person of an early Italian lady. +"Had the great poetess of our own day and nation," she says, "only been +unhappy instead of happy, her circumstances would have invited her to +bequeath to us, in lieu of the _Portuguese Sonnets_, an inimitable +'donna innominata' drawn not from fancy, but from feeling, and worthy to +occupy, a niche beside Beatrice and Laura." Now this sonnet-sequence of +Miss Rossetti's is far from her best work, and holds a lower rank in +every way than that passionate self-revelation of Mrs. Browning's; yet +to read these confessions of the two poets together is a good way to get +at the division between their spirits. In Miss Rossetti's sonnets all +those feminine traits I have dwelt on are present to a marked, almost an +exaggerated, degree. They are harmonious within themselves, and filled +with a quiet ease; only the higher inspiration is lacking to them in +comparison with her _Passing Away_, and other great lyrics. In Mrs. +Browning, on the contrary, one cannot but feel a disturbing element. The +very tortuousness of her language, the straining to render her emotion +in terms of the intellect, introduces a quality which is out of harmony +with the ground theme of feminine surrender. More than that, this +submission to love, if looked at more closely, is itself in large part +such as might proceed from a man as well as from a woman, so that there +results an annoying confusion of masculine and feminine passion. Take, +for instance, the twenty-second of the _Portuguese Sonnets_, one of the +most perfect in the series: + + When our two souls stand up erect and strong, + Face to face, drawing nigher and nigher, + Until the lengthening wings break into fire + At either curved point,--What bitter wrong + Can earth do to us, that we should not long + Be here contented? Think. In mounting higher, + The angels would press on us, and aspire + To drop some golden orb of perfect song + Into our deep, dear silence. Let us stay + Rather on earth, Beloved,--where the unfit + Contrarious moods of men recoil away + And isolate pure spirits, and permit + A place to stand and love in for a day, + With darkness and the death-hour rounding it. + +That is noble verse, undoubtedly. The point is that it might just as +well have been written by a man to a woman as the contrary; it would, +for example, fit perfectly well into Dante Gabriel Rossetti's _House of +Life_. There is here no passivity of soul; the passion is not that of +acquiescence, but of determination to press to the quick of love. Only, +perhaps, a certain falsetto in the tone (if the meaning of that word may +be so extended) shows that, after all, it was written by a woman, who in +adopting the masculine pitch loses something of fineness and +exquisiteness. + +A single phrase of the sonnet, that "deep, dear silence," links it in my +mind with one of Christina Rossetti's not found in the _Monna +Innominata_, but expressing the same spirit of resignation. It is +entitled simply _Rest_: + + O Earth, lie heavily upon her eyes; + Seal her sweet eyes weary of watching, Earth; + Lie close around her; leave no room for mirth + With its harsh laughter, nor for sound of sighs. + She hath no questions, she hath no replies, + Hushed in and curtained with a blessed dearth + Of all that irked her from the hour of birth; + _With stillness that is almost Paradise. + Darkness more clear than noonday holdeth her, + Silence more musical than any song;_ + Even her very heart has ceased to stir: + Until the morning of Eternity + Her rest shall not begin nor end, but be; + And when she wakes she will not think it long. + +Am I misguided in thinking that in this stillness, this silence more +musical than any song, the feminine heart speaks with a simplicity and +consummate purity such as I quite fail to hear in the _Portuguese +Sonnets_, admired as those sonnets are? Nor could one, perhaps, find in +all Christina Rossetti's poems a single line that better expresses the +character of her genius than these magical words: "With stillness that +is almost Paradise." That is the mood which, with the passing away of +love, never leaves her; that is her religion; her acquiescent Yea, to +the world and the soul and to God. Into that region of rapt stillness it +seems almost a sacrilege to penetrate with inquisitive, critical mind; +it is like tearing away the veil of modesty. I will not attempt to bring +out the beauty of her mood by comparing it with that of the more +masculine quietists, who reach out and take the kingdom of Heaven by +storm, and whose prayer is, in the words of Tennyson: + + Our wills are ours, we know not how; + Our wills are ours, to make them Thine. + +It will be better to quote one other poem, perhaps her most perfect work +artistically, and to pass on: + +UP-HILL + + Does the road wind up-hill all the way? + Yes, to the very end. + Will the day's journey take the whole long day? + From morn to night, my friend. + + But is there for the night a resting-place? + A roof for when the slow dark hours begin. + May not the darkness hide it from my face? + You cannot miss that inn. + + Shall I meet other wayfarers at night? + Those who have gone before. + Then must I knock, or call when just in sight? + They will not keep you standing at that door. + + Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak? + Of labour you shall find the sum. + Will there be beds for me and all who seek? + Yea, beds for all who come. + +The culmination of her pathetic weariness is always this cry for rest, a +cry for supreme acquiescence in the will of Heaven, troubled by no +personal volition, no desire, no emotion, save only love that waits for +blessed absorption. Her latter years became what St. Teresa called a +long "prayer of quiet"; and her brother's record of her secluded life in +the refuge of his home, and later in her own house on Torrington Square, +reads like the saintly story of a cloistered nun. It might be said of +her, as of one of the fathers, that she needed not to pray, for her life +was an unbroken communion with God. And yet that is not all. It is a +sign of her utter womanliness that envy for the common affections of +life was never quite crushed in her heart. Now and then through this +monotony of resignation there wells up a sob of complaint, a note not +easy, indeed, to distinguish from that _amari aliquid_ of jealousy, +which Thackeray, cynically, as some think, always left at the bottom of +his gentlest feminine characters. The fullest expression of this feeling +is in one of her longer poems, _The Lowest Room_, which contrasts the +life of two sisters, one of whom chooses the ordinary lot of woman with +home and husband and children, while the other learns, year after +tedious year, the consolation of lonely patience. The spirit of the poem +is not entirely pleasant. The resurgence of personal envy is a little +disconcerting; and the only comfort to be derived from it is the proof +that under different circumstances Christina Rossetti might have given +expression to the more ordinary lot of contented womanhood as perfectly +as she sings the pathos and hope of the cloistered life. Had that first +voice, which led her "where the bluest water flows," suffered her also +to quench the thirst of her heart, had not that second voice summoned +her to follow, this might have been. But literature, I think, would have +lost in her gain. As it is, we must recognise that the vision of +fulfilled affection and of quiet home joys still troubled her, in her +darker hours, with a feeling of embittered regret. Two or three of the +stanzas of _The Lowest Room_ even evoke a reminiscence of that scene in +Thomson's _City of Dreadful Night_, where the "shrill and lamentable +cry" breaks through the silence of the shadowy congregation: + + In all eternity I had one chance, + One few years' term of gracious human life, + The splendours of the intellect's advance, + The sweetness of the home with babes and wife. + +But if occasionally this residue of bitterness in Christina Rossetti +recalls the more acrid genius of James Thomson, yet a comparison of the +two poets (and such a comparison is not fantastic, however unexpected it +may appear) would set the feminine character of our subject in a +peculiarly vivid light. Both were profoundly moved by the evanescence of +life, by the deceitfulness of pleasure, while both at times, Thomson +almost continually, were troubled by the apparent content of those who +rested in these joys of the world. Both looked forward longingly to the +consummation of peace. In his call to _Our Lady of Oblivion_ Thomson +might seem to be speaking for both, only in a more deliberately +metaphorical style: + + Take me, and lull me into perfect sleep; + Down, down, far hidden in thy duskiest cave; + While all the clamorous years above me sweep + Unheard, or, like the voice of seas that rave + On far-off coasts, but murmuring o'er my trance, + A dim vast monotone, that shall enhance + The restful rapture of the inviolate grave. + +But the roads by which the two would reach this "silence more musical +than any song" were utterly different. With an intellect at once +mathematical and constructive, Thomson built out of his personal +bitterness and despair a universe corresponding to his own mood, a +philosophy of atheistic revolt. Like Lucretius, "he denied divinely the +divine." In that tremendous conversation on the river-walk he represents +one soul as protesting to another that not for all his misery would he +carry the guilt of creating such a world; whereto the second replies, +and it is the poet himself who speaks: + + The world rolls round forever as a mill; + It grinds out death and life and good and ill; + It has no purpose, heart or mind or will.... + + Man might know one thing were his sight less dim; + That it whirls not to suit his petty whim, + That it is quite indifferent to him. + +There is the voluntary ecstasy of the saints, there is also this stern +and self-willed rebellion, and, contrasted with them both, as woman is +contrasted with man, there is the acquiescence of Christina Rossetti and +of the little group of writers whom she leads in spirit: + + Passing away, saith the World, passing away.... + Then I answered: Yea. + + + + +WHY IS BROWNING POPULAR? + + +It has come to be a matter of course that some new book on Browning +shall appear with every season. Already the number of these manuals has +grown so large that any one interested in critical literature finds he +must devote a whole corner of his library to them--where, the cynical +may add, they are better lodged than in his brain. To name only a few of +the more recent publications: there was Stopford Brooke's volume, which +partitioned the poet's philosophy into convenient compartments, labelled +nature, human life, art, love, etc. Then came Mr. Chesterton, with his +biting paradoxes and his bold justification of Browning's work, not as +it ought to be, but as it is. Professor Dowden followed with what is, on +the whole, the best _vade mecum_ for those who wish to preserve their +enthusiasm with a little salt of common sense; and, latest of all, we +have now a critical study[7] by Prof. C. H. Herford, of the University +of Manchester, which once more unrolls in all its gleaming aspects the +poet's "joy in soul." Two things would seem to be clear from this +succession of commentaries: Browning must need a deal of exegesis, and +he must be a subject of wide curiosity. Now obscurity and popularity do +not commonly go together, and I fail to remember that any of the critics +named has paused long enough in his own admiration to explain just why +Browning has caught the breath of favour; in a word, to answer the +question: Why is Browning popular? + +There is, indeed, one response to such a question, so obvious and so +simple that it might well be taken for granted. It would hardly seem +worth while to say that despite his difficulty Browning is esteemed +because he has written great poetry; and in the most primitive and +unequivocal manner this is to a certain extent true. At intervals the +staccato of his lines, like the drilling of a woodpecker, is interrupted +by a burst of pure and liquid music, as if that vigorous and exploring +bird were suddenly gifted with the melodious throat of the lark. It is +not necessary to hunt curiously for examples of this power; they are +fairly frequent and the best known are the most striking. Consider the +first lines that sing themselves in the memory: + + O lyric Love, half-angel and half-bird, + And all a wonder and a wild desire-- + +there needs no cunning exegete to point out the beauty of these. Their +rhythm is of the singing, traditional kind that is familiar to us in all +the true poets of the language; the harmony of the vowel sounds and of +the consonants, the very trick of alliteration, are obvious to the least +critical; yet withal there is that miraculous suggestion in their charm +which may be felt but cannot be converted into a prosaic equivalent. +They stand out from the lines that precede and follow them in _The Ring +and the Book_, as differing not so much in degree as in kind; they are +lyrical, poetical, in the midst of a passage which is neither lyrical +nor, precisely speaking, poetical. Elsewhere the surprise may be on the +lower plane of mere description. So, throughout the peroration of +_Paracelsus_, despite the glory and eloquence of the dying scholar's +vision, one feels continually an alien element which just prevents a +complete acquiescence in their magic, some residue of clogging analysis +which has not quite been subdued to poetry--and then suddenly, as if +some discordant instrument were silenced in an orchestra and unvexed +music floated to the ear, the manner changes, thus: + + The herded pines commune and have deep thoughts, + A secret they assemble to discuss + When the sun drops behind their trunks which glare + Like grates of hell. + +And, take his works throughout, there is a good deal of this writing +which has the ordinary, direct appeal to the emotions. Yet it is +scattered, accidental so to speak; nor is it any pabulum of the soul as +simple as this which converts the lover of poetry into the Browningite. +Even his common-sense admirers are probably held by something more +recondite than this occasional charm. + + You see one lad o'erstride a chimney-stack; + Him you must watch--he's sure to fall, yet stands! + Our interest 's on the dangerous edge of things-- + +says Bishop Blougram, and the attraction of Browning to many is just +watching what may be called his acrobatic psychology. Consider this same +_Bishop Blougram's Apology_, in some respects the most characteristic, +as it is certainly not the least prodigious, of his poems. "Over his +wine so smiled and talked his hour Sylvester Blougram"--talked and +smiled to a silent listener concerning the strange mixture of doubt and +faith which lie snugly side by side in the mind of an ecclesiastic who +is at once a hypocrite and a sincere believer in the Church. The mental +attitude of the speaker is subtile enough in itself to be fascinating, +but the real suspense does not lie there. The very balancing of the +priest's argument may at first work a kind of deception, but read more +attentively and it begins to grow clear that no man in the wily bishop's +predicament ever talked in this way over his wine or anywhere else. And +here lies the real piquancy of the situation. His words are something +more than a confession; they are this and at the same time the poet's, +or if you will the bishop's own, comment to himself on that confession. +He who talks is never quite in the privacy of solitude, nor is he ever +quite conscious of his listener, who as a matter of fact is not so much +a person as some half-personified opinion of the world or abstract +notion set against the character of the speaker. And this is Browning's +regular procedure not only in those wonderful dramatic monologues, _Men +and Women_, that form the heart of his work, but in _Paracelsus_, in +_The Ring and the Book_, even in the songs and the formal dramas. + +Perhaps the most remarkable and most obvious example of this suspended +psychology is to be found in _The Ring and the Book_. Take the canto in +which Giuseppe Caponsacchi relates to the judges his share in the +tangled story. It is clear that the interest here is not primarily in +the event itself, nor does it lie in that phase of the speaker's +character which would be revealed by his confession before such a court +as he is supposed to confront. The fact is, that Caponsacchi's language +is not such as under the circumstances he could possibly be conceived to +use. As the situation forms itself in my mind, he might be in his cell +awaiting the summons to appear. In that solitude and uncertainty he goes +over in memory the days in Arezzo, when the temptation first came to +him, and once more takes the perilous ride with Pompilia to Rome. He +lives again through the great crisis, dissecting all his motives, +balancing the pros and cons of each step; yet all the time he has in +mind the opinion of the world as personified in the judges he is to +face. The psychology is suspended dexterously between self-examination +and open confession, and the reader who accepts the actual dramatic +situation as suggested by Browning loses the finest and subtlest savour +of the speech. In many places it would be simply preposterous to suppose +we are listening to words really uttered by the priest. + + We did go on all night; but at its close + She was troubled, restless, moaned low, talked at whiles + To herself, her brow on quiver with the dream: + Once, wide awake, she menaced, at arms' length + Waved away something--"Never again with you! + My soul is mine, my body is my soul's: + You and I are divided ever more + In soul and body: get you gone!" Then I-- + "Why, in my whole life I have never prayed! + Oh, if the God, that only can, would help! + Am I his priest with power to cast out fiends? + Let God arise and all his enemies + Be scattered!" By morn, there was peace, no sigh + Out of the deep sleep-- + +no, those words were never spoken in the ears of a sceptical, worldly +tribunal; they belong to the most sacred recesses of memory; yet at the +same time that memory is coloured by a consciousness of the world's +clumsy judgment. + +It would be exaggeration to say that all Browning's greater poems +proceed in this involved manner, yet the method is so constant as to be +the most significant feature of his work. And it bestows on him the +honour of having created a new genre which follows neither the fashion +of lyric on the one hand nor that of drama or narrative on the other, +but is a curious and illusive hybrid of the two. The passions are not +uttered directly as having validity and meaning in the heart of the +speaker alone, nor are they revealed through action and reaction upon +the emotions of another. His dramas, if read attentively, will be found +really to fall into the same mixed genre as his monologues. And a +comparison of his _Sordello_ with such a poem as Goethe's _Tasso_ (which +is more the dialogue of a narrative poem than a true drama) will show +how far he fails to make a character move visibly amid opposing +circumstances. In both poems we have a contrast of the poetical +temperament with the practical world. In Browning it is difficult to +distinguish the poet's own thought from the words of the hero; the +narrative is in reality a long confession of Sordello to himself who is +conscious of a hostile power without. In Goethe this hostile power +stands out as distinctly as Tasso himself, and they act side by side +each to his own end. + +There is even a certain significance in what is perhaps the most +immediately personal poem Browning ever wrote, that _One Word More_ +which he appended to his _Men and Women_. Did he himself quite +understand this lament for Raphael's lost sonnets and Dante's +interrupted angel, this desire to find his love a language, + + Fit and fair and simple and sufficient-- + Using nature that's an art to others, + Not, this one time, art that's turned his nature? + +It would seem rather the uneasiness of his own mind when brought face to +face with strong feeling where no escape remains into his oblique mode +of expression. And the man Browning of real life, with his training in a +dissenting Camberwell home and later his somewhat dapper acceptance of +the London social season, accords with such a view of the writer. It is, +too, worthy of note that almost invariably he impressed those who first +met him as being a successful merchant, a banker, a diplomat--anything +but a poet. There was passion enough below the surface, as his outburst +of rage against FitzGerald and other incidents of the kind declare; but +the direct exhibition of it was painful if not grotesque. + +Yet in this matter, as in everything that touches Browning's psychology, +it is well to proceed cautiously. Because he approached the emotions +thus obliquely, as it were in a style hybrid between the lyric and the +drama, it does not follow that his work is void of emotion or that he +questioned the validity of human passion. The very contrary is true. I +remember, indeed, once hearing a lady, whose taste was as frank as it +was modern, say that she liked Browning better than Shakespeare because +he was more emotional and less intellectual than the older dramatist. +Her distinction was somewhat confused, but it leads to an important +consideration; I do not know but it points to the very heart of the +question of Browning's popularity. He is not in reality more emotional +than Shakespeare, but his emotion is of a kind more readily felt by the +reader of to-day; nor does he require less use of the intellect, but he +does demand less of that peculiar translation of the intellect from the +particular to the general point of view which is necessary to raise the +reader into what may be called the poetical mood. In one sense Browning +is nearly the most intellectual poet in the language. The action of his +brain was so nimble, his seizure of every associated idea was so quick +and subtile, his elliptical style is so supercilious of the reader's +needs, that often to understand him is like following a long +mathematical demonstration in which many of the intermediate equations +are omitted. And then his very trick of approaching the emotions +indirectly, his suspended psychology as I have called it, requires a +peculiar flexibility of the reader's mind. But in a way these +roughnesses of the shell possess an attraction for the educated public +which has been sated with what lies too accessibly on the surface. They +hold out the flattering promise of an initiation into mysteries not open +to all the world. Our wits have become pretty well sharpened by the +complexities of modern life, and we are ready enough to prove our +analytical powers on any riddle of poetry or economics. And once we have +penetrated to the heart of these enigmas we are quite at our ease. His +emotional content is of a sort that requires no further adjustment; it +demands none of that poetical displacement of the person which is so +uncomfortable to the keen but prosaic intelligence. + +And here that tenth Muse, who has been added to the Pantheon for the +guidance of the critical writer, trembles and starts back. She beholds +to the right and the left a quaking bog of abstractions and metaphysical +definitions, whereon if a critic so much as set his foot he is sucked +down into the bottomless mire. She plucks me by the ear and bids me keep +to the strait and beaten path, whispering the self-admonition of one who +was the darling of her sisters: + + I _won't_ philosophise, and _will_ be read. + +Indeed, the question that arises is no less than the ultimate +distinction between poetry and prose, and "ultimates" may well have an +ugly sound to one who is content if he can comprehend what is concrete +and very near at hand. And, as for that, those who would care to hear +the matter debated in terms of _Idee_ and _Begriff_, _Objektivitaet_ and +_Subjektivitaet_, must already be familiar with those extraordinary +chapters in Schopenhauer wherein philosophy and literature are married +as they have seldom been elsewhere since the days of Plato. And yet +without any such formidable apparatus as that, it is not difficult to +see that the peculiar procedure of Browning's mind offers to the reader +a pleasure different more in kind than in degree from what is commonly +associated with the word poetry. His very manner of approaching the +passions obliquely, his habit of holding his portrayal of character in +suspense between direct exposition and dramatic reaction, tends to keep +the attention riveted on the individual speaker or problem, and prevents +that escape into the larger and more general vision which marks just the +transition from prose to poetry. + +It is not always so. Into that cry "O lyric Love" there breaks the note +which from the beginning has made lovers forget themselves in their +song--the note that passes so easily from the lips of Persian Omar to +the mouth of British FitzGerald: + + Ah Love! could you and I with Him conspire + To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire, + Would not we shatter it to bits--and then + Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire! + +Is it not clear how, in these direct and lyrical expressions, the +passion of the individual is carried up into some region where it is +blended with currents of emotion broader than any one man's loss or +gain? and how, reading these words, we, too, feel that sudden +enlargement of the heart which it is the special office of the poet to +bestow? But it is equally true that Browning's treatment of love, as in +_James Lee's Wife_ and _In a Balcony_, to name the poems nearest at +hand, is for the most part so involved in his peculiar psychological +method that we cannot for a moment forget ourselves in this freer +emotion. + +And in his attitude towards nature it is the same thing. I have not read +Schopenhauer for many years, but I remember as if it were yesterday my +sensation of joy as in the course of his argument I came upon these two +lines quoted from Horace: + + Nox erat et caelo fulgebat luna sereno + Inter minora sidera. + +How perfectly simple the words, and yet it was as if the splendour of +the heavens had broken upon me--rather, in some strange way, within me. +And that, I suppose, is the real function of descriptive poetry--not to +present a detailed scene to the eye, but in its mysterious manner to +sink our sense of individual life in this larger sympathy with the +world. Now and then, no doubt, Browning, too, strikes this universal +note, as, for instance, in those lines from _Paracelsus_ already quoted. +But for the most part, his description, like his lyrical passion, is +adapted with remarkable skill towards individualising still further the +problem or character that he is analysing. Take that famous passage in +_Easter-Day_: + + And as I said + This nonsense, throwing back my head + With light complacent laugh, I found + Suddenly all the midnight round + One fire. The dome of heaven had stood + As made up of a multitude + Of handbreadth cloudlets, one vast rack + Of ripples infinite and black, + From sky to sky. Sudden there went, + Like horror and astonishment, + A fierce vindictive scribble of red + Quick flame across, as if one said + (The angry scribe of Judgment), "There-- + Burn it!" And straight I was aware + That the whole ribwork round, minute + Cloud touching cloud beyond compute, + Was tinted, each with its own spot + Of burning at the core, till clot + Jammed against clot, and spilt its fire + Over all heaven.... + +We are far enough from the "Nox erat" of Horace or even the "trunks that +glare like grates of hell"; we are seeing the world with the eye of a +man whose mind is perplexed and whose imagination is narrowed down by +terror to a single question: "How hard it is to be A Christian!" + +And nothing, perhaps, confirms this impression of a body of writing +which is neither quite prose nor quite poetry more than the rhythm of +Browning's verse. Lady Burne-Jones in the Memorials of her husband tells +of meeting the poet at Denmark Hill, when some talk went on about the +rate at which the pulse of different people beat. Browning suddenly +leaned toward her, saying, "Do me the honour to feel my pulse"--but to +her surprise there was none to feel. His pulse was, in fact, never +perceptible to touch. The notion may seem fantastic, but, in view of +certain recent investigations of psychology into the relation between +our pulse and our sense of rhythm, I have wondered whether the lack of +any regular systole and diastole in Browning's verse may not rest on a +physical basis. There is undoubtedly a kind of proper motion in his +language, but it is neither the regular rise and fall of verse nor the +more loosely balanced cadences of prose; or, rather, it vacillates from +one movement to the other, in a way which keeps the rhythmically trained +ear in a state of acute tension. But it has at least the interest of +corresponding curiously to the writer's trick of steering between the +elevation of poetry and the analysis of prose. It rounds out completely +our impression of watching the most expert funambulist in English +letters. Nor is there anything strange in this intimate relation between +the content of his writing and the mechanism of his metre. "The purpose +of rhythm," says Mr. Yeats in a striking passage of one of his essays, +"it has always seemed to me, is to prolong the moment of contemplation, +the moment when we are both asleep and awake, which is the one moment of +creation, by hushing us with an alluring monotony, while it holds us +waking by variety." That is the neo-Celt's mystical way of putting a +truth that all have felt--the fact that the regular sing-song of verse +exerts a species of enchantment on the senses, lulling to sleep the +individual within us and translating our thoughts and emotions into +something significant of the larger experience of mankind. + +But I would not leave this aspect of Browning's work without making a +reservation which may seem to some (though wrongly, I think) to +invalidate all that has been said. For it does happen now and again that +he somehow produces the unmistakable exaltation of poetry through the +very exaggeration of his unpoetical method. Nothing could be more +indirect, more oblique, than his way of approaching the climax in +_Cleon_. The ancient Greek poet, writing "from the sprinkled isles, Lily +on lily, that o'erlace the sea," answers certain queries of Protus the +Tyrant. He contrasts the insufficiency of the artistic life with that of +his master, and laments bitterly the vanity of pursuing ideal beauty +when the goal at the end is only death: + + It is so horrible, + I dare at times imagine to my need + Some future state revealed to us by Zeus, + Unlimited in capability + For joy, as this is in desire for joy. + ............................... But no! + Zeus has not yet revealed it; and alas, + He must have done so, were it possible! + +The poem, one begins to suspect, is a specimen of Browning's peculiar +manner of indirection; in reality, through this monologue, suspended +delicately between self-examination and dramatic confession, he is +focussing in one individual heart the doom of the great civilisation +that is passing away and the splendid triumph of the new. And then +follows the climax, as it were an accidental afterthought: + + And for the rest, + I cannot tell thy messenger aright + Where to deliver what he bears of thine + To one called Paulus; we have heard his fame + Indeed, if Christus be not one with him-- + _I know not, nor am troubled much to know._ + Thou canst not think a mere barbarian Jew, + As Paulus proves to be, one circumcised, + Hath access to a secret shut from us? + Thou wrongest our philosophy, O King, + In stooping to inquire of such an one, + As if his answer could impose at all! + _He writeth, doth he? well, and he may write._ + Oh, the Jew findeth scholars! certain slaves + Who touched on this same isle, preached him and Christ; + And (as I gathered from a bystander) + Their doctrine could be held by no sane man. + +It is not revoking what has been said to admit that the superb audacity +of the indirection in these underscored lines touches on the sublime; +the individual is involuntarily rapt into communion with the great +currents that sweep through human affairs, and the interest of +psychology is lost in the elevation of poetry. At the same time it ought +to be added that this effect would scarcely have been possible were not +the rhythm and the mechanism of the verse unusually free of Browning's +prosaic mannerism. + +It might seem that enough had been said to explain why Browning is +popular. The attitude of the ordinary intelligent reader toward him is, +I presume, easily stated. A good many of Browning's mystifications, +_Sordello_, for one, he simply refuses to bother himself with. _Le jeu_, +he says candidly, _ne vaut pas les chandelles_. Other works he goes +through with some impatience, but with an amount of exhilarating +surprise sufficient to compensate for the annoyances. If he is trained +in literary distinctions, he will be likely to lay down the book with +the exclamation: _C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la poesie!_ And +probably such a distinction will not lessen his admiration; for it +cannot be asserted too often that the reading public to-day is ready to +accede to any legitimate demand on its analytical understanding, but +that it responds sluggishly, or only spasmodically, to that readjustment +of the emotions necessary for the sustained enjoyment of such a poem as +_Paradise Lost_. But I suspect that we have not yet touched the real +heart of the problem. All this does not explain that other phase of +Browning's popularity, which depends upon anything but the common sense +of the average reader; and, least of all, does it account for the +library of books, of which Professor Herford's is the latest example. +There is another public which craves a different food from the mere +display of human nature; it is recruited largely by the women's clubs +and by men who are unwilling or afraid to hold their minds in a state of +self-centred expectancy toward the meaning of a civilisation shot +through by threads of many ages and confused colours; it is kept in a +state of excitation by critics who write lengthily and systematically of +"joy in soul." Now there is a certain philosophy which is in a +particular way adapted to such readers and writers. Its beginnings, no +doubt, are rooted in the naturalism of Rousseau and the eighteenth +century, but the flower of it belongs wholly to our own age. It is the +philosophy whose purest essence may be found distilled in Browning's +magical alembic, and a single drop of it will affect the brain of some +people with a strange giddiness. + +And here again I am tempted to abscond behind those blessed words +_Platonische Ideen_ and _Begriffe, universalia ante rem_ and +_universalia post rem_, which offer so convenient an escape from the +difficulty of meaning what one says. It would be so easy with those +counters of German metaphysicians and the schoolmen to explain how it is +that Browning has a philosophy of generalised notions, and yet so often +misses the form of generalisation special to the poet. The fact is his +philosophy is not so much inherent in his writing as imposed on it from +the outside. His theory of love does not expand like Dante's into a +great vision of life wherein symbol and reality are fused together, but +is added as a commentary on the action or situation. And on the other +hand he does not accept the simple and pathetic incompleteness of life +as a humbler poet might, but must try with his reason to reconcile it +with an ideal system: + + Over the ball of it, + Peering and prying, + How I see all of it, + Life there, outlying! + Roughness and smoothness, + Shine and defilement, + Grace and uncouthness: + One reconcilement. + +Yet "ideal" and "reconcilement" are scarcely the words; for Browning's +philosophy, when detached, as it may be, from its context, teaches just +the acceptance of life in itself as needing no conversion into something +beyond its own impulsive desires: + + Let us not always say, + "Spite of this flesh to-day + I strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole!" + As the bird wings and sings, + Let us cry, "All good things + Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul!" + +Passion to Shakespeare was the source of tragedy; there is no tragedy, +properly speaking, in Browning, for the reason that passion is to him +essentially good. By sheer bravado of human emotion we justify our +existence, nay-- + + We have to live alone to set forth well + God's praise. + +His notion of "moral strength," as Professor Santayana so forcibly says, +"is a blind and miscellaneous vehemence." + +But if all the passions have their own validity, one of them in +particular is the power that moves through all and renders them all +good: + + In my own heart love had not been made wise + To trace love's faint beginnings in mankind, + To know even hate is but a mask of love's. + +It is the power that reaches up from earth to heaven, and the divine +nature is no more than a higher, more vehement manifestation of its +energy: + + For the loving worm within its clod + Were diviner than a loveless god. + +And in the closing vision of _Saul_ this thought of the identity of +man's love and God's love is uttered by David in a kind of delirious +ecstasy: + + 'T is the weakness in strength, that I cry for! my flesh, that I seek + In the Godhead! I seek and I find it. O Saul, it shall be + A Face like my face that receives thee; a Man like to me, + Thou shalt love and be loved by, forever: a Hand like this hand + Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee! See the Christ stand! + +But there is no need to multiply quotations. The point is that in all +Browning's rhapsody there is nowhere a hint of any break between the +lower and the higher nature of man, or between the human and the +celestial character. Not that his philosophy is pantheistic, for it is +Hebraic in its vivid sense of God's distinct personality; but that man's +love is itself divine, only lesser in degree. There is nothing that +corresponds to the tremendous words of Beatrice to Dante when he meets +her face to face in the Terrestrial Paradise: + + Guardami ben: ben son, ben son Beatrice. + Come degnasti d' accedere al monte? + Non sapei to the qui e l'uom felice? + + (Behold me well: lo, Beatrice am I. + And thou, how daredst thou to this mount draw nigh? + Knew'st thou not here was man's felicity?)-- + +nothing that corresponds to the "scot of penitence," the tears, and the +plunge into the river of Lethe before the new, transcendent love begins. +Indeed, the point of the matter is not that Browning magnifies human +love in its own sphere of beauty, but that he speaks of it with the +voice of a prophet of spiritual things and proclaims it as a complete +doctrine of salvation. Often, as I read the books on Browning's gospel +of human passion, my mind recurs to that scene in the Gospel of St. +John, wherein it is told how a certain Nicodemus of the Pharisees came +to Jesus by night and was puzzled by the hard saying: "Except a man be +born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God." There is no lack of +confessions from that day to this of men to whom it has seemed that they +were born again, and always, I believe, the new birth, like the birth of +the body, was consummated with wailing and anguish, and afterwards the +great peace. This is a mystery into which it is no business of mine to +enter, but with the singularly uniform record of these confessions in my +memory, I cannot but wonder at the light message of the new prophet: "If +you desire faith--then you've faith enough," and "For God is glorified +in man." I am even sceptical enough to believe that the vaunted +conclusion of _Fifine at the Fair_, "I end with--Love is all and Death +is naught," sounds like the wisdom of a schoolgirl. There is an element +in Browning's popularity which springs from those readers who are +content to look upon the world as it is; they feel the power of his +lyric song when at rare intervals it flows in pure and untroubled grace, +and they enjoy the intellectual legerdemain of his suspended psychology. +But there is another element in that popularity (and this, unhappily, is +the inspiration of the clubs and of the formulating critics) which is +concerned too much with this flattering substitute for spirituality. +Undoubtedly, a good deal of restiveness exists under what is called the +materialism of modern life, and many are looking in this way and that +for an escape into the purer joy which they hear has passed from the +world. It used to be believed that Calderon was a bearer of the +message, Calderon who expressed the doctrine of the saints and the +poets: + + Pues el delito mayor + Del hombre es haber nacido-- + +(since the greatest transgression of man is to have been born). It was +believed that the spiritual life was bought with a price, and that the +desires of this world must first suffer permutation into something not +themselves. I am not holding a brief for that austere doctrine; I am not +even sure that I quite understand it, although it is written at large in +many books. But I do know that those who think they have found its +equivalent in the poetry of Browning are misled by wandering and futile +lights. The secret of his more esoteric fame is just this, that he +dresses a worldly and easy philosophy in the forms of spiritual faith +and so deceives the troubled seekers after the higher life. + +It is not pleasant to be convicted of throwing stones at the prophets, +as I shall appear to many to have done. My only consolation is that, if +the prophet is a true teacher, these stones of the casual passer-by +merely raise a more conspicuous monument to his honour; but if he turns +out in the end to be a false prophet (as I believe Browning to have +been)--why, then, let his disciples look to it. + + + + +A NOTE ON BYRON'S "DON JUAN" + + +It has often been a source of wonder to me that I was able to read and +enjoy Byron's _Don Juan_ under the peculiar circumstances attending my +introduction to that poem. I had been walking in the Alps, and after a +day of unusual exertion found myself in the village of Chamouni, +fatigued and craving rest. A copy of the Tauchnitz edition fell into my +hands, and there, in a little room, through a summer's day, by a window +which looked full upon the unshadowed splendour of Mont Blanc, I sat and +read, and only arose when Juan faded out of sight with "the phantom of +her frolic Grace--Fitz-Fulke." I have often wondered, I say, why the +incongruity of that solemn Alpine scene with the mockery of Byron's wit +did not cause me to shut the book and thrust it away, for in general I +am highly sensitive to the nature of my surroundings while reading. Only +recently, on taking up the poem again for the purpose of editing it, did +the answer to that riddle occur to me, and with it a better +understanding of the place of _Don Juan_ among the great epics which +might have seemed in finer accord with the sublimity and peace of that +memorable day. + +In one respect, at least, it needed no return to Byron's work to show +how closely it is related in spirit to the accepted canons of the past. +These poets, who have filled the world with their rumour, all looked +upon life with some curious obliquity of vision. We, who have approached +the consummation of the world's hope, know that happiness and peace and +the fulfilment of desires are about to settle down and brood for ever +more over the lot of mankind, but with them it seems to have been +otherwise. Who can forget the recurring _minynthadion_ of Homer, in +which he summed up for the men of his day the vanity of long +aspirations? So if we were asked to point out the lines of Shakespeare +that express most completely his attitude toward life, we should +probably quote that soliloquy of Hamlet wherein he catalogues the evils +of existence, and only in the fear of future dreams finds a reason for +continuance; or we should cite that sonnet of disillusion: "Tired with +all these for restful death I cry." And as for the lyric poets, sooner +or later the lament of Shelley was wrung from the lips of each: + + Out of the day and night + A joy has taken flight: + Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar + Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight + No more--oh, never more! + +This, I repeat, is a strange fact, for it appears that these poets, +prophets who spoke in the language of beauty and who have held the +world's reverence so long--it appears now that these interpreters of the +fates were all misled. Possibly, as Aristotle intimated, genius is +allied to some vice of the secretions which produces a melancholia of +the brain; something like this, indeed, only expressed in more recondite +terms, may be found in the most modern theory of science. But more +probably they wrote merely from insufficient experience, not having +perceived how the human race with increase of knowledge grows in +happiness. Thus, at least, it seems to one who observes the tides of +thought. Next year, or the next, some divine invention shall come which +will prove this melancholy of the poets to have been only a childish +ignorance of man's sublimer destiny; some discovery of a new element +more wonderful than radium will render the ancient brooding over human +feebleness a matter of laughter and astonishment; some acceptance of the +larger brotherhood of the race will wipe away all tears and bring down +upon earth the fair dream of heaven, a reality and a possession for +ever; some new philosophy of the soul will convert the old poems of +conflict into meaningless fables, stale and unprofitable. Already we see +the change at hand. To how many persons to-day does Browning +appeal--though they would not always confess it--more powerfully than +Homer or Milton or any other of the great names of antiquity? And the +reason of this closer appeal of Browning is chiefly the unflagging +optimism of his philosophy, his full-blooded knowledge and sympathy +which make the wailings of the past somewhat silly in our ears, if truth +must be told. I never read Browning but those extraordinary lines of +Euripides recur to my mind: "Not now for the first time do I regard +mortal things as a shadow, nor would I fear to charge with supreme folly +those artificers of words who are reckoned the sages of mankind, for no +man among mortals is happy." [Greek: Thneton gar oudeis estin eudaimon], +indeed!--would any one be shameless enough to utter such words under the +new dispensation of official optimism? + +It is necessary to think of these things before we attempt to criticise +Byron, for _Don Juan_, too, despite its marvellous vivacity, looks upon +life from the old point of view. Already, for this reason in part, it +seems a little antiquated to us, and in a few years it may be read only +as a curiosity. Meanwhile for the few who lag behind in the urgent march +of progress the poem will possess a special interest just because it +presents the ancient thesis of the poets and prophets in a novel form. +Of course, in many lesser matters it makes a wider and more lasting +appeal. Part of the Haidee episode, for instance, is so exquisitely +lovely, so radiant with the golden haze of youth, that even in the wiser +happiness of our maturity we may still turn to it with a kind of +complacent delight. Briefer passages scattered here and there, such as +the "'T is sweet to hear," and the "Ave Maria," need only a little +abridgment at the close to fit them perfectly for any future anthology +devoted to the satisfaction and the ultimate significance of human +emotions. But, strangely enough, these disturbing climaxes, which will +demand to be forgotten, or to be rearranged as we restore old mutilated +statues, do, indeed, point to those very qualities which render the poem +so extraordinary a complement to the great and accepted epics of the +past. For the present it may yet be sufficient to consider _Don Juan_ as +it is--with all its enormities upon it. + +And, first of all, we shall make a sad mistake if we regard the poem as +a mere work of satire. Occasionally Byron pretends to lash himself into +a righteous fury over the vices of the age, but we know that this is all +put on, and that the real savageness of his nature comes out only when +he thinks of his own personal wrongs. Now this is a very different thing +from the deliberate and sustained denunciation of a vicious age such as +we find in Juvenal, a different thing utterly from the _saeva indignatio_ +that devoured the heart and brain of poor Swift. There is in _Don Juan_ +something of the personal satire of Pope, and something of the whimsical +mockery of Lucilius and his imitators. But it needs but a little +discernment to see that Byron's poem has vastly greater scope and +significance than the _Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot_, or the spasmodic +gaiety of the Menippean satire. It does in its own way present a view +of life as a whole, with the good and the evil, and so passes beyond the +category of the merely satirical. The very scope of its subject, if +nothing more, classes it with the more universal epics of literature +rather than with the poems that portray only a single aspect of life. + +Byron himself was conscious of this, and more than once alludes to the +larger aspect of his work. "If you must have an epic," he once said to +Medwin, "there's _Don Juan_ for you; it is an epic as much in the spirit +of our day as the _Iliad_ was in that of Homer." And in one of the +asides in the poem itself he avows the same design: + + A panoramic view of Hell's in training, + After the style of Virgil and of Homer, + So that my name of Epic's no misnomer. + +Hardly the style of those stately writers, to be sure, but an epic after +its own fashion the poem certainly is. That Byron's way is not the way +of the older poets requires no emphasis; they + + reveled in the fancies of the time, + True Knights, chaste Dames, huge Giants, Kings despotic; + But all these, save the last, being obsolete, + I chose a modern subject as more meet. + +Being cut off from the heroic subjects of the established school, he +still sought to obtain something of the same large and liberating effect +through the use of a frankly modern theme. The task was not less +difficult than his success was singular and marked; and that is why it +seemed in no way inappropriate, despite its occasional lapse of +licentiousness, to read _Don Juan_ with the white reflection of Mont +Blanc streaming through the window. Homer might have been so read, or +Virgil, or any of those poets who presented life solemnly and +magniloquently; I do not think I could have held my mind to Juvenal or +Pope or even Horace beneath the calm radiance of that Alpine light. + +I have said that the great poets all took a sombre view of the world. +Man is but _the dream of a shadow_, said Pindar, speaking for the race +of genius, and Byron is conscious of the same insight into the illusive +spectacle. He has looked with like vision upon + + this scene of all-confessed inanity, + By Saint, by Sage, by Preacher, and by Poet, + +and will not in his turn refrain "from holding up the nothingness of +life." So in the introduction to the seventh canto he runs through the +list of those who have preached and sung this solemn, but happily to us +outworn, theme: + + I say no more than hath been said in Dante's + Verse, and by Solomon and by Cervantes. + +It must not be supposed, however, because the heroic poems of old were +touched with the pettiness and sadness of human destiny, that their +influence on the reader was supposed to be narrowing or depressing; the +name "heroic" implies the contrary of that. Indeed their very +inspiration was derived from the fortitude of a spirit struggling to +rise above the league of little things and foiling despairs. It may seem +paradoxical to us, yet it is true that these morbid poets believed in +the association of men with gods and in the grandeur of mortal passions. +So Achilles and Hector, both with the knowledge of their brief destiny +upon them, both filled with foreboding of frustrate hopes, strive nobly +to the end of magnanimous defeat. There lay the greatness of the heroic +epos for readers of old,--the sense of human littleness, the melancholy +of broken aspirations, swallowed up in the transcending sublimity of +man's endurance and daring. And men of lesser mould, who knew so well +the limitations of their sphere, took courage and were taught to look +down unmoved upon their harassed fate. + +Now Byron came at a time of transition from the old to the new. The +triumphs of material discovery, "_Le magnifiche sorti e progressive_," +had not yet cast a reproach on the earlier sense of life's futility, +while at the same time the faith in heroic passions had passed away. An +attempt to create an epic in the old spirit would have been doomed, was +indeed doomed in the hands of those who undertook it. The very language +in which Byron presents the ancient universal belief of Plato and those +others + + Who knew this life was not worth a potato,-- + +shows how far he was from the loftier mode of imagination. In place of +heroic passion he must seek another outlet of relief, another mode of +purging away melancholy; and the spirit of the burlesque came lightly to +his use as the only available _vis medica_. The feeling was common to +his age, but he alone was able to adapt the motive to epic needs. How +often the melancholy sentimentality of Heine corrects itself by a +burlesque conclusion! Or, if we regard the novel, how often does +Thackeray in like manner replace the old heroic relief of passion by a +kindly smile at the brief and busy cares of men. But neither Heine nor +Thackeray carries the principle of the burlesque to its artistic +completion, or makes it the avowed motive of a complicated action, as +Byron does in _Don Juan_. That poem is indeed "prolific of melancholy +merriment." It is not necessary to point out at length the persistence +of this mock-heroic spirit. Love, ambition, home-attachments, are all +burlesqued; battle ardour, the special theme of epic sublimity, is +subjected to the same quizzical mockery: + + There was not now a luggage boy, but sought + Danger and spoil with ardour much increased; + And why? because a little--odd--old man, + Stripped to his shirt, was come to lead the van. + +In the gruesome shipwreck scene the tale of suffering which leads to +cannibalism is interrupted thus: + + At length they caught two Boobies, and a Noddy, + And then they left off eating the dead body. + +The description of London town as seen from Shooter's Hill ends with +this absurd metaphor: + + A huge, dun Cupola, like a foolscap crown + On a fool's head--and there is London Town! + +Even Death laughs,--death that "_hiatus maxime defiendus_," "the dunnest +of all duns," etc. And, last of all, the poet turns the same weapon +against his own art. Do the lines for a little while grow serious, he +suddenly pulls himself up with a sneer: + + Here I must leave him, for I grow pathetic, + Moved by the Chinese nymph of tears, green tea! + +I trust, however, it has been made sufficiently clear that _Don Juan_ is +something quite different from the mere mock-heroic--from Pulci, for +instance, "sire of the half-serious rhyme," whom Byron professed to +imitate. The poem is in a sense not half but wholly serious, for the +very reason that it takes so broad a view of human activity, and because +of its persistent moral sense. (Which is nowise contradicted by the +immoral scenes in several of the cantos.) It is not, for example, +possible to think of finding in Pulci such a couplet as this: + + But almost sanctify the sweet excess + By the immortal wish and power to bless. + +He who could write such lines as those was not merely indulging his +humour. _Don Juan_ is something more than + + A versified Aurora Borealis, + Which flashes o'er a waste and icy clime. + +Out of the bitterness of his soul, out of the wreck of his passions +which, though heroic in intensity, had ended in quailing of the heart, +he sought what the great makers of epic had sought,--a solace and a +sense of uplifted freedom. The heroic ideal was gone, the refuge of +religion was gone; but, passing to the opposite extreme, by showing the +power of the human heart to mock at all things, he would still set forth +the possibility of standing above and apart from all things. He, too, +went beyond the limitations of destiny by laughter, as Homer and Virgil +and Milton had risen by the imagination. And, in doing this, he wrote +the modern epic. + +We are learning a new significance of human life, as I said; and the +sublime audacities of the elder poets in attempting to transcend the +melancholia of their day are growing antiquated, just as Byron's heroic +mockery is turning stale. In a few years we shall have come so much +closer to the mysteries over which the poets bungled helplessly, that we +can afford to forget their rhapsodies. Meanwhile it may not be amiss to +make clear to ourselves the purpose and character of one of the few, the +very few, great poems in our literature. + + + + +LAURENCE STERNE + + +A number of excellent editions of our standard authors have been put +forth during the last two or three years, but none of them, perhaps, has +been of such real service to letters as the new Sterne edited by +Professor Wilbur L. Cross.[8] + +Ordinarily the fresh material advertised in these editions is in large +measure rubbish which had been deliberately discarded by the author and +whose resuscitation is an impertinence to his memory. Certainly this is +true of Murray's new Byron; it is in part true of the great editions of +Hazlitt and Lamb recently published, to go no further afield. But with +Sterne the case is different. The _Journal to Eliza_ and the letters now +first printed in full from the "Gibbs manuscript" are a genuine aid in +getting at the heart of Sterne's elusive character. Even more important +is the readjustment of dates for the older correspondence, which the +present editor has accomplished at the cost of considerable pains, for +the setting back of a letter two years may make all the difference +between a lying knave and an unstable sentimentalist. In the spring of +1767, just a year before his death, Sterne was inditing those rather +sickly letters and the newly published _Journal_ to Eliza, a susceptible +young woman who was about to sail for India. "The coward," says +Thackeray, "was writing gay letters to his friends this while, with +sneering allusions to his poor foolish _Brahmine_. Her ship was not out +of the Downs, and the charming Sterne was at the 'Mount Coffee-House,' +with a sheet of gilt-edged paper before him, offering that precious +treasure, his heart, to Lady P----." It is an ugly charge, and indeed +Thackeray's whole portrait of the humourist is harshly painted. But +Sterne was not sneering in other letters at his "Brahmine," as he called +the rather spoiled East India lady, and it turns out from some very +pretty calculations of Professor Cross that the particular note to Lady +P[ercy] must have been written at the Mount Coffee-House two years +before he ever knew Eliza. "Coward," "wicked," "false," "wretched +worn-out old scamp," "mountebank," "foul Satyr," "the last words the +famous author wrote were bad and wicked, the last lines the poor +stricken wretch penned were for pity and pardon"--for shame, Mr. +Thackeray! Sterne was a weak man, one may admit; wretched and worn-out +he was when the final blow struck him in his lonely hired room; but is +there no pity and pardon on your pen for the wayward penitent? You had +sympathy enough and facile tears enough for the genial Costigans and the +others who followed their hearts too readily; have you no _Alas, poor +Yorick!_ for the author who gave you these characters? You could smile +at Pendennis when he used the old songs for a second love; was it a +terrible thing that Yorick should have taken passages from his early +letters (copies of which were thriftily preserved after the fashion of +the day) and sent them as the bubblings of fresh emotion at the end of +his life? "One solitary plate, one knife, one fork, one glass!--I gave a +thousand pensive, penetrating looks at the chair thou hadst so often +graced, in those quiet and sentimental repasts--then laid down my knife +and fork, and took out my handkerchief, and clapped it across my face, +and wept like a child"--he wrote to Miss Lumley who afterwards became +Mrs. Sterne; and in the _Journal_ kept for Eliza when he was broken in +spirit and near to death, you may read the same words, as Thackeray read +them in manuscript, and you may call them false and lying; but I am +inclined to believe they were quite as genuine as most of the pathos of +that lachrymose age. The want of sympathy in Thackeray's case is the +harder to understand for the reason that to Sterne more than to any +other of the eighteenth-century wits he would seem to owe his style and +his turn of thought. On many a page his peculiar sentiment reads like a +direct imitation of _Tristram Shandy_; add but a touch of caprice to +Colonel Newcome and you might almost imagine my Uncle Toby parading in +the nineteenth century; and I think it is just the lack of this +whimsical touch that makes the good colonel a little mawkish to many +readers. And if one is to look for an antetype of Thackeray's exquisite +English, whither shall one turn unless to the _Sermons_ of Mr. Yorick? +There is a taint of ingratitude in his affectation of being shocked at +the irregularities of one to whom he was so much indebted, and I fear +Mr. Thackeray was too consciously appealing to the Philistine prejudices +of the good folk who were listening to his lectures. Afterwards, when +the mischief was done, he suffered what looks like a qualm of +conscience. In one of the _Roundabout Papers_ he tells how he slept in +Sterne's old hotel at Calais: "When I went to bed in the room, in _his_ +room, when I think how I admire, dislike, and have abused him, a certain +dim feeling of apprehension filled my mind at the midnight hour. What if +I should see his lean figure in the black-satin breeches, his sinister +smile, his long thin finger pointing to me in the moonlight!" +Unfortunately the popular notion of Sterne is still based almost +exclusively on the picture of him in the _English Humourists_. + +It is to be hoped that at last this carefully prepared edition will do +something toward dispelling that false impression. Certainly, the +various introductions furnished by Professor Cross are admirable for +their fairness and insight. He does not attempt a panegyric of Sterne, +as did Mr. Fitzgerald in the first edition of the _Life_, nor does he +awkwardly overlay panegyric with censure, as these are found in the +present revised form of that narrative; he recognises the errors of the +sentimentalist, but he does not call them by exaggerated names. And he +sees, too, the fundamental sincerity of the man, knowing that no great +book was ever penned without that quality, whatever else might be +missing. I think he will account it for service in a good cause if, as +an essayist taking my material where it may be found, I try to draw a +little closer still to the sly follower of Rabelais whom he has honoured +by so elaborate a study. + +Possibly Professor Cross does not recognise fully enough the influence +of Sterne's early years on his character. It is indeed a vagrant and +Shandean childhood to which the Rev. Mr. Laurence Sterne introduces us +in the _Memoir_ written late in life for the benefit of his daughter +Lydia. The father, a lieutenant in Handaside's regiment, passed from +engagement to idleness, and from barrack to barrack, more than was the +custom even in those unsettled days. At Clonmel, in the south of +Ireland, November 24, 1713, Laurence was born, a few days after the +arrival of his mother from Dunkirk. Other children had been given to the +luckless couple, and were yet to be added, but here and there they were +dropped on the wayside in pathetic graves, leaving in the end only two, +the future novelist and his sister Catherine, who married a publican in +London and became estranged from her brother by her "uncle's wickedness +and her own folly"--says Laurence. Of the mother it is not necessary to +say much. The difficulties of her life as a hanger-on in camps seem to +have hardened her, and her temper ("clamorous and rapacious," he called +it) was in all points unlike her son's. That Sterne neglected her +brutally is a charge as old as Walpole's scandalous tongue, and Byron, +taking his cue from thence, gave piquancy to the accusation by saying +that "he preferred whining over a dead ass to relieving a living +mother." Sterne's minute refutation of the slander may now be read at +full length in a letter to the very uncle who set the tale agoing. The +boy would seem to have taken the father's mercurial temperament, though +not his physique: + + The regiment [he writes] was sent to defend Gibraltar, at the + siege, where my father was run through the body by Capt. Phillips, + in a duel (the quarrel began about a goose!): with much difficulty + he survived, though with an impaired constitution, which was not + able to withstand the hardships it was put to; for he was sent to + Jamaica, where he soon fell by the country fever, which took away + his senses first, and made a child of him; and then, in a month or + two, walking about continually without complaining, till the + moment he sat down in an armchair, and breathed his last, which + was at Port Antonio, on the north of the island. My father was a + little smart man, active to the last degree in all exercises, most + patient of fatigue and disappointments, of which it pleased God to + give him full measure. He was, in his temper, somewhat rapid and + hasty, but of a kindly, sweet disposition, void of all design; and + so innocent in his own intentions, that he suspected no one; so + that you might have cheated him ten times in a day, if nine had + not been sufficient for your purpose. + +Lieutenant Sterne died in 1731, and it would require but a few changes +in the son's record to make it read like a page from _Henry Esmond_; the +very texture of the language, the turn of the quizzical pathos, are +Thackeray's. + +Laurence at this time was at school near Halifax, where he got into a +characteristic scrape. The ceiling of the schoolroom had been newly +whitewashed; the ladder was standing, and the boy mounted it and wrote +in large letters, LAU. STERNE. The usher whipped him severely, but, says +the _Memoir_, "my master was very much hurt at this, and said, before +me, that never should that name be effaced, for I was a boy of genius, +and he was sure I should come to preferment." From Halifax Sterne went +to Jesus College, Cambridge, at the expense of a cousin. An uncle at +York next took charge of him and got him the living of Sutton, and +afterwards the Prebendary of York. Just how he came to quarrel with this +patron we shall probably never know. Sterne himself declares that his +uncle wished him to write political paragraphs for the Whigs, that he +detested such "dirty work," and got his uncle's hatred in return for his +independence. According to the writer of the _Yorkshire Anecdotes_, the +two fell out over a woman--which sounds more like the truth. Meanwhile, +Laurence had been successfully courting Miss Elizabeth Lumley at York, +and, during her absence, had been writing those love-letters which his +daughter published after the death of her parents, to the immense +increase of sentimentalism throughout the United Kingdom. They are, in +sooth, but a sickly, hothouse production, though honestly enough meant, +no doubt. The writer, too, kept a copy of them, and thriftily made use +of select passages at a later date, as we have seen. Miss Lumley became +Mrs. Sterne in due time, and brought to her husband a modest jointure, +and another living at Stillington, so that he was now a pluralist, +although far from rich. The marriage was not particularly happy. Madam, +one gathers, was pragmatic and contentious and unreasonable, her +reverend spouse was volatile and pleasure-loving; and when, in the years +of Yorick's fame, they went over to France, she decided to stay there +with her daughter. Sterne seems to have been fond of her always, in a +way, and in money matters was never anything but generous and tactfully +considerate. A bad-hearted man is not so thoughtful of his wife's +comfort after she has left him, as Sterne's letters show him to have +been; and even Thackeray admits that his affection for the girl was +"artless, kind, affectionate, and _not_ sentimental." + +But the lawful Mrs. Sterne was not the only woman at whose feet the +parson of Sutton and Stillington was sighing. There was that Mlle. de +Fourmantelle, a Huguenot refugee, the "dear, dear Kitty" (or "Jenny" as +she becomes in _Tristram Shandy_), to whom he sends presents of wine and +honey (with notes asking, "What is honey to the sweetness of thee?"), +and who followed him to London in the heyday of his fame, where somehow +she fades mysteriously out of view. "I myself must ever have some +Dulcinea in my head," he said; "it harmonises the soul." And, in truth, +the soul of Yorick was mewed in the cage of his breast very near his +heart, and never stretched her wings out of that close atmosphere. +Charity was his creed in the pulpit, and his love of woman had a curious +and childlike way of fortifying the Christian love of his neighbour. +Most famous of all was his passion--it seems almost to have been a +passion in this case--for the famous "Eliza." Towards the end of his +life he had become warmly attached to a certain William James, a retired +Indian commodore, and his wife, who were the best and most wholesome of +his friends. At their London home he met Mrs. Elizabeth Draper, and soon +became romantically attached to her. When the time drew near for her to +sail to India to rejoin her husband, he wrote a succession of notes in a +kind of paroxysm of grief for himself and anxiety for her, and for +several months afterwards he kept a journal of his emotions for her +benefit some day. He was dead in less than a year. The letters she +kept, and in due time printed, because it was rumoured that Lydia was to +publish them from copies--a pretty bit of wrangling among all these +women there was, over the sentimental relics of poor Yorick! The +_Journal_ is now for the first time included in the author's works--a +singular document, as eccentric in spelling and grammar as the sentiment +is hard to define, a wild and hysterical record. But it rings true on +the whole, and confirms the belief that Sterne's feelings were genuine, +however short-lived they may have been. The last letter to Eliza is +pitiful with its tale of a broken body and a sick heart: "In ten minutes +after I dispatched my letter, this poor, fine-spun frame of Yorick's +gave way, and I broke a vessel in my breast, and could not stop the loss +of blood till four this morning. I have filled all thy India +handkerchiefs with it.--It came, I think, from my heart! I fell asleep +through weakness. At six I awoke, with the bosom of my shirt steeped in +tears." All through the _Journal_ that follows are indications of wasted +health and of the perplexities of life that were closing in upon him. +Only at rare intervals the worries are forgotten, and we get a picture +of serener moments. One day, July 2nd, he grows genuinely idyllic, and +it may not be amiss to copy out his note just as he penned it: + + But I am in the Vale of Coxwould & wish You saw in how princely a + manner I live in it--tis a Land of Plenty--I sit down alone to + Venison, fish or wild fowl--or a couple of fowls--with curds, and + strawberrys & cream, (and all the simple clean plenty w^{ch.} a + rich Vally can produce)--with a Bottle of wine on my right hand + (as in Bond street) to drink y^{r.} health--I have a hundred hens + & chickens [he sometimes spelt it _chickings_] ab^{t.} my yard--and + not a parishoner catches a hare a rabbit or a Trout--but he brings + it as an offering--In short tis a golden Vally--& will be the + golden Age when You govern the rural feast, my Bramine, & are the + Mistress of my table & spread it with elegancy and that natural + grace & bounty w^{th.} w^{ch.} heaven has distinguish'd You... + + --Time goes on slowly--every thing stands still--hours seem days & + days seem Years whilst you lengthen the Distance between us--from + Madras to Bombay--I shall think it shortening--and then desire & + expectation will be upon the rack again--come--come-- + +But Eliza never came until Yorick had gone on a longer journey than +Bombay. In England once more, she traded on her relation to the famous +writer, and then reviled him. She associated with John Wilkes, and +afterwards with the Abbe Raynal, who writ an absurd, pompous eulogy on +"the Lady who has been so celebrated as the Correspondent of Mr. +Sterne." It is engraved on her tomb in Bristol Cathedral that "genius +and benevolence were united in her"; but the long letter composed in the +vein of Mrs. Montagu and now printed from her manuscript belies the +first, and her behaviour after Sterne's death makes a mockery of the +second. + +All this new material throws light on a phase of this matter which +cannot be avoided in any discussion of Sterne's character: How far did +his immorality actually extend? To Thackeray he was a "foul Satyr"; +Bagehot thought he was merely an "old flirt," and others have seen +various degrees of guilt in his philanderings. Now his relation to Eliza +would seem to be pretty decisive of his character in this respect, and +fortunately the evidence here published in full by Professor Cross +leaves little room for doubt. There is, for one thing, an extraordinary +letter which is given in facsimile from the rough draft, with all its +erasures and corrections. It was addressed to Daniel Draper, but was +never sent, apparently never completed. The substance of it is, to say +the least, unusual: + + I own it, Sir, that the writing a letter to a gentleman I have not + the honour to be known to--a letter likewise upon no kind of + business (in the ideas of the world) is a little out of the common + course of things--but I'm so myself, and the impulse which makes + me take up my pen is out of the common way too, for it arises from + the honest pain I should feel in having so great esteem and + friendship as I bear for Mrs. Draper--if I did not wish to hope + and extend it to Mr. Draper also. I am really, dear sir, in love + with your wife; but 'tis a love you would honour me for, for 'tis + so like that I bear my own daughter, who is a good creature, that + I scarce distinguish a difference betwixt it--that moment I had + would have been the last. + +Follows a polite offer of services, which is nothing to our purpose. + +Now it is easy to say that such a letter was written with the +hypocritical intention of allaying Mr. Draper's possible suspicions, and +certainly the last sentence overshoots the mark. Against the general +innocence of Sterne's life there exist, in particular, two damaging bits +of evidence--that infamous thing in dog-Latin addressed to the master of +the "Demoniacs," whose meaning must have been quite lost upon the +daughter who published it, and a pair of brief notes to a woman named +Hannah. Of the Latin letter one may say that it was probably written in +the exaggerated tone of bravado suitable to its recipient; of both this +and the notes one may add that they do not incriminate the later years +of Sterne's life. As an offset we now have that extraordinary memorandum +in the _Journal to Eliza_, dated April 24, 1767, which states +explicitly, and convincingly, that he had led an entirely chaste life +for the past fifteen years. It is not requisite, or indeed possible, to +enter into the evidence further in this place, but the general inference +may be stated with something like assurance: Sterne's relation to Eliza +was purely sentimental, as was the case with most of his philandering; +at the same time in his earlier years he had probably indulged in a life +of pleasure such as was by no means uncommon among the clergy of his +day. He was neither quite the lying scoundrel of Thackeray nor the "old +flirt" of Bagehot, but a man led into many follies, and many kindnesses +also, by an impulsive heart and a worldly philosophy. It is not his +immorality that one has to complain of, and the talk in the books on +that score is mostly foolishness; it is rather his bad taste. He cannot +be much blamed for his estrangement from his wife, and his care for her +comfort is not a little to his credit; but he might have refrained from +writing to Eliza on the happiness they were to enjoy when the poor woman +was dead--as he had already done to Mlle. Fourmantelle, and others, too, +it may be. Mrs. Sterne, not long after the departure of Eliza, had +written that she was coming over to England, and the _Journal_ for a +time is filled with forebodings of the confusion she was to bring with +her. One hardly knows whether to smile or drop a tear over the +Postscript added after the last regular entry: + + Nov: 1^{st.} All my dearest Eliza has turnd out more favourable + than my hopes--M^{rs.} S.--& my dear Girl have been 2 Months with + me and they have this day left me to go to spend the Winter at + York, after having settled every thing to their hearts + content--M^{rs.} Sterne retires into france, whence she purposes + not to stir, till her death.--& never, has she vow'd, will give me + another sorrowful or discontented hour--I have conquerd her, as I + w^{d.} every one else, by humanity & Generosity--& she leaves me, + more than half in Love w^{th.} me--She goes into the South of + france, her health being insupportable in England--& her age, as + she now confesses ten Years more, than I thought being on the edge + of sixty--so God bless--& make the remainder of her Life happy--in + order to w^{ch.} I am to remit her three hundred guineas a year--& + give my dear Girl two thousand p^{ds.}--w^{th.} w^{ch.} all Joy, + I agree to,--but tis to be sunk into an annuity in the french + Loans-- + + --And now Eliza! Let me talk to thee--But What can I say, What can + I write--But the Yearnings of heart wasted with looking & wishing + for thy Return--Return--Return! my dear Eliza! May heaven smooth + the Way for thee to send thee safely to us, & joy for Ever. + +So ends the famous _Journal_, which at last we are permitted to read +with all its sins upon it. And I think the first observation that will +occur to every reader is surprise that a master of style could write +such slipshod, almost illiterate, English. The fact is a good many of +the writers of the day were content to leave all minor matters of +grammar and orthography to their printer, whom it was then the fashion +to abuse. More than one page of stately English out of that formal age +would look as queer as Sterne's hectic scribblings, could we see the +original manuscript. But the ill taste of it all is quite as apparent, +and unfortunately no printer could expunge that fault, along with his +haphazard punctuation, from Sterne's published works. In another way his +incongruous calling as a priest may be responsible for a note that +particularly jars upon us to-day. Too often in the midst of very earthly +sentiments he breaks forth with a bit of religious claptrap, as when in +the _Journal_ he cries out, "Great God of Mercy! shorten the Space +betwixt us--Shorten the space of our miseries!"--or as when, in that +letter to Lady Percy which so disgusted Thackeray, he dandles his +temptations, and in the same breath tells how he has repeated the Lord's +Prayer for the sake of deliverance from them. Again, I say, it is a +matter of taste, for there is no reason to believe that Yorick's +religious feelings were not just as sincere, and as volatile, too, as +his love-making. They sometimes came to him at an inopportune moment. + +"Un pretre corrumpu ne l'est jamais a demi"--a priest is never only half +corrupt--said Massillon, and there are times when such a saying is true. +It is also true, and Sterne's life is witness thereof, that in certain +ages, when compassion and tenderness of heart have taken the place of +religion's austerer virtues, a man may preach with conviction on Sunday, +and on Monday join without much disquiet of conscience in the revelries +of a "Crazy" Castle. There is not a great deal for the moralist to say +on such a life; it is a matter for the historian to explain. At +Cambridge Sterne had made the acquaintance of John Hall Stevenson, the +owner of Skelton, or "Crazy," Castle, which lay at Guisborough, within +convenient reach of Sterne's Yorkshire homes. An excellent engraving in +the present edition gives a fair notion of this fantastic dwelling +before its restoration. On a fringe of land between the edge of what +seems a stagnant pool and the foot of some barren hills, the old pile of +stone sits dull and lowering. First comes a double terrace rising sheer +from the water, and above that a rambling, comfortless-looking +structure, pierced in the upper story by a few solemn windows. Terraces +and building alike are braced with outstanding buttresses, as if, like +the House of Usher, the ancient edifice might some day split and crumble +away into the lake. At one end of the pile is a heavy square tower +erected long ago for defence; at the other stands a slender octagonal +turret with its famous weathercock, by whose direction the owner +regulated his mood for the day. The whole bears an aspect of bleakness +and solitude, in startling contrast with the wild doings of host and +guests. A study yet to be made is a history of the clubs or associations +of the eighteenth century, which, in imitation, no doubt, of the newly +instituted Masonic rites, were formed for the purpose of adding the +sting of a fraternal secrecy to the commonplace pleasures of +dissipation. Famous among these were the "Monks of Medmenham Abbey," and +the "Hell-Fire Club," and to a less degree the "Demoniacs" whom Hall +Stevenson gathered into his notorious abode. If Sterne found his +amusement in this boisterous assembly, it is charitable (and the +evidence points this way) to suppose that he enjoyed the jovial wit and +grotesque pranks of such a company rather than its viciousness. It is at +least remarkable that Hall Stevenson, or "Eugenius," as Sterne called +him, seems to have tried to steady the eccentric divine by more than one +piece of practical advice. Above all, there lay at Skelton a great +collection of Rabelaisian books, brought together by the owner during +his tours on the Continent; and to this Sterne owed his eccentric +reading and that acquaintance with the world's humours and +whimsicalities which were to make his fortune. + +Here, then, in the library of his compromising friend, he gathered the +material for his great work, _Tristram Shandy_; and, indeed, if we +credit some scholars, he gathered so successfully that little was left +for his own creative talents. It is demonstrably true that he made +extraordinary use of certain old French books, including Rabelais, whom +he counted with Cervantes as his master; and from Burton's _Anatomy of +Melancholy_ he borrowed unblushingly, not to mention other English +authors. We are shocked at first to learn that some of his choicest +passages are stolen goods; the recording angel's tear was shed, it +appears, and my Uncle Toby's fly was released long before that gentleman +was born to sweeten the world; so too the wind was tempered to the shorn +lamb in proverb before Sterne ever added that text to the stock of +biblical quotations. But after all, there is little to be gained by +unearthing these plagiarisms. _Tristram Shandy_ and the _Sentimental +Journey_ still remain among the most original productions in the +language, and we are only taught once more that genius has a high-handed +way of taking its own where it finds it. + +The fact is that this trick of borrowing scarcely does more than affect +a few of those set pieces or purple patches by which an author like +Sterne gradually comes to be known and judged. These are admirably +adapted for use in anthologies, for they may be severed from their +context without cutting a single artery or nerve; but let no one suppose +that from reading them he gets anything but a distorted view of Sterne's +work. They are all marked by a peculiar kind of artificial pathos--the +recording angel's tear, Uncle Toby's fly, the dead ass, the caged +starling, Maria of Moulines (I name them as they occur to me)--and they +give a very imperfect notion of the true Shandean flavour. In their own +genre they are no doubt masterpieces, but it is a genre which gives +pleasure from the perception of the art, and not from the kindling touch +of nature, in their execution. They are ostensibly pathetic, yet they +make no appeal to the heart, and I doubt if a tear was ever shed over +any of them--even by the lachrymose Yorick himself. To enjoy them +properly one must key his mind to that state in which the emotions cease +to have validity in themselves, and are changed into a kind of exquisite +convention. Now, it is easier by far to detect the inherent +insubstantiality of such a convention than to appreciate its delicately +balanced beauty, and thus it happens that we hear so much of Sterne's +false sentiment from those who base their criticism primarily on these +famous episodes. For my part I am almost inclined to place the story of +Le Fevre in this class, and to wonder if those who call it pathetic +really mean that it has touched their heart; I am sure it never cost me +a sigh. + +No, the highest mastery of Sterne does not lie in these anthological +patches, but first of all in his power of creating characters. There are +not many persons engaged in the little drama of Shandy Hall, and their +range of action is narrow, but they are drawn with a skill and a +memorable distinctness which have never been surpassed. Not the bustling +people of Shakespeare's stage are more real and individual than Mr. +Shandy, my Uncle Toby, Corporal Trim, and Dr. Slop. Even the minor +characters of the servants' hall are sketched in with wonderful +vividness; and if there is a single failure in all that gallery of +portraits, it is Yorick himself, who was drawn from the author and is +foisted upon the company somewhat unceremoniously, if truth be told. Nor +is the secret of their lifelikeness hard to discern. One of the constant +creeds of the age, handed down from the old comedy of humours, was the +belief in the "ruling passion" as the source of all a man's acts. The +persons who figure in most of the contemporary letters and novels are a +succession of originals or grotesques, moved by a single motive. They +are all mad in England, said Hamlet, and Walpole enforces the sentence +with a thousand burlesque anecdotes. Now in Sterne this ruling passion, +both in his own character and in that of his creations, was softened +down to what may be called a whimsical egotism, which does not repel by +its exaggeration, yet bestows a marvellous unity and relief. It is his +_hobbyhorsical_ philosophy, as he calls it. At the head of all are +Tristram's father and uncle, with their cunningly contrasted +humours--Mr. Shandy, who would regulate all the affairs of life by +abstract theorems of the mind, and my Uncle Toby, who is guided solely +by the impulses of the heart. Between them Sterne would seem to have set +over against each other the two divided sources of human activity; and +the minor characters, each with his cherished hobby, are ranged under +them in proper subordination. The art of the narrative--and in this +Sterne is without master or rival--is to bring these characters into a +group by some common motive, and then to show how each of them is +thinking all the while of his own dear crotchet. Take, for example, the +tremendous curse of Ernulphus in the third book. Mr. Shandy had "the +greatest veneration in the world for that gentleman, who, in distrust of +his own discretion in this point, sat down and composed (that is, at his +leisure) fit forms of swearing suitable to all cases, from the lowest to +the highest provocation which could possibly happen to him." That is Mr. +Shandy's theorising hobby, and accordingly, when his man Obadiah is the +cause of an annoying mishap, Mr. Shandy reaches down the formal curse of +Bishop Ernulphus and hands it to Dr. Slop to read. It might seem tedious +to have seven pages of excommunicative wrath thrust upon you, with the +Latin text duly written out on the opposite page. On the contrary, this +is one of the more entertaining scenes of the book, for at every step +one or another of the listeners throws in an exclamation which intimates +how the words are falling in with his own peculiar train of thought. The +result is a delightful cross-section of human nature, as it actually +exists. "Our armies swore terribly in _Flanders_, cried my Uncle +_Toby_--but nothing to this.--For my own part, I could not have a heart +to curse my dog so." + +But it is not this persistent and very human egotism alone which makes +the good people of Shandy Hall so real to us. Sterne is the originator +and master of the gesture and the attitude. Like a skilful player of +puppets, he both puts words into the mouths of his creatures and pulls +the wires that move them. No one has ever approached him in the art with +which he carries out every mood of the heart and every fancy of the +brain into the most minute and precise posturing. Before Corporal Trim +reads the sermon his exact attitude is described so that, as the author +says, "a statuary might have modelled from it." Throughout all the +dialogue between the two contrasted brothers we follow every movement of +the speakers, as if we sat with them in the flesh, and when Mr. Shandy +breaks his pipe the moment is tense with expectation. But the supreme +exhibition of this art occurs at the announcement of Bobby's death. Let +us leave Mr. Shandy and my Uncle Toby discoursing over this sad event, +and turn to the kitchen. Those who know the scene may pass on: + + ----My young master in _London_ is dead! said Obadiah.-- + + ----A green sattin night-gown of my mother's, which had been twice + scoured, was the first idea which _Obadiah's_ exclamation brought + into _Susannah's_ head.... + + --O! 'twill be the death of my poor mistress, cried + _Susannah_.--My mother's whole wardrobe followed.--What a + procession! her red damask,--her orange tawney,--her white and + yellow lutestrings,--her brown taffata,--her bone-laced caps, her + bed-gowns, and comfortable under-petticoats.--Not a rag was left + behind.--"_No,--she will never look up again_," said _Susannah_. + + We had a fat, foolish scullion--my father, I think, kept her for + her simplicity;--she had been all autumn struggling with a + dropsy.--He is dead, said _Obadiah_,--he is certainly dead!--So am + not I, said the foolish scullion. + + ----Here is sad news, _Trim_, cried _Susannah_, wiping her eyes as + _Trim_ stepp'd into the kitchen,--master _Bobby_ is dead and + _buried_--the funeral was an interpolation of _Susannah's_--we + shall have all to go into mourning, said _Susannah_. + + I hope not, said _Trim_.--You hope not! cried _Susannah_ + earnestly.--The mourning ran not in _Trim's_ head, whatever it did + in _Susannah's_.--I hope--said _Trim_, explaining himself, I hope + in God the news is not true--I heard the letter read with my own + ears, answered _Obadiah_; and we shall have a terrible piece of + work of it in stubbing the Ox-moor.--Oh! he's dead, said + _Susannah_.--As sure, said the scullion, as I'm alive. + + I lament for him from my heart and my soul, said _Trim_, fetching + a sigh.--Poor creature!--poor boy!--poor gentleman! + + --He was alive last _Whitsontide_! said the + coachman.--_Whitsontide!_ alas! cried _Trim_, extending his right + arm, and falling instantly into the same attitude in which he read + the sermon,--what is _Whitsontide_, _Jonathan_ (for that was the + coachman's name), or _Shrovetide_, or any tide or time past, to + this? Are we not here now, continued the corporal (striking the + end of his stick perpendicularly upon the floor, so as to give an + idea of health and stability)--and are we not--(dropping his hat + upon the ground) gone! in a moment!--'T was infinitely striking! + _Susannah_ burst into a flood of tears.--We are not stocks and + stones.--_Jonathan, Obadiah_, the cookmaid, all melted.--The + foolish fat scullion herself, who was scouring a fish-kettle upon + her knees, was rous'd with it.--The whole kitchen crowded about + the corporal. + +There is the true Sterne. A common happening unites a half-dozen people +in a sympathetic group, yet all the while each of them is living his +individual life. You may look far and wide, but you will find nothing +quite comparable to that fat, foolish scullion. And withal there is no +touch of cynical satire in this display of egotism, but a kindly, +quizzical sense of the way in which our human personalities are jumbled +together in this strange world. And in the end the feeling that lies +covered up in the heart of each, the feeling that all of us carry dumbly +in the inevitable presence of death, is conveyed in that supreme gesture +of Corporal Trim's, whose force in the book is magnified by the +author's fantastic disquisition on its precise nature and significance. + +It begins to grow clear, I think, that we have here something more than +an ordinary tale in which a few individuals are set apart to enact their +roles. Somehow, this quaint household in the country, where nothing more +important is happening than the birth of a child, becomes a symbol of +the great world with all its tangle of cross-purposes. There is a +philosophy, a new and distinct vision of the meaning of life, in these +scenes, which makes of Sterne something larger than a mere novelist. He +was not indulging his author's vanity when he thought of himself as a +follower of Rabelais and Cervantes and Swift, for he belongs with them +rather than with his great contemporaries, Fielding and Smollet, or his +greater successors, Thackeray and Dickens. Nor is his exact parentage +hard to discover. In Rabelais I seem to see the embryonic humour of a +world coming to the birth and not yet fully formed. Through the crust of +the old mediaeval ideals the new humanism was struggling to emerge, and +in its first lusty liberty mankind, with the clog of the old +civilisation still hanging upon it, was like those monsters that Nature +threw off when she was preparing her hand for a higher creation. There +is something unshaped, as of Milton's beast wallowing unwieldy, in the +creatures of Rabelais's brain; yet withal one perceives the pride of the +design that is foreshadowed and will some day come to its own. +Cervantes arose in the full tide of humanism, and there is about his +humour the pathetic regret for an ideal that has been swept aside by the +new forms. For this young civilisation, which spurned so haughtily the +ancient law of humiliation and which was to be satisfied with the full +and unconfined development of pure human nature, had a pitiful +incompleteness to all but a few of Fortune's minions, and the memory of +the past haunted the brain of Cervantes like a ghost vanquished and made +ridiculous, but unwilling to depart. He found therein the tragic humour +of man's ideal life. Then came Swift. Into his heart he sucked the +bitterness of a thousand disappointments. Even the semblance of the old +ideals had passed away, and for the fair promise of the new world he saw +only corruption and folly and a gigantic egotism stalking in the +disguise of liberty. Savage indignation laid hold of him and he vented +his rage in that mocking laughter which stings the ears like a buffet. +His was the sardonic humour. But time that takes away brings also its +compensation. To Sterne, living among smaller men, these passionate +egotisms are dwindled to mere caprices, and a jest becomes more +appropriate than a sneer. And after all, one good thing is left. There +is the kindly heart and the humble acknowledgment that we too are +seeking our own petty ends. It is a world of homely chance into which +Sterne introduces us, and there is no room in it for the boisterous +mirth or the tragedy or wrath of his predecessors. His humour is merely +whimsical; his smile is almost a caress. + +I can never look at that portrait of Sterne by Sir Joshua Reynolds, with +the head thrown forward and the index finger of the right hand laid upon +the forehead, but an extraordinary fantasy enters my mind. I seem to see +one of those pictures of the Renaissance, in which the face of the +Almighty beams benevolently out of the sky, but as I gaze, the features +gradually change into those of Yorick. The mouth assumes the sly smile, +and the eyes twinkle with conscious merriment, as if they were saying, +"We know, you and I, but we won't tell!" Possibly it is something in the +pose of Sir Joshua's picture which lends itself to this transformation, +helped by a feeling that the Shandean world, over which Sterne presides, +is at times as real as the actualities that surround us. That portrait +at the head of his works is, so to speak, an image of His Sacred +Majesty, Chance, whom a witty Frenchman reverenced as the genius of this +world. + +It may be that we do not always in our impatience recognise how artfully +the caprices of Sterne's manner are adapted to creating this atmosphere +of illusion. Now and then his trick of reaching a point by the longest +way round, his wanton interruptions, the absurdity of his blank pages, +and other cheap devices to appear original, grow a trifle wearisome, and +we call the author a mountebank for his pains. Yet was there ever a +great book without its tedious flats? They would seem to be necessary to +procure the proper perspective. Certainly all these whimsicalities of +Sterne's manner fall in admirably with the central theme of _Tristram +Shandy_, which is nothing else but an exposition of the way in which the +blind goddess Chance, whose hobby-horse is this world itself, makes her +plaything of the lesser caprices of mankind. "I have been the continual +sport of what the world calls Fortune," cries Tristram at the beginning +of his narrative, and indeed that deity laid her designs early against +our hero, whose troubles date from the very day of conception. "I see it +plainly," says Mr. Shandy, in his chapter of Lamentation, when calamity +had succeeded calamity--"I see it plainly, that either for my own sins, +brother _Toby_, or the sins and follies of the _Shandy_ family, Heaven +has thought fit to draw forth the heaviest of its artillery against me; +and the prosperity of my child is the point upon which the whole force +of it is directed to play."--"Such a thing would batter the whole +universe about our ears," replies my Uncle Toby, thinking no doubt of +the terrible work of the artillery in Flanders. Mr. Shandy was a man of +ideas, and Tristram was to be the embodiment of a theory. But +alas,--"with all my precautions how was my system turned topside-turvy +in the womb with my child!" There is something inimitably droll in this +combat between the solemn, pedantic notions of Mr. Shandy and the +blunders of Chance. The interrupted conception of poor Tristram, his +unfortunate birth, the crushing of his nose, the grotesque mistake in +naming him,--all are scenes in this ludicrous and prolonged warfare. Nor +is my Uncle Toby any the less a subject of Fortune's sport. There is, to +begin with, a comical inconsistency between the feminine tenderness of +his heart and his absorption in the memories of war. His hobby of living +through in miniature the campaign of the army in Flanders is one of the +kindliest satires on human ambition ever penned. And it was inevitable +that my Uncle Toby, with his "most extreme and unparalleled modesty of +nature," should in the end have fallen a victim to the designs of a +woman like the Widow Wadman. It is, as I have said, this underlying +philosophy worked out in every detail of the book which makes of +_Tristram Shandy_ something more than a mere comedy of manners. It +shatters the whole world of convention before our eyes and rebuilds it +according to the humour of a mad Yorkshire parson. And all of us at +times, I think, may find our pleasure and a lesson of human frailty, +too, by entering for a while into the concerns of that Shandean society. + +Sterne, on one side of his character, was a sentimentalist. That, and +little more than that, we see in his letters and _Journal_. And in a +form, subtilised no doubt to a kind of exquisite felicity, that is the +essence of his _Sentimental Journey_, as the name implies. He was +indeed the first author to use the word "sentimental" in its modern +significance, and for one reason and another this was the trait of his +writing that was able, as the French would say, to _faire ecole_. It +flooded English literature with tearful trash like Mackenzie's _Man of +Feeling_, and, in a happier manner, it influenced even Thackeray more +than he would have been willing to admit. It is present in _Tristram +Shandy_, but only as a milder and half-concealed flavour, subduing the +satire of that travesty to the uses of a genial and sympathetic humour. + +Probably, however, the imputation of sentimentalism repels fewer readers +from Sterne to-day than that of immorality. It is a charge easily flung, +and in part deserved. And yet, in all honesty, are we not prone to fall +into cant whenever this topic is broached? I was reading in a family +edition of Rabelais the other day and came across this sentence in the +introduction: "After wading through the worst of Rabelais's work, one +needs a thorough bath and a change of raiment, but after Sterne one +needs strychnine and iron and a complete change of blood." It does not +seem to me that the case with Sterne is quite so bad as that. Rabelais +wrote when the human passions were emerging from restraint, and it was +part of his humour to paint the lusty youth of the world in colours of +grotesque exaggeration. Sterne, coming in an age of conventional +manners, pointed slyly to the gross and untamed thoughts that lurked in +the minds of men beneath all their stiffened decorum. It was the purpose +of his "topside-turvydom," as it was of Rabelais's, to turn the under +side of human nature up to the light, and to show how Fortune smiles at +the social proprieties; but his instrument was necessarily innuendo +instead of boisterous ribaldry, Shandeism in place of Pantagruelism. +Deliberately he employed this art of insinuation in such a way as to +draw the reader on to look for hidden meanings where none really exists. +We are made an unwilling accomplice in his obscenity, and this perhaps, +though a legitimate device, is the most objectionable feature of his +suggestive style. + +One may concede so much and yet dislike such broad accusations of +immorality as are sometimes laid against him. I cannot see what harm can +come to a mature mind from either Rabelais or Sterne. And if the _pueris +reverentia_ be taken as the criterion (the effect actually produced on +those who are as yet unformed, for good or ill, by the experience of +life) I am inclined to think that the really dangerous books are those +like the _Venus and Adonis_, which throw the colours of a glowing +imagination over what is in itself perfectly natural and wholesome; I am +inclined to think that Shakespeare has debauched more immature minds +than ever Sterne could do, and that even Pantagruelism is more +inflammatory than Shandeism. So far as morals alone are concerned there +is a touch of what may be called inverted cant in this discrimination +between the wholesome and the unwholesome. Sir Walter Scott, in his +straight-forward, manly way, put the matter right once for all: "It +cannot be said that the licentious humour of _Tristram Shandy_ is of the +kind which applies itself to the passions, or is calculated to corrupt +society. But it is a sin against taste if allowed to be harmless as to +morals." The question with Sterne's writings, as with his life, is not +so much one of morality as of taste. And if we admit that he +occasionally sinned against these inexorable laws, this does not mean +that his book as a whole was ill or foully conceived. He merely erred at +times by excess of his method. + +The first two volumes of _Tristram Shandy_ were written in 1759, when +Sterne was forty-six, and were advertised for sale in London on the +first day of the year following. Like many another too original work, it +had first to go a-begging for a publisher, but the effect of it on the +great world, when once it became known, was prodigious. The author soon +followed his book to the city to reap his reward, and the story of his +fame in London during his annual visits and of his reception in Paris +reads like enchantment. "My Lodging," he writes to his dear Kitty in the +first flush of triumph, "is euery hour full of your Great People of the +first Rank, who striue who shall most honor me;--euen all the Bishops +have sent their Complim^{ts.} to me, & I set out on Monday Morning to +pay my Visits to them all. I am to dine w^{h.} Lord Chesterfield this +Week, &c. &c., and next Sunday L^{d.} Rockingham takes me to Court." +Nor was his reward confined to the empty plaudits of society. Lord +Falconberg presented him with the perpetual curacy of Coxwold, a +comfortable charge not twenty miles from Sutton. The "proud priest" +Warburton sent him a purse of gold, because (so the story ran, but it +may well have been idle slander) he had heard that Sterne contemplated +introducing him into a later volume as the tutor of Tristram. + +Sterne planned to bring out two successive volumes each year for the +remainder of his life, and the number did actually run to nine without +getting Tristram much beyond his childhood's misadventures. At different +times, also, he published two volumes of _Sermons by Mr. Yorick_, which, +in their own way, and considered as moral essays rather than as +theological discourses, are worthy of a study in themselves. They are +for one thing almost the finest example in English of that style which +follows the sinuosities and subtle transitions of the spoken word. + +But soon his health, always delicate, began to give way under the strain +of reckless living. Long vacations in Paris and the South of France +restored his strength temporarily, and at the same time gave him +material for the travel scenes in _Tristram Shandy_ and for the +_Sentimental Journey_. But that "vile asthma" was never long absent, +and there is something pitiable in the quips and jests with which he +covers his dread of the spectre that was pursuing him. We have seen how +the travail of his broken body wails in the _Journal to Eliza_; and his +last letter, written from his lodging in London to his truest and least +equivocal friend, was, as Thackeray says, a plea for pity and pardon: +"Do, dear Mrs. J[ames], entreat him to come to-morrow, or next day, for +perhaps I have not many days, or hours to live--I want to ask a favour +of him, if I find myself worse--that I shall beg of you, if in this +wrestling I come off conqueror--my spirits are fled--'tis a bad omen--do +not weep my dear Lady--your tears are too precious to shed for +me--bottle them up, and may the cork never be drawn.--Dearest, kindest, +gentlest, and best of women! may health, peace, and happiness prove your +handmaids.--If I die, cherish the remembrance of me, and forget the +follies which you so often condemn'd--which my heart, not my head, +betray'd me into. Should my child, my Lydia want a mother, may I hope +you will (if she is left parentless) take her to your bosom?"--I cannot +but feel that the man who wrote that note was kind and good at heart, +and that through all his wayward tricks and sham sentiment, as through +the incoherence of his untrimmed language, there ran a vein of genuine +sweetness. + +He sent this appeal from Bond Street, on Tuesday, the 15th of March, +1768. On Friday, the 18th, a party of his roistering friends, nobles and +actors and gay livers, were having a grand dinner in a street near by, +when some one in the midst of their frolic mentioned that Sterne was +lying ill in his chamber. They dispatched a footman to inquire of their +old merry-maker, and this is the report that he wrote in later years; it +is unique in its terrible simplicity: + + About this time, Mr. Sterne, the celebrated author, was taken ill + at the silk-bag shop in Old Bond Street. He was sometimes called + "Tristram Shandy," and sometime "Yorick"; a very great favourite + of the gentlemen's. One day my master had company to dinner, who + were speaking about him; the Duke of Roxburgh, the Earl of March, + the Earl of Ossory, the Duke of Grafton, Mr. Garrick, Mr. Hume, + and Mr. James. "John," said my master, "go and inquire how Mr. + Sterne is to-day." I went, returned, and said: I went to Mr. + Sterne's lodging; the mistress opened the door; I inquired how he + did. She told me to go up to the nurse; I went into the room, and + he was just a-dying. I waited ten minutes; but in five he said, + "Now it is come!" He put up his hand as if to stop a blow, and + died in a minute. The gentlemen were all very sorry, and lamented + him very much. + +We have seen Corporal Trim in the kitchen dropping his hat as a symbol +of man's quick and humiliating collapse, but I think the attitude of +poor Yorick himself lying in his hired chamber, with hand upraised to +stop the invisible blow, a work of greater and still more astounding +genius. It was devised by the Master of gesture indeed, by him whose +puppets move on a wider stage than that of Shandy Hall. + + + + +J. HENRY SHORTHOUSE + + +Probably few people expected a work of more than mediocre interest when +they heard that Mrs. Shorthouse was preparing her husband's _Letters and +Literary Remains_ for the the press.[9] The life of a Birmingham +merchant, who in the course of his evenings elaborated one rather +mystical novel and then a few paler and abbreviated shadows of it, did +not, indeed, promise a great deal, and there is something to make one +shudder in the very sound of "literary remains." Nor would it have been +reassuring to know that these remains were for the most part short +essays and stories read at the social meetings of the Friends' Essay +Society of Birmingham. The manuscript records of such a club are not a +source to which one would naturally look for exhilarating literature, +yet from them, let me say at once, the editor has drawn a volume both +interesting and valuable. Mr. Shorthouse contributed to these meetings +for some twenty years, from the age of eighteen until he withdrew to +concentrate his energies upon _John Inglesant_, and it is worthy of +notice that his early sketches are, on the whole, better work than the +more elaborate essays, such as that on _The Platonism of Wordsworth_, +which followed the production of his masterpiece. He was to an +extraordinary degree _homo unius libri_, almost of a single thought, and +there is a certain freshness in his immature presentation of that idea +which was lost after it once received the stamp of definitive +expression. Hawthorne, we already knew, furnished the model for his +later method, but we feel a pleasant shock, such as always accompanies +the perception of some innate consistency, on opening to the very first +sentence in his volume of Remains, and finding the master's name: "I +have been all my life what Nathaniel Hawthorne calls 'a devoted epicure +of my own emotions.'" That, I suppose, was written about 1854, when +Hawthorne's first long romance had been published scarcely four years, +and shows a remarkable power in the young disciple of finding his +literary kinship. Indeed, not the least of his resemblances to Hawthorne +is the fact that he seems from the first to have possessed a native +sense of style; what other men toil for was theirs by right of birth. In +the earliest of these sketches the cadenced rhythms of _John Inglesant_ +are already present, lacking a little, perhaps, in the perfect assurance +that came later, but still unmistakable. And at times--in _The Autumn +Walk_, for instance, with its "attempt to find language for nameless +sights and voices," in _Sundays at the Seaside_, with their benediction +of outpoured light upon the waters, offering to the beholder as it were +the sacrament of beauty, or in the _Recollections of a London +Church_,--at times, I say, we seem almost to be reading some lost or +discarded chapter of the finished romance. This closing paragraph of the +_Recollections_, written apparently when Shorthouse was not much more +than a boy--might it not be a memory of King Charles's cavalier +himself?-- + + Certes, it was very strange that the story of this young girl whom + I have never seen, whom I knew so little of, should haunt me thus. + Yet for her sake I loved the church and the trees and even the + dark and dingy houses round about; and as with the small + congregation I listened to the refrain of that sublime litany + which sounded forth, word for word, as she had heard it, I thought + it all the more divine because I knew so certainly that in her + days of trouble and affliction it had supported and comforted her: + + By Thine agony and bloody sweat; by Thy cross and passion; by Thy + precious death and burial; by Thy glorious resurrection and + ascension; and by the coming of the Holy Ghost, Good Lord deliver + us. + +And the Life, too, in an unpretentious way, is decidedly more +interesting than might have been expected. The narrative is simply told, +and the letters are for the most part quiet expositions of the idea that +dominated the writer's mind. Here and there comes the gracious record of +some day of shimmering lights among the Welsh hills;--"a wonderful +vision of sea and great mountains in a pale white mist trembling into +blue," as he writes to Mr. Gosse from Llandudno, and we know we are with +the author of _John Inglesant_. Joseph Henry Shorthouse was born in +Birmingham on September 9th, 1834. His parents belonged to the Society +of Friends, and the boy's first schooling was at the house of a lady who +belonged to the same body. He was, however, of an extremely sensitive +and timid disposition, and even the excitement of this homelike school +affected him deplorably. "I have now," says his wife, "the old copy of +Lindley Murray's spelling book which he used there. His mother saw, to +her dismay, when she heard him repeat the few small words of his lesson, +that his face worked painfully, and his little nervous fingers had worn +away the bottom edges of his book, and that he was beginning to +stammer." He was immediately taken from school, but the affection of +stammering remained with him through life and cut him off from much +active intercourse with the world. He acknowledged that without it he +would probably never have found time for his studies and productive +work, and the eloquence of his pen was due in part to the lameness of +his tongue. At a later date he went for a while to Tottenham College, +but his real education he got from tutors and still more from his own +insatiable love of books. + +It appears that all his family associations were of a kind to foster the +peculiar talents that were to bring him fame. His father while dressing +used to tell the boy of his travels in Italy, and so imbued him with a +love for that wonderful country which he himself was never to see. In +after years, when the elder Shorthouse came to read his son's novel, he +was surprised and delighted to find the scenes he had described all +written out with extraordinary accuracy. Even more beneficial was the +influence of his grandmother, Rebecca Shorthouse, and her home at +Moseley, where every Thursday young Henry and his four girl cousins, the +Southalls, used to foregather and spend the day. One of the cousins has +left a record of this garden estate and of these weekly visits which +might have been written by Shorthouse himself, so illuminated is it with +that subdued radiance which rests upon all his works. I could wish it +were permissible to quote at even greater length from these pages, for +they are the best possible preparation for an understanding of _John +Inglesant_: + + The old house at Moseley ... was surrounded by a large extent of + garden ground and ample lawns. The gardens were on different + levels--the upper was the flower garden. No gardener with his + dozens of bedding plants molested that fragrant solitude, but + there, unhindered, the narcissus multiplied into sheets of bloom, + the little yellow rose embodied the summer sunshine, the white + roses climbed into the old apple trees, or looked out from the + depths of the ivy, and we knew the sweet-briar was there, though + we saw it not. + + Below, but accessible by stone steps, lay the low garden, + surrounded by brick lichen-covered walls, beyond which rose banks + of trees. [The "blue door" in this garden wall is introduced in + the _Countess Eve_, and another part of the garden in _Sir + Percival_.] On these old walls nectarines, peaches, and apricots + ripened in the August sun. In the upper part of this walled garden + stretched a winding lawn, made in the shape of a letter S, and + surrounded on all sides by laurels. This was a complete seclusion. + In the broad light of noon, when the lilacs and laburnums and + guelder-roses were full of bees, and each laurel leaf, as if newly + burnished, reflected the glorious sunshine, it was a delicious + solitude, where we read, or talked, or thought, to our hearts' + content. But as night fell, when "the laurels' pattering talk was + over," there was a deep solemnity in its dark shadows, and in its + stillness and loneliness. + +_Qualis ab incepto!_ Are we not in fancy carried straightway to that +scene where the boy Inglesant goes back to his first schoolmaster, whom +he finds sitting amid his flowers, and who tells him marvellous things +concerning the search for the Divine Light? or to that other scene, +where he talks with Dr. Henry More in the garden of Oulton, and hears +that rare Platonist discourse on the glories of the visible world, +saying: "I am in fact '_Incola coeli in terra_,' an inhabitant of +paradise and heaven upon earth; and I may soberly confess that +sometimes, walking abroad after my studies, I have been almost mad with +pleasure,--the effect of nature upon my soul having been inexpressibly +ravishing, and beyond what I can convey to you." Indeed, not only _John +Inglesant_, but all of Mr. Shorthouse's stories could not be better +described than as a writing out at large of the wistful memory of that +time when men heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in +the cool of the day--and were still not afraid. But we must not pass on +without observing the more individual traits of the boy noted down in +the record: + + That which strikes one most in recalling our intercourse with our + cousin at this time is that our conversation did not consist of + commonplaces; we talked for hours on literary subjects, or, if + persons were under discussion, they were such as had a real + interest; the books we were reading were the chief theme. The low + garden was generally the scene of these conversations, and it was + here we read and talked all through the long summer afternoons ... + Nathaniel Hawthorne had a perennial charm,--his influence on our + cousin was permanent,--and we turned from all other books to + Hawthorne's with fresh delight. There is in existence a well-worn + copy of the _Twice-Told Tales_ that was seldom out of our hands. + [It is in the Preface to this book that Hawthorne boasts of being + "the obscurest man of letters in America."].... + + Our cousin was at this and all other times very particular about + his dress and appearance; it seemed to us then that he assumed a + certain exaggeration with regard to them; we did not understand + how consistent it all was with his idea of life.... + + He was not at all fond of walking, and it is doubtful if he cared + for mountain scenery for its own sake. He responded to the moods + of Nature with a sensitiveness that was natural to him, but it was + her quiet aspects which most affected him. He was a native of "the + land where it is always afternoon." + +But life was not all play with young Shorthouse. At the age of sixteen +his father took him into the chemical works which had been founded by +the great-grandfather, and, although his father and later his brother +were indulgent to him in many ways, the best of his energies went to +this business until within a few years of his death. There is something +incongruous, as has been remarked, in the manufacture of vitriol and the +writing of mystical novels. In 1857 he married Sarah Scott, whom he had +known for a number of years, and the young couple took a house in +Edgbaston, the suburb of Birmingham in which they had both grown up and +where they continued to live until the end. Mrs. Shorthouse tells of the +disposition of his hours. He went regularly to business at nine, came +home to dinner in the middle of the day, and returned to town till +nearly seven. The evenings, after the first hour of relaxation, were +mostly devoted to studying Greek, reading classics and divinity, and the +seventeenth-century literature, which had always possessed a peculiar +fascination for him. During the years from 1866 to 1876 he was slowly +putting together his story of _John Inglesant_, and with the exception +of his wife, no one saw the writing, or, indeed, knew that he had a work +of any such magnitude on hand. For four years he kept the completed +manuscript, which was rejected by one or two publishers, and then, in +1880, he printed an edition of a hundred copies for private +distribution. One of these fell into the hands of Mrs. Humphry Ward, +and through her the Macmillans became interested in the book, and +requested to publish it. No one was more amazed at the reception of the +story than was the author himself. He was immediately a man of mark, and +the doors of the world were thrown open to him. Other stories followed, +beautiful in thought and expression, but too manifestly little more in +substance than pale reflections of his one great book; his message +needed no repetition. He died in 1903, beloved and honoured by all who +knew him, and it is characteristic of the man that during his last years +of suffering one or another of the volumes of _John Inglesant_ was +always at his side, a comfort and a consoling voice to the author as it +had been to so many other readers. + +Religion was the supreme reality for him as a boy, and as a man nearing +the hidden goal. His family were Quakers, but in 1861 he and his wife +became members of the Church of England, and it was under the influence +of that faith his books were written. Naturally his letters and the +record of his life have much to say of religious matters, but in one +respect they are disappointing. It would have been interesting to know a +little more precisely the nature of his views and the steps by which he +passed from one form of belief to the other. That the anxiety attendant +on the change cost him heavily and for a while broke down his health, we +know, and from his published writings it is easy to conjecture the +underlying cause of the change, but the more human aspect of the +struggle he underwent is still left obscure. + +Nor is his relation to the three-cornered embroglio within the Church +itself anywhere set forth in detail. Almost it would seem as if he dwelt +in some charmed corner of the fold into which the reverberations of +those terrific words _Broad_ and _High_ and _Low_ penetrated only as a +subdued muttering. To supplement this defect I have myself been reading +some of the literature of that contest, and among other things a series +of able papers on _Le Mouvement Ritualiste dans l'Eglise Anglicane_, +which M. Paul Thureau-Dangin has just published in the _Revue des Deux +Mondes_. The impression left on my own mind has been in the highest +degree contradictory and exasperating. One labours incessantly to know +what all this tumult is about, and I should suppose that no more +inveterate and vicious display of parochialism was ever enacted in this +world. To pass from these disputes to the religious conflict that was +going on in France at the same time is to learn in a striking way the +difference between words and ideas; and even our own pet transcendental +hubbub in Concord is in comparison with the Oxford debate vast and +cosmopolitan in significance. The intrusion of a single idea into that +mad logomachy would have been a phenomenon more appalling than the +appearance of a naked body in a London drawing-room, and it is not +without its amusing side that one of Newman's associates is said to have +dreaded "the preponderance of intellect among the elements of character +and as a guide of life" in that perplexed apologist. Ideas are not +conspicuous anywhere in English literature, least of all in its +religious books, and often one is inclined to extend Bagehot's cynical +pleasantry as a cloak for deficiencies here, too: the stupidity of the +English is the salvation of their literature as well as of their +politics. For it is only fair to add that this ecclesiastical battle, if +paltry in abstract thought, was rich in human character and in a certain +obstinate perception of the validity of traditional forms; it was at +bottom a contest over the position of the Church in the intricate +hierarchy of society, and pure religion was the least important factor +under consideration. + +Two impulses, which were in reality one, were at the origin of the +movement. Religion had lagged behind the rest of life in that impetuous +awakening of the imagination which had come with the opening of the +nineteenth century; it retained all the dryness and lifeless cant of the +preceding generation, which had marked about the lowest stage of British +formalism. Enthusiasm of any sort was more feared than sin. Perhaps the +first widely recognized sign of change was the publication, in 1827, of +Keble's _Christian Year_, although the "Advertisement" to that famous +book showed no promise of a startling revolution. "Next to a sound rule +of faith," said the author, "there is nothing of so much consequence as +a sober standard of feeling in matters of practical religion"; and +certainly, to one who reads those peaceful hymns to-day, sobriety seems +to have marked them for her own. Yet their effect was undoubtedly to +import into the Church and into the contemplation of churchmen something +of that enthusiasm, trained now and subdued to authority, which had been +the possession of infidels and sectaries. + + What sudden blaze of song + Spreads o'er the expanse of Heaven? + In waves of light it thrills along, + The angelic signal given-- + "Glory to God!" from yonder central fire + Flows out the echoing lay beyond the starry choir;-- + +such words men read in the hymn for _Christmas Day_, and they were +thrilled to think that the imaginative glow, which for a score of years +had burned in the secular poets, was at last impressed into the service +of the sanctuary. + +Another impulse, more definite in its nature, was the shock of the +reform bill. In his _Apologia_, Cardinal Newman, looking back to the +early days of the Tractarian Movement, declared that "the vital question +was, How were we to keep the Church from being Liberalised?" and in his +eyes the sermon preached by Keble, July 14, 1833, on the subject of +_National Apostasy_, was the first sounding of the battle cry. Impelled +by the fear of the new democratic tendencies, which threatened to lay +hold of the Church and to use it for utilitarian ends, the leaders of +the opposition sought to go back beyond the ordinances of the +Reformation, and to emphasise the close relation of the present forms of +worship with those of the first Christian centuries; against the +invasions of the civil government they raised the notion of the Church +universal and one. The first of the famous Tracts, dated September 9, +1833, puts the question frankly: + + Should the Government and the Country so far forget their God as + to cast off the Church, to deprive it of its temporal honours and + substance, _on what_ will you rest the claim of respect and + attention which you make upon your flocks? Hitherto you have been + upheld by your birth, your education, your wealth, your + connexions; should these secular advantages cease, on what must + Christ's ministers depend? + +A layman might reply simply, _On the truth_, and Shorthouse, as we shall +see, had such an answer to make, though couched in more circuitous +language. But not so the Tract: + + I fear we have neglected the real ground on which our authority is + built--OUR APOSTOLICAL DESCENT. + +That was the Tractarian, or Oxford, Movement, which united the claims of +the imagination with the claims of priestcraft, and by a logical +development led the way to Rome. In the Church at large, the new leaven +worked its way slowly and confusedly, but in the end it created a +tripartite division, which threatened for a while to bring the whole +establishment down in ruins. The first of these, the High Church, is +indeed essentially a continuation, and to a certain extent a +vulgarisation, of the Oxford Movement. What had been a kind of epicurean +vision of holy things, reserved for a few chosen souls, was now made the +vehicle of a wide propaganda. The beautiful rites of the ancient worship +were a powerful seduction to wean the rich from worldly living and no +less a tangible compensation for the poor and outcast. At a later date, +under the stress of persecution, the leaders of the party formulated the +so-called Six Points on which they made a final stand: (1) The eastward +position; (2) the eucharistic vestments; (3) altar candles; (4) water +mingled with the wine in the chalice; (5) unleavened bread; (6) +incense--without these there was no worship; barely, if at all, +salvation. The Low Church was, in large part, a state of pure hostility +to these followers of the Scarlet Woman; it was loudly Protestant, +confining the virtue of religion to an acceptance of the dogmas of the +Reformation, distrusting the symbolical appeal to the imagination, and +finding the truth too often in what was merely opposition to Rome. +Contrary to both, and despised by both, was the Broad Church, which held +the sacraments so lightly that, with the Dean of Westminster, it joined +in communion with Unitarians, and which treated dogma so cavalierly +that, with Maurice, it thought a subscription to the Thirty-nine +Articles the quickest way to liberty of belief. Yet I cannot see that +this boasted freedom did much more than introduce a kind of license in +the interpretation of words; it transferred the field of battle from +forms to formulae. + +From this unpromising soil (intellectually, for in character it +possessed its giants) was to spring the one great religious novel of the +English language. I have thought it worth while to recall thus briefly, +yet I fear tediously, the chief aspects of the controversy, because only +as the result of a profound and, in many respects, violent national +upheaval can the force and the inner veracity of _John Inglesant_ be +comprehended. Mrs. Shorthouse fails to dwell on this point; indeed, it +would appear from her record that the noise of the dispute reached her +husband only from afar off. Yet during the years of composition he was +dwelling in a house at Edgbaston within a stone's throw of the Oratory, +where, at that time and to the end of his life, Cardinal Newman resided, +having found peace at last in the surrender of his doubts to authority. +The thought of that venerable man and of the agony through which he had +come must have been often in the novelist's mind. And it was during +these same ten years of composition that the forces of Low and High +were lined up against each other like two hostile armies, under the +banners of the English Church Union and the Church Association. The +activity of this latter body, which was founded in 1865 for the express +purpose of "putting down" the heresy of ritualism, may be gathered from +the fact that at a single meeting it voted to raise a fund of some +$250,000 for the sake of attacking High Church clergymen through the +processes of law. Not without reason was it dubbed the Persecution +Company limited. + +Now it may be possible with some ingenuity of argument--Laud himself had +aforetime made such an attempt--to regard the Battle of the Churches as +a contest of the reason; in practice its provincialism is due to the +fact that it was concerned, not with the truth, but with what men had +held to be the truth. That Mr. Shorthouse was able to write a book which +is in a way the direct fruit of this conflict, and which still contains +so much of the universal aspect of religion, came, I think, from his +early Quaker training and from his Greek philosophy. It would be a +mistake to suppose that, on entering the Church of England, he closed in +his own breast the door to that inner sanctuary of listening silence, +the _innocuae silentia vitae_, where he had been taught to worship as a +child. At the time of the change he could still write to one who was +distressed at his decision: "I grant that Friends, at their +commencement, held with a strong hand perhaps the most important truth +of this system, the indwelling of the Divine Word." In reality, there +was no "perhaps" in Mr. Shorthouse's own adherence to this principle, +both before and after his conversion; only he would place a new emphasis +on the word "indwelling." The step signified to him, as I read his life, +a transition from the religion of the conscience to that of the +imagination, from morality to spiritual vision. This voice, which the +Quakers heard in their own hearts alone, and which was an admonition to +separate themselves from all the false splendours of the world, he now +heard from stream and flowering meadow and from the decorum of courtly +society, bidding him make beautiful his life, as well as holy. +Henceforth he could say that "all history is nothing but the relation of +this great effort--the struggle of the divine principle to enter into +human life." And in the same letter in which these words occur--an +extraordinary epistle to Matthew Arnold, asking him to embody the +writer's ideas in an essay--he extends his Quaker inheritance so far as +to make it a cloak for humour, a humour, as he says, in "a sense beyond, +perhaps, that in which it ever has been understood, but which, it may +be, it is reserved to _you_ to reveal to men." One would like to have +Mr. Arnold's reply to this divagation on _Don Quixote_. Mr. Shorthouse +had, characteristically, adapted the book to his own spiritual needs as +a representation "of the struggles of the divine principle to enter +into the everyday details of human life." + +It was, I say, his unforgotten discipleship to George Fox and to Plato +which preserved Mr. Shorthouse from the narrowness of the movement while +permitting him to be faithful to the Church. In the Introduction to the +Life an ecclesiastical friend distinguishes him from the partisan +schools as a "Broad Church Sacramentarian." I confess in general to a +strong dislike for these technical phrases, which always savour a little +of an evasion of realities, and bear about the same relation to actual +human experience as do the pigeonholes of a lawyer's desk; but in this +case the words have a useful brevity. They show how he had been able to +take the best from all sides of the controversy and to weld these +elements into harmony with the philosophy of his inheritance and +education. The position of Mr. Shorthouse was akin to that of the +Low-Churchmen in his hostility to the Romanising tendencies and his +distrust of priestcraft, but he differed from them still more +essentially in his recognition of the imagination as equally potent with +the moral sense in the upbuilding of character. To the Broad-Churchman +he was united chiefly in his abhorrence of dogmatic tests. One of his +few published papers (reprinted in the Life) is a plea for _The Agnostic +at Church_,--a plea which may still be taken to heart by those troubled +doubters who are held aloof by the dogmas of Christianity, yet regret +their lonely isolation from the religious aspirations of the community: + + There is, however, one principle which underlies all church + worship with which he [the agnostic] cannot fail to sympathise, + with which he cannot fail to be in harmony--the sacramental + principle. For this is the great underlying principle of life, by + which the commonest and dullest incidents, the most unattractive + sights, the crowded streets and unlovely masses of people, become + instinct with a delicate purity, a radiant beauty, become the + "outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace." + Everything may be a sacrament to the pure in heart.... Kneeling in + company with his fellows, even if all recollection of a far-away + past, with its childhood's faith and fancies, has faded from his + mind, it is impossible but that some effect of sympathy, some + magic chord and thrill of sweetness, should mollify and refresh + his heart, blessing with a sweet humility that consciousness of + intellect which, natural and laudable in itself, may perhaps be + felt by him at moments to be his greatest snare. + +But he separated himself from the Broad Church in making religion a +culture of individual holiness rather than a message for the "unlovely +masses of people," in caring more for the guidance of the Inner Voice +than for the brotherhood of charity or the association of men in good +works. In his idea of worship he was near to the High Church, but he +differed from that body in ranking sacerdotalism and dissent together as +the equal foes of religion. The efficacy of the sacrament came from its +historic symbolism and its national acceptance, and needed not, or +scarcely needed, the ministration of the priest. He thus extended the +meaning of the word far beyond the narrow range of ecclesiasticism. +"This sunshine upon the grass," he wrote, "is a sacrament of remembrance +and of love." When, in his early days, Newman visited Hurrell Froude's +lovely Devonshire home, there arose in his mind a poignant strife +between his loyalty to created and to uncreated beauty. In a stanza +composed for a lady's autograph album he gave this expression to his +hesitancy: + + There strayed awhile, amid the woods of Dart, + One who could love them, but who durst not love; + A vow had bound him ne'er to give his heart + To streamlet bright, or soft secluded grove. + 'T was a hard humbling task, onward to move + His easy-captured eye from each fair spot, + With unattached and lonely step to rove + O'er happy meads which soon its print forgot. + Yet kept he safe his pledge, prizing his pilgrim lot. + +No such note is to be found in the letters written by Mr. Shorthouse +during his holidays among the Welsh hills; he looked upon the inherited +Church as the instrument chosen by many generations of men for their +approach to God, but he was not afraid to see the communion service on +the ocean waters when the heavenly light poured upon them, even as he +saw it at the altar table. + +If he differed from the Broad Church mainly in his loyalty to Quaker +mysticism, it was Platonism which made the bounds of the High Church +too narrow for his faith. He did not hesitate at one time to say that +Plato possessed a truer spiritual insight than St. Paul, and it was in +reality a mere extension of the sphere of Platonism when, in what +appears to be the last letter he ever wrote (or dictated rather, for his +hands were already clasped in those of beneficent Death), he avowed his +creed: "That Image after which we were created--the Divine +Intellect--must surely be able to respond to the Divine call. The +greatest advance which has ever been made was the teaching, originally +by Aristotle, of the receptivity of matter.... I should be very glad to +see this idea of _John Inglesant_ worked out by an intelligent critic." +Beauty was for him a kind of transfiguration in which the world, in its +response to the indwelling Power, was lifted into something no longer +worldly, but divine; and he could speak of our existence on this earth +as lighted by "the immeasurable glory of the drama of God in which we +are actors." It was not that he, like certain poets of the past century, +attempted to give to the crude passions of men or the transient pomp of +earth a power intrinsically equivalent to the spirit; but he believed +that these might be made by faith to become as it were an illusory and +transparent veil through which the visionary eye could penetrate to the +mystic reality. + +For the particular act in this drama, which he was to write out in his +religious novel, he went back to the seventeenth century, when, as it +seemed to him, the same problem as that of the nineteenth arose to +trouble the hearts of Englishmen, but in nobler and more romantic forms. +There was, in fact, a certain note of reality about the earlier struggle +of Puritan, Churchman, and Roman Catholic, which was lacking to the +quarrel of his own day. John Inglesant is the younger of twin sons born +in a family of Catholic sympathies. A Jesuit, Father Hall, who reminds +one not a little of Father Holt in _Henry Esmond_, is put in charge of +the boy and trains him up to be an intermediary between the Church of +England and the Church of Rome. To this end his Mentor keeps his mind in +a state of suspense between the faiths, and the inner and real drama of +the book is the contest in Inglesant's own mind, after his immediate +debt to Rome has been fulfilled, between the two forms of worship. + +In part the actual narrative is well conducted. Johnnie's relations to +Charles I., and especially his share in that strange adventure when the +King was terrified by a vision of the dead Strafford, are told with a +good deal of dramatic skill. So, too, his own trial, the murder of his +brother by the Italian, his visits to the household of the Ferrars at +Little Gidding, and some of the events in Italy--these in themselves are +sufficient to make a novel of unusual interest. On the human side, where +the emotions are of a dreamy, half-mystical sort, the work is equally +successful; in its own kind the love of Inglesant and Mary Collet is +beautiful beyond the common love of man and woman. But the novel fails, +it must be acknowledged, in the expression of the more ordinary motives +of human activity. Johnnie's ingrained obedience to the Jesuit is one of +the mainsprings of the plot, yet there is nothing in the story to make +this exaggerated devotion seem natural. In the same way Johnnie's +attachment to his worldly brother is unexplained by the author, and +sounds fantastic. A considerable portion of the book is taken up with +Inglesant's search for his brother's murderer, and here again the +vacillating desire of vengeance is a false note which no amount of +exposition on the part of the author makes convincing. Mr. Shorthouse's +hero burns for revenge one day, and on the next is oblivious of his +passion, in a way that simply leaves the reader in a state of +bewilderment. Curiously enough, it was one of the incidents in this +hide-and-seek portion of the story, found by Mr. Shorthouse in "a +well-known guide-book," that actually suggested the novel to him. For my +own part, the sustained charm of the language, a style midway, as it +were, between that of Thackeray and that of Hawthorne, not quite so +negligently graceful as the former nor quite so deliberate as the +latter, yet mingling the elements of both in a happy compound--the +language alone, I say, would be sufficient to carry me through these +inadequately conceived parts of the story. But I can understand, +nevertheless, how in the course of time this feebleness of the purely +human motives may gradually deprive the book of readers, for it is the +human that abides unchanged, after all, and the divine that alters in +form with the passing ages. Hawthorne, in this respect, is better +equipped for the future; his novels are not concerned with phases of +religion, but with the moral consciousness and the feeling of guilt, +which are eternally the same. + +And yet it will be a real loss to letters if this nearest approach in +English to a religious novel of universal significance should lose its +vitality and be forgotten. Almost, but not quite, Mr. Shorthouse has +gone below the shifting of forms and formulae to the instinct that lies +buried in the heart of each man, seeking and awaiting the light. I have +already referred to those early chapters, the most perfect in the book I +think, wherein is told how Johnnie, a grown boy now, visits his +childhood's masters and questions them about the Divine Light which he +would behold and follow amid the wandering lights of this world. Mr. +Shorthouse believed, as he had been taught at his mother's knee, that +such a Guide dwelt in the breasts of all men, and that we need only to +hearken to its admonition to attain holiness and peace. He thought that +it had spoken more clearly to certain of the poets and philosophers of +Greece than to any others, and that "the ideal of the Greeks--the +godlike and the beautiful in one"--was still the lesson to be practised +to-day. "What we want," he said, "is to apply it to real life. We all +understand that art should be religious, but it is more difficult to +understand how religion may be an art." And this, as he avows again and +again in his letters, was the purpose of his book; "one of many failures +to reconcile the artistic with the spiritual aspect of life," he once +calls it. + +But if, intellectually, the vision of the Divine Light was vouchsafed to +Plato more than to any other man, historically it had been presented to +the gross, unpurged eyes of the world in the life and death of Jesus. +The precision of dogma, even the Bible, meant relatively little to Mr. +Shorthouse. "I do not advocate belief in the Bible," he wrote; "I +advocate belief in Christ." Somehow, in some way beyond the scope of +logic, the idea which Plato had beheld, the divine ideal which all men +know and doubt, became a personality that one time, and henceforth the +sacraments that recalled the drama of that holy life were the surest +means of obtaining the silence of the world through which the Inner +Voice speaks and is heard. + +To some, of course, this will appear the one flaw in the author's +logic--this step from the vague notion of the Platonic ideas dwelling in +the world of matter, and shaping it to their own beautiful forms, to the +belief in the actual Christian drama as the realisation of the Divine +Nature in human life. Yet the step was easy, was almost necessary, for +one who held at the same time the doctrines of the Friends and of Plato; +their union might be called the wedding of pure religion and pure +philosophy, wherein the more bigoted and inhuman character of the former +was surrendered, while to the latter was added the power to touch the +universal heart of man. As Mr. Shorthouse held them, and as Inglesant +came to view them, the sacraments might be called a memorial of that +mystic wedding. They brought to it the historic consciousness and the +traditional brotherhood of mankind; they were the symbolism through +which men sought to introduce the light into their own lives as a +religious art. Now an art is a matter to be perceived and to be felt, +whereas a science, as Newman and others held religion to be, is a +subject for demonstration and argument. How much religion in England +suffered from the attempt to prove what could not be caught in the mesh +of logic, and from the endeavour to make words take the place of ideas, +we have already seen. You may reason about abstract truth, you cannot +reason about a symbolism or a form of worship. The strength of _John +Inglesant_ lies in its avoidance of rationalism or the appeal to +precedent, and in its frank search for the human and the artistic. + +It was in this sense that Mr. Shorthouse could speak of his book as +above all an attempt "to promote culture at the expense of fanaticism, +including the fanaticism of work": but we shall miss the full meaning +of his intention if we omit the corollary of those words, viz.: "to +exalt the unpopular doctrine that the end of existence is not the good +of one's neighbour, but one's own culture." I do not know, indeed, but +this exaltation of the old theory that the chief purpose of religion is +the worship and beatitude of the individual soul, in opposition to the +humanitarian notions which were even then springing into prominence, is +the central theme of the story. Certainly with many readers the scene +that remains most deeply impressed in their memory is that which shows +Inglesant coming to Serenus de Cressy at the House of the Benedictines +in Paris, and, like the young man who came to Jesus, asking what he +shall do to make clear the guidance of the Inner Light. There, in those +marvellous pages, Cressy points out the divergence of the ways before +him: "On the one hand, you have the delights of reason and of intellect, +the beauty of that wonderful creation which God made, yet did not keep; +the charms of Divine philosophy, and the enticements of the poet's art; +on the other side, Jesus." And then as the old man, who had himself +turned from the gardens of Oxford to the discipline of a monastery, sees +the hesitation of his listener, he breaks forth into this eloquent +appeal: + + I put before you your life, with no false colouring, no tampering + with the truth. Come with me to Douay; you shall enter our house + according to the strictest rule; you shall engage in no study + that is any delight or effort to the intellect; but you shall + teach the smallest children in the schools, and visit the poorest + people, and perform the duties of the household--and all for + Christ. I promise you on the faith of a gentleman and a priest--I + promise you, for I have no shade of doubt--that in this path you + shall find the satisfaction of the heavenly walk; you shall walk + with Jesus day by day, growing ever more and more like to Him; and + your path, without the least fall or deviation, shall lead more + and more into the light, until you come unto the perfect day; and + on your death-bed--the death-bed of a saint--the vision of the + smile of God shall sustain you, and Jesus Himself shall meet you + at the gates of eternal life. + +We are told that every word went straight to Inglesant's conviction, and +that no single note jarred upon his taste. He implicitly believed that +what the Benedictine offered him he should find. But he also knew that +this was not the only way of service--nor even, perhaps, the highest. He +turned away from the monastery sadly, but firmly, and continued his +search for the light in that direction whither the culture of his own +nature led him; he showed--though this neither he nor Mr. Shorthouse, +perhaps, would acknowledge--that at the bottom of his heart Plato and +not Christ was his master, and that to him practical Christianity was +only one of the many historic forms which the so-called Platonic insight +assumes among men. To some, no doubt, this attempt to make of religion +an art will savour of that peculiar form of hedonism, or bastard +Platonism, which Walter Pater introduced into England, and _John +Inglesant_ will be classed with _Marius the Epicurean_ as a blossom of +aesthetic romanticism. There is a certain show of justification in the +comparison, and the work of Mr. Shorthouse quite possibly grants too +much to the enervating acquiescence in the lovely and the decorous; it +lacks a little in virility. But the difference between the two books is +still more radical than the likeness. Though absolute truth may not be +within the reach of man, nevertheless the life of John Inglesant is a +discipline and a growth toward a verity that emanates from acknowledged +powers and calls him out of himself. The senses have no validity in +themselves. He aims to make an art of religion, not a religion of art; +the distinction is deeper than words. The true parentage of the work +goes back, in some ways, to Shaftesbury, with whom an interesting +parallel might be drawn. + +In the end Inglesant returns to England, after years spent in France and +Italy among Roman Catholics, and accepts frankly the religious forms of +his own land. His character had been strengthened by experience, and in +following the higher instincts of his own nature he had attained the +assurance and the sanctity of one who has not quailed before a great +sacrifice. The last scene in the book, the letter which relates the +conversation with Inglesant in the Cathedral Church at Worcester, should +be read as a complement to the earlier chapters which describe his +boyish search for what he was not to find save through the lesson of +years; the whole book may be regarded as a link between these two +presentations of the hero's life. It would require too many words to +repeat Inglesant's confession even in outline. "The Church of England," +says the writer of the letter, "is no doubt a compromise, and is +powerless to exert its discipline.... If there be absolute truth +revealed, there must be an inspired exponent of it, else from age to age +it could not get itself revealed to mankind." And Inglesant replies: +"This is the Papist argument, there is only one answer to it--Absolute +truth is not revealed. There were certain dangers which Christianity +could not, as it would seem, escape. As it brought down the sublimest +teaching of Platonism to the humblest understanding, so it was +compelled, by this very action, to reduce spiritual and abstract truth +to hard and inadequate dogma. As it inculcated a sublime indifference to +the things of this life, and a steadfast gaze upon the future, so, by +this very means, it encouraged the growth of a wild unreasoning +superstition." + +It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that those words, taken with the +plea which follows, express the finest wisdom struck out of the long and +for the most part futile Battle of the Churches; they were the creed of +Mr. Shorthouse, as they were the experience of the hero of his book. I +would end with that image of life as a sacred game with which Inglesant +himself closed his confession of faith at the Cathedral door: + + The ways are dark and foul, and the grey years bring a mysterious + future which we cannot see. We are like children, or men in a + tennis court, and before our conquest is half won the dim twilight + comes and stops the game; nevertheless, let us keep our places, + and above all things hold fast by the law of life we feel within. + This was the method which Christ followed, and He won the world by + placing Himself in harmony with that law of gradual development + which the Divine Wisdom has planned. Let us follow in His steps + and we shall attain to the ideal life; and, without waiting for + our "mortal passage," tread the free and spacious streets of that + Jerusalem which is above. + + + + +THE QUEST OF A CENTURY + + + [The scientific part of this essay, indeed the central idea which + makes it anything more than a philosophic vagary, is borrowed from + an unpublished lecture of my brother, Prof. Louis T. More, who + holds the chair of Physics in the University of Cincinnati. If I + have printed the paper under my name rather than his, this is + because he, as a scientist, might not wish to be held responsible + for the general drift of the thought.] + +The story is told of Dante that in one of his peregrinations through +Italy he stopped at a certain convent, moved either by the religion of +the place or by some other feeling, and was there questioned by the +monks concerning what he came to seek. At first the poet did not reply, +but stood silently contemplating the columns and arches of the cloister. +Again they asked him what he desired; and then slowly turning his head +and looking at the friars, he answered, "Peace!" The anecdote is +altogether too significant to escape suspicion; yet as _The Divine +Comedy_ is supposed to contain symbolically the history of the human +spirit in its upward growth and striving, so this fable of the divine +poet may be held to sum up in a single word the aim and desire of the +spirit's endless quest. So clearly is the object of our inner search +this "peace" which Dante is said to have sought, and so close has the +spirit come again and again to attaining this goal, that it should seem +as if some warring principle within ourselves turned us back ever when +the hoped-for consummation was just within reach. As Vaughan says in his +quaint way: + + Man is the shuttle, to whose winding quest + And passage through these looms + God ordered motion, but ordained no rest. + +It is possible, I believe, to view the ceaseless intellectual +fluctuations of mankind backward and forward as the varying fortunes of +the contest between these two hostile members of our being,--between the +deep-lying principle that impels us to seek rest and the principle that +drags us back into the region of change and motion and forever forbids +us to acquiesce in what is found. And I believe further that the moral +disposition of a nation or of an individual may be best characterised by +the predominance of the one or the other of these two elements. We may +find a people, such as the ancient Hindus, in whom the longing after +peace was so intense as to make insignificant every other concern of +life, and among whom the aim of saint and philosopher alike was to close +the eyes upon the theatre of this world's shifting scenes and to look +only upon that changeless vision of + + central peace subsisting at the heart + Of endless agitation. + +The spectacle of division and mutation became to them at last a mere +phantasmagoria, like the morning mists that melt away beneath the +upspringing day-star. + +Again, we may find a race, like the Greeks, in whom the imperturbable +stillness of the Orient and the restless activity of the Occident meet +together in intimate union and produce that peculiar repose in action, +that unity in variety, which we call harmony or beauty and which is the +special field of art. But if this harmonious union was a source of the +artistic sense among the Greeks, their logicians, like logicians +everywhere, were not content until the divergent tendencies were drawn +out to the extreme; and nowhere is the conflict between the two +principles more vividly displayed than in that battle between the +followers of Xenophanes, who sought to adapt the world of change to +their haunting desire for peace by denying motion altogether, and the +disciples of Heraclitus, who saw only motion and mutation in all things +and nowhere rest. "All things flow and nothing abides," said the +Ephesian, and looked upon man in the midst of the universe as upon one +who stands in the current of a ceaselessly gliding river. The brood of +Sophists, carrying this law into human consciousness, disclaimed the +possibility of truth altogether; and it is no wonder that Plato, while +avoiding the other extreme of motionless pantheism, regarded the +sophistic acceptance of this law of universal flux as the last +irreconcilable enemy of philosophy and morality alike. "The war over +this point is indeed no trivial matter and many are concerned therein," +said he, not without bitterness. + +It is, when rightly considered, this same question that lends dramatic +unity and human value to the long debate of the mediaeval schoolmen. +Their dispute may be regarded from more than one point of view,--as a +struggle of the reason against the bondage of authority, as an attempt +to lay bare the foundation of philosophy, as a contest between science +and mysticism; but above all it seems to me a long conflict in words +between these two warring members within us. The desire of infinite +peace was the impulse, I think, which drove on the realists to that +"abyss of pantheism," from the brink of which the vision of most men +recoils as from the horror of shoreless vacuity. In this way Erigena, +the greatest of realists, spoke of God as that which neither acts nor is +acted upon, neither loves nor is loved; and then, as if frightened by +these blank words, avowed that God though he does not love is in a way +Love itself, defining love as the _finis quietaque statio_ of the +natural motion of all things that move. On the other hand it was the +impulse toward unresting activity which led the nominalists to deny +reality to the stationary ideas of genera and species, and to fix the +mind upon the shifting combinations of individual objects. In this +direction lay the labour of accurate observation and experimental +classification, and it is with prefect justice that Haureau, the +historian of scholastic philosophy, closes his chapter on William of +Occam, the last of the schoolmen, with these words: "It is then in truth +on this soil so well prepared by the prince of the nominalists that +Francis Bacon founded his eternal monument,"--and that monument is the +scientific method as we see it developed in the nineteenth century. + +The justification of scholastic philosophy, as I understand it, was the +hope of finding in the dictates of pure reason an immovable +resting-place for the human spirit; the recoil from the abyss of +pantheism and absolute quietism was the work of the nominalists who in +William of Occam finally won the day; and with him scholastic philosophy +brought an end to its own activity. But a greater champion than William +was needed to wipe away what seems to the world the cobwebs of mediaeval +logomachy. Kant's _Critique of Pure Reason_ accomplished what the +nominalistic schoolmen failed to achieve: it showed the impossibility of +establishing by means of logic the dogma of God or any absolute +conception of the universe. Henceforth the real support of metaphysics +was taken away, and the study fell more and more into disrepute as the +nineteenth century waxed old. Not many men to-day look to the pure +reason for aid in attaining the consummation of faith. That +consummation, if it be derived at all from external aid, must come +henceforth by way of the imagination and of the moral sense. We say +with Kant: "Two things fill the mind with ever-new and increasing +admiration and reverence, the oftener and the more persistently they are +reflected on: the starry heaven above me, and the moral law within me." + +But neither the imagination nor the conscience alone, any more than +reason, can create faith. They may prepare the soil for the growth of +that perfect flower of joy, but they cannot plant the seed or give the +increase; for they, both the imagination and the conscience, are +concerned in the end with the light of this life, and faith looks for +guidance to a different and rarer illumination. Faith is a power of +itself; _fidem rem esse, non scientiam, non opinionem vel +imaginationem_, said Zwingle. It is that faculty of the will, mysterious +in its source and inexplicable in its operation, which turns the desire +of a man away from contemplating the fitful changes of the world toward +an ideal, an empty dream it may be, or a shadow, or a mere name, of +peace in absolute changelessness. Reason and logic may have no words to +express the object of this desire, but experience is rich with the +influence of such an aspiration on human character. To the saints it was +that peace of God which passeth all understanding; to the mystics it was +figured as the raptures of a celestial love, as the yearning for that + + Passionless bride, divine Tranquillity. + +To the ignorant it was the unquestioning trust in those who seemed to +them endowed with a grace beyond their untutored comprehension. + +Even if the imagination or the conscience could lift us to this blissful +height, they would avail us little to-day; for we have put away the +imagination as one of the pleasant but unfruitful play-things of youth, +and the conscience in this age of humanitarian pity has become less than +ever a sense of man's responsibility to the supermundane powers and more +than ever a feeling of brotherhood among men. Of faith, speaking +generally, the past century had no recking, for it turned deliberately +to observe and study the phenomena of change. We call that time, which +is still our own time, the age of reason, but scarcely with justice. The +Middle Ages, despite the obscurantism of the Church, had far better +claim to that title. One needs but to turn the pages of the doctors, +even before the day of Abelard who is supposed first to have been the +champion of reason against authority, to see how profound was their +conviction that in reason might be discovered a justification of the +faith they held. And indeed Abelard is styled the champion of reason +because only with him do men begin to perceive the inability of reason +to establish faith. Better we should call ours an age of observation, +for never before have men given themselves with such complete abandon to +observing and recording systematically. By long and intent observation +of the phenomenal world the eye has discovered a seeming order in +disorder, the shifting visions of time have assumed a specious +regularity which we call law, and the mind has made for itself a home on +this earth which to the wise of old seemed but a house of bondage. + + For life is but a dream whose shapes return, + Some frequently, some seldom, some by night + And some by day, some night and day: we learn, + The while all change and many vanish quite, + In their recurrence with recurrent changes + A certain seeming order; where this ranges + We count things real; such is memory's might. + +From this wealth of observation and record the modern age, and +especially the century just past, has developed two fields of +intellectual activity to such an extent as almost to claim the creation +of them. Gradually through accumulated observation the nineteenth +century came to look on human affairs in a new light; like everything +else they were seen to be subject to the Heraclitean ebb and flow; and +history was written from a new point of view. We learned to regard eras +of the past as subject each to its peculiar passions and ambitions, and +this taught us to throw ourselves back into their life with a kind of +sympathy never before known. We did not judge them by an immutable code, +but by reference to time and place. Nor is this all. Within the small +arc of our observation we observed a certain regularity of change +similar to the changes due to growth in an individual, and this we +called the law of progress. History was then no longer a mere chronicle +of events or, if philosophical, the portrayal and judgment of characters +from a fixed point of view; it became at its best the systematic +examination of the causes of progress and development. And naturally +this attention to change and motion, this historic sense, was extended +to every other branch of human interest: in religion it taught +Christians to accept the Bible as the history of revelation instead of +something complete from the beginning; in literature it taught us to +portray the development of character or the influence of environment on +character rather than the interplay of fixed passions; in art it created +impressionism or the endeavour to reproduce what the individual sees at +the moment instead of a rationalised picture; in criticism it introduced +what Sainte-Beuve, the master of the movement, sought to write, a +history of the human spirit. + +But history, like Cronos of old, possessed a strange power of devouring +its own offspring. Gradually, from the habit of regarding human affairs +in a state of flux and more particularly from the growth of the idea of +progress, the past lost its hold over men. It became a matter of +curiosity but not of authority, and history as it was understood in +Renan's day has in ours almost ceased to be written. Science on the +other hand is the observation of phenomena regarded chiefly in the +relation of space--for it is correct, I believe, to assert that the +laws of energy may be reduced to this point--and as such is not subject +to this devouring act of time. It frankly discards the past and as +frankly dwells in the present. It is not my purpose, indeed it would be +quite superfluous, to reckon up the immense acquisitions of the +scientific method in the past century: they are the theme of schoolboys +and savants alike, the pride and wonder of our civilisation. Nor need I +dwell on the new philosophy which sprang up from the union of the +historic and the scientific sense and still subsists. Not the system of +Hegel or Schopenhauer or of any other professor of metaphysics is the +true philosophy of the age; these are but echoes of a past civilisation, +voices and _praeterea nil_. Evolution is the living guide of our thought, +assigning to the region of the unknowable the conceptions of unity and +perfect rest, and building up its theories on the visible experience of +motion and change and development. It has reduced the universal flux of +Heraclitus to a scientific system and assimilated it to our inner +growth; it has become as essentially a factor of our attitude toward the +natural world as Newton's laws of gravitation. + +But if our thoughts are directed almost wholly to the sphere of motion, +yet this does not mean that the longing after quietude and peace has +passed entirely from the mind of man; the thirst of the human heart is +too deep for that. Only the world has learned to look for peace in +another direction. In place of that faith which would deny valid +reality to changing forms, we have taught ourselves to find a certain +order in disorder, which we call law,--whether it be the law of progress +or the law of energy,--and on the stability of this law we are willing +to stake our desired tranquillity. + +In this way, through what may be called the offspring begotten on the +historic sense by science, the mind has turned its regard into the +future and seemed to discern there a continuation of the same law of +progress which it saw working in the past. Hence have arisen the +manifold dreams and visions of socialism, altruism, humanitarianism, and +all the other isms that would fix the hope of mankind upon some coming +perfectibility of human life, and that like Prometheus in the play have +implanted blind hopes in the hearts of men. It is indeed one of the most +curious instances of the recrudescence of ideas to see the mediaeval +visions of a city of golden streets and eternal bliss in another +existence brought down to the future of this world itself. What to the +mystic of that age was to come suddenly, with the twinkling of an eye, +when we are changed and have put away mortal things, when the angel of +the Apocalypse has sworn that time shall be no longer,--all this, the +heavenly city of joy and endless content, is now to be the natural +outcome here in this world of causes working in time. The theory is +beautiful in itself and might satisfy the hunger of the heart, even +though its main hope concerns only generations to come, were it not for +a lingering and fatal suspicion that progress does not involve increased +capability of happiness to the individual, and that somehow the race +does not move toward content. Physical comfort has perhaps become more +widely distributed, but of the placid joy of life the recent years have +known singularly little; we need but turn over the pages of the more +representative poets and prose writers of the past sixty years to +discover how deep is the unrest of our souls. The higher literature has +come to be chiefly the "blank misgivings of a creature moving about in +worlds not realised"; and missing the note of deeper peace we sigh at +times even for + + A draught of dull complacency. + +Alas, those who would find a resting-place for the spirit in the +relations of man to man seem not to reckon that the very essence--if +such a term may be used of so contingent a nature--that the very essence +of this world's life is motion and change and contention, and that Peace +spreads her wings in another and purer atmosphere. One might suppose +that a single glance into the heart would show how vain are such +aspirations, and how utterly dreary and illusory is every conceived +ideal of progress and socialism because each and all are based on an +inherent contradiction. He who waits for peace until the course of +events has become stable is like the silly peasant by the river side, +watching and waiting while the current flows forever and will ever flow. + +Not less vain is the hope of those who would find in the laws of science +a permanent abiding place--perhaps one should say was rather than is, +for the avowed gospel of science which was to usurp the office of +olden-time religious faith is already like the precedent historic sense, +itself becoming a thing of the past. Yet the much discussed war between +science and religion is none the less real because to-day the din of +battle has ceased. It does not depend on criticism of the Mosaic story +of creation by the one, nor on hostility to progress offered by the +other. These things were only signs of a deeper and more radical +difference: religion is the voice of faith uttering in symbols of the +imagination its distrust of the world as a scene of deception and +unreality, whereas science is the attempt to discover fixed laws in the +midst of this very world of change. If to-day the strife between the two +seems reconciled, this only means that faith has grown dimmer and that +science has learned the futility of its more dogmatic assumptions.[10] + +The very growth of science is in fact a gradual recognition of motion as +the basis of phenomena and an increasing comprehension of what may be +called the laws of motion. When motion was regarded as simple and +regular, it seemed possible to explain phenomena by correspondingly +simple and regular laws; but when each primary motion was seen to be +the resultant of an infinite series of motions the question became in +like manner infinitely complex, or in other words insoluble. But to be +clear we must consider the matter more in detail. + +From the days of the old Greek Heraclitus, who built up his theory of +the world on the axiom of eternal flux and change, the Doctrine of +Motion as a distinct enunciation has lingered on in the world well-nigh +unnoticed and buried from sight in the bulk of suppositions and guesses +that have made up the passing systems of philosophy. Now and then some +lonely thinker took up the doctrine, but only to let it drop back into +obscurity; until during the great burst of scientific enquiry in the +fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it assumed new significance and began +to grow. From that time to this its progress in acceptance as the basis +of phenomena may be regarded as a measure of scientific advance. + +By a strange fatality Kant, who had been so efficient as an iconoclast +in metaphysics, was perhaps with his nebular hypothesis, followed later +by the work of Goethe on animal and plant variations, the one most +largely responsible for the new hope that in science at last was to be +found an answer to the riddle of existence which had baffled the search +of pure reason. The achievement of Kant both destructive and +constructive is well known, if vaguely understood, by the world at +large; but it is not so well known that a contemporary of Kant did +precisely for science what the sage of Koenigsberg accomplished in +metaphysics. In the very decade in which _The Critique of Pure Reason_ +saw the light, Lagrange, a scholar of France, published a work which +carried the analytic method, or the method of motion, to its farthest +limit. In this work, the _Mecanique Analytique_, Lagrange develops an +equation from which it can be proved conclusively that to explain any +group of phenomena measured by energy an infinite number of hypotheses +may be employed. So, for instance, if we establish any one theory which +will sufficiently account for the known phenomena of light, such as +reflection, refraction, polarisation, etc., there will yet remain an +infinite number of other hypotheses equally capable of explaining the +same group of phenomena. Or to use the words of Poincare: "If then we +can give one complete mechanical explanation of a phenomenon, there will +also be possible an infinite number of others which will account equally +well for all the particulars revealed by experiment." That is to say, no +_experimentum crucis_ can be imagined which will reveal the truth or +error of any given theory. This restriction on the finality of our +knowledge is borne out in all physical reasoning,--and I venture also to +say in the other sciences; thus in optics we can perform no experiment +which will establish as finally true the theory that light is caused by +the motion of corpuscles of matter emitted from a luminous body, or +that it is due to vibrations propagated through a medium by a wave +motion, or that it is generated by certain disturbances in the +electrical state of bodies. Each of these hypotheses has its advantages +and disadvantages; and in our choice we merely adopt that theory which +explains the greater number of phenomena in the simplest way. + +If any one should here ask: Granted that from phenomena expressed in +terms of energy no ultimate law can be educed, yet may not some other +view of phenomena lead to other results? We answer that no other view is +possible. Not that the system of the universe, if we may use such an +expression, is necessarily constructed on what we call energy, but that +our minds can conceive it only in terms of energy. An analysis of the +concepts which enter into the idea of energy must make it evident that +in our understanding of nature we cannot go beyond this point. + +There is an agreement among philosophers and scientists that the concept +of space is not derived from external experience, but is inherently +intuitive. As stated by Kant: + + The representation of space cannot be borrowed through experience + from relations of external phenomena, but, on the contrary, those + external phenomena become possible only by means of the + representation of space. Space is a necessary representation, _a + priori_, forming the very foundation of external intuitions. It is + impossible to imagine that there should be no space, though it is + possible to imagine space without objects to fill it. + +The concept of space therefore makes possible the intuition of external +phenomena; but these phenomena to be realised must appeal to one of our +senses, and this connecting link between the outer world and our +consciousness is the concept which we call time. Quoting again from +Kant: + + Time is the formal condition, _a priori_, of all phenomena + whatsoever. But, as all representations, whether they have for + their objects external things or not, belong by themselves, as + determinations of the mind, to our inner state;... therefore, if I + am able to say, _a priori_, that all external phenomena are in + space, I can, according to the principle of the internal sense, + make the general assertion that all phenomena, that is, all + objects of the senses, are _in time_, and stand necessarily in + relations of time. + +It follows, then, that our simplest possible expression for phenomena +will be in terms of space and time, and that beyond this the human mind +cannot go. + +Turning here from metaphysical to scientific language, we speak of space +and time as the fundamental units from which we deduce the laws of the +external world. The fact that space appeals to us only through time +furnishes us with our concept or unit of motion, which is the ratio of +space to time. The external phenomena so revealed to us we call the +manifestations of mass or energy, thus providing ourselves with a second +unit. It must be observed, however, that mass or energy is not a new +concept, but bears precisely the same relation to motion as Kant's +_Ding-an-sich_ bears to space and time: it is the unknowable cause of +motion--or more properly speaking it is the ability residing in an +object to change the motion of another object and is measured by the +degree of change it can produce. And I say mass or energy, advisedly, +for the two are merely different names or different views of the same +thing; we cannot conceive of matter without energy or of energy without +matter. Our choice between the two depends solely on the simplicity and +convenience with which deductions may be made from one or the other. +From a physical standpoint the concept energy is rather the simpler, but +mathematically our deductions flow more readily from the concept mass. + +If then our explanations of phenomena must ultimately involve the two +units of motion and of energy or mass, and if it can be demonstrated +that on this basis we may account for any group of phenomena in an +infinite number of ways, what shall we say but that the attempt to +attain any resting-place for the mind in the laws of nature is, and must +always be, futile? Further than this, any given law is itself only an +approximate explanation of phenomena, and must be continually modified +as we add to our experimental knowledge. In all cases a law must be +considered valid only within the limits of the sensitiveness of the +instruments by which we get our measurements. With more delicate +instruments variations will be observed that must be expressed by +additional terms in the formula. Thus we maintain that the law of +gravitation is true only within the range of our observation; it does +not apply to masses of molecular dimensions. Another formula, the +well-known law of the pressure of gases, can be shown by experiment to +be merely an approximation, because the variations in it are not of a +dimension negligible in comparison with the sensibility of our +instruments. As the pressure increases the error in the formular +equation becomes constantly greater. To remedy this a second +approximation, which is still inadequate, has been added to the equation +by Van der Waals; yet greater accuracy will require the addition of +other terms; and a complete demonstration would demand an infinite +series of approximations. + +The meaning of all this is quite plain: there is no reach of the human +intellect which can bridge the gap between motion and rest. Our senses +are adapted to a world of universal flux which is, so far as we can +determine, subject to no absolute law but the law of probabilities. He +who attempts to circumscribe the ebb and flow of circumstance within the +bounds of our spiritual needs, he who attempts to find peace in any +formula of science or in any promise of historic progress, is like one +who labours on the old and vain problem of squaring the circle: + + Qual e'l geometra, che tutto s'affige + Per misurar lo cerchio, e non ritrova, + Pensando, quel principio ond' egli indige. + +The desire of peace, as the world has known it in past times, signified +always a turning away from the flotsam and jetsam of time and an attempt +to fix the mind on absolute rest and unity,--the desire of peace has +been the aspiration of faith. And because the object of faith cannot be +seen by the eyes of the body or expressed in terms of the understanding, +a firm grasp of the will has been necessary to keep the desire of the +heart from falling back into the visible, tangible things of change and +motion. For this reason, when the will is relaxed, doubts spring up and +men give themselves wholly to the transient intoxication of the senses. +Yet blessed are they that believe and have not seen. It was the peculiar +quest of the nineteenth century to discover fixed laws and an unshaken +abiding place for the mind in the very kingdom of unrest; we have sought +to chain the waves of the sea with the winds. + +And how does all this affect one who stands apart, striving in his own +small way to live in the serene contemplation of the universe? I cannot +doubt that there are some in the world to-day who look back over the +long past and watch the toiling of the human race toward peace as a +traveller in the Alps may with a telescope follow the mountain-climbers +in their slow ascent through the snows of Mont Blanc; or again they +watch our labours and painstaking in the valley of the senses and wonder +at our grotesque industry; or look upon the striving of men to build a +city for the soul amid the uncertainties of this life, as men look at +the play of children who build castles and domes in the sands of the +seashore and cry out when the advancing waves wash all their hopes away. +I think there are some such men in the world to-day who are absorbed in +the fellowship of the wise men of the East, and of the no less wise +Plato, with whom they would retort upon the accusing advocates of the +present: "Do you think that a spirit full of lofty thoughts, and +privileged to contemplate all time and all existence, can possibly +attach any great importance to this life?" They live in the world of +action, but are not of it. They pass each other at rare intervals on the +thoroughfares of life and know each other by a secret sign, and smile to +each other and go on their way comforted and in better hope. + + + + +FOOTNOTES: + + +[1] _The Correspondence of William Cowper._ Arranged in chronological +order, with annotations, by Thomas Wright, Principal of Cowper School, +Olney. Four volumes. New York: Dodd, Mead, & Co., 1904. + +[2] In a newly published volume of the letters of William Bodham Donne +(the friend of Edward FitzGerald and Bernard Barton), the editor, +Catharine B. Johnson, throws doubt on this supposed descent of Cowper's +mother from the Poet Dean. + +[3] How refreshing is that whiff of good honest smoke in the abstemious +lives of Cowper and John Newton! I have just seen, in W. Tuckwell's +_Reminiscences of a Radical Parson_, a happy allusion to William Bull's +pipes: "To Olney, under the auspices of a benevolent Quaker.... I saw +all the relics: the parlour where bewitching Lady Austen's shuttlecock +flew to and fro; the hole made in the wall for the entrance and exit of +the hares; the poet's bedroom; Mrs. Unwin's room, where, as she knelt by +the bed in prayer, her clothes caught fire. The garden was in other +hands, but I obtained leave to enter it. Of course, I went straight to +the summer-house, small, and with not much glass, the wall and ceiling +covered with names, Cowper's wig-block on the table, _a hole in the +floor where that mellow divine, the Reverend Mr. Bull, kept his pipes_; +outside, the bed of pinks celebrated affectionately in one of his +letters to Joseph Hill, pipings from which are still growing in my +garden."--The date of the Rev. Mr. Tuckwell's visit to Olney is not +indicated, but his _Reminiscences_ were published in the present year, +1905. + +[4] Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve was born at Boulogne-sur-Mer, December +23, 1804, and died at Paris, October 13, 1869. + +[5] _The Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne._ In six volumes. New York: +Harper & Brothers. 1904. + +[6] _The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti._ With Memoir and +Notes, etc. By William Michael Rossetti. New York: The Macmillan Co., +1904. + +[7] _Robert Browning._ By C. H. Herford. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., +1905. + +[8] _The Complete Works of Laurence Sterne._ Edited by Wilbur L. Cross. +Supplemented with the Life by Percy Fitzgerald. 12 volumes. New York: J. +F. Taylor & Co. 1904. + +[9] _Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of J. H. Shorthouse._ Edited by +his wife. In two volumes. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1905. + +[10] Yet even while I read the proof of this page there lies before me +an article in the _Contemporary Review_ (July, 1905), in which Sir +Oliver Lodge utters the old assumptions of science with childlike +simplicity. "I want to urge," he says, "that my advocacy of science and +scientific training is not really due to any wish to be able to travel +faster or shout further round the earth, or to construct more extensive +towns, or to consume more atmosphere and absorb more rivers, nor even to +overcome disease, prolong human life, grow more corn, and cultivate to +better advantage the kindly surface of the earth; though all these +latter things will be 'added unto us' if we persevere in high aims. But +it is none of these things which should be held out as the ultimate +object and aim of humanity--the gain derivable from a genuine pursuit of +truth of every kind; no, the ultimate aim can be expressed in many ways, +but I claim that it is no less than to be able to comprehend what is the +length and breadth and depth and height of this mighty universe, +including man as part of it, and to know not man and nature alone, but +to attain also some incipient comprehension of what the saints speak of +as the love of God which passeth knowledge, and so to begin an entrance +into the fulness of an existence beside which the joy even of a perfect +earthly life is but as the happiness of a summer's day." The sentiment +is beautiful, but what shall we say of the logic? To speak of attaining +through _science_ a comprehension, even an incipient comprehension, of +that which passeth _knowledge_, is to fall into that curious confusion +of ideas to which the scientifically trained mind is subject when it +goes beyond its own field. "Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will +demand of thee, and answer thou me. Where wast thou when I laid the +foundations of the earth? Declare, if thou hast understanding." Has Sir +Oliver read the Book of Job? + + +THE END. + + + * * * * * + + + + +Shelburne Essays + +By Paul Elmer More + + 3 vols. Crown octavo. + + Sold separately. Net, $1.25. (By mail, $1.35) + + + _Contents_ + + FIRST SERIES: A Hermit's Notes on Thoreau--The Solitude of + Nathaniel Hawthorne--The Origins of Hawthorne and Poe--The + Influence of Emerson--The Spirit of Carlyle--The Science of English + Verse--Arthur Symonds: The Two Illusions--The Epic of Ireland--Two + Poets of the Irish Movement--Tolstoy; or, The Ancient Feud between + Philosophy and Art--The Religious Ground of Humanitarianism. + + SECOND SERIES: Elizabethan Sonnets--Shakespeare's Sonnets--Lafcadio + Hearn--The First Complete Edition of Hazlitt--Charles Lamb--Kipling + and FitzGerald--George Crabbe--The Novels of George + Meredith--Hawthorne: Looking before and after--Delphi and Greek + Literature--Nemesis; or, The Divine Envy. + + THIRD SERIES: The Correspondence of William Cowper--Whittier the + Poet--The Centenary of Sainte-Beuve--The Scotch Novels and Scotch + History--Swinburne--Christina Rossetti--Why is Browning Popular?--A + Note on Byron's "Don Juan"--Laurence Sterne--J. Henry + Shorthouse--The Quest. + + + G. P. Putnam's Sons + New York London + + + + +_A Few Press Criticisms on Shelburne Essays_ + + + "It is a pleasure to hail in Mr. More a genuine critic, for genuine + critics in America in these days are uncommonly scarce.... We + recommend, as a sample of his breadth, style, acumen, and power the + essay on Tolstoy in the present volume. That represents criticism + that has not merely a metropolitan but a world note.... One is + thoroughly grateful to Mr. More for the high quality of his + thought, his serious purpose, and his excellent style."--_Harvard + Graduates' Magazine._ + + "We do not know of any one now writing who gives evidence of a + better critical equipment than Mr. More. It is rare nowadays to + find a writer so thoroughly familiar with both ancient and modern + thought. It is this width of view, this intimate acquaintance with + so much of the best that has been thought and said in the world, + irrespective of local prejudice, that constitute Mr. More's + strength as a critic. He has been able to form for himself a sound + literary canon and a sane philosophy of life which constitute to + our mind his peculiar merit as a critic."--_Independent._ + + "He is familiar with classical, Oriental, and English literature; + he uses a temperate, lucid, weighty, and not ungraceful style; he + is aware of his best predecessors, and is apparently on the way to + a set of philosophic principles which should lead him to a high + and perhaps influential place in criticism.... We believe that we + are in the presence of a critic who must be counted among the + first who take literature and life for their theme."--_London + Speaker._ + + + G. P. Putnam's Sons + New York London + + + + +The Jessica Letters + +An Editor's Romance + +By Paul E. More and Mrs. Lundy Howard Harris + + Crown octavo. Net, $1.10. (By mail, $1.25.) + + +The correspondence between a young New York Editor and a young Southern +woman. The book is above all a love story. The letters are full of wit +and refreshing frankness. The situations are delightfully romantic, and +the work contains some of the prettiest love-making that has appeared +for years. + + "It is altogether a charming book. Beautifully printed, bound in a + dainty apple-blossom cover, and written in a clean-cut, forceful + style. Jessica's letters are bright, witty, and delicately poetic. + They introduce to the reader a mind of rare charm, originality, and + independence."--Rev. THOMAS DIXON, Jr. + + "There can be but praise for the delicate literary quality revealed + on every page of this story. It is indeed refreshing to find a love + story so charmingly told as this."--_Newark News._ + + "A love story told in letters, letters which show how simple it is + to find even under the very nose of the blue pencil both love and + high thinking."--_N. Y. Times._ + + "It is delicate, sincere, and earnest.... A wholesomeness and + sweetness permeates all the book."--_Chicago Tribune._ + + "A delightfully romantic love story."--_The Outlook._ + + + G. P. 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