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<h1>The Project Gutenberg eBook, Shelburne Essays, Third Series, by Paul Elmer
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<p>Title: Shelburne Essays, Third Series</p>
<p>Author: Paul Elmer More</p>
<p>Release Date: April 14, 2012 [eBook #39447]</p>
<p>Language: English</p>
<p>Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1</p>
<p>***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SHELBURNE ESSAYS, THIRD SERIES***</p>
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Images of the original pages are available through
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<p> </p>
<hr class="full" />
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<h1>Shelburne Essays</h1>
<p> </p>
<p class="center">By</p>
<h3>Paul Elmer More</h3>
<p> </p>
<p class="center"><i>Third Series</i></p>
<p> </p>
<div class="gquot">
<p>Τίνι χρὴ κρίνεσθαι
τὰ μέλλοντα καλὢς
κριθήσεσθαι;<br />
ἄρ' οὐκ ἐμπειρίᾳ
τε καὶ φρονήσει
καὶ λόγῳ;</p>
<p style='text-align: right'><span class="smcap">Plato</span>, <i>Republic</i>.</p>
</div>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p class="center">
<big>G. P. Putnam's Sons</big><br />
New York and London<br />
<b>The Knickerbocker Press</b><br />
1905</p>
<hr style="width: 65%;" />
<p> </p><p> </p>
<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Copyright, 1905</span><br />
<small>BY</small><br />
PAUL ELMER MORE</p>
<p> </p><p> </p>
<h5>The Knickerbocker Press, New York</h5>
<hr style="width: 65%;" />
<div class="gquot">
<h4>ADVERTISEMENT</h4>
<p>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 <i>Atlantic Monthly</i>, the <i>Independent</i>, and
the New York <i>Evening Post</i>.</p>
</div>
<hr style="width: 65%;" />
<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
<div class='center'>
<table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" summary="">
<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='right'><small>PAGE</small></td></tr>
<tr><td align='left'><span class="smcap">The Correspondence of William Cowper</span> </td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td></tr>
<tr><td align='left'><span class="smcap">Whittier the Poet</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_28">28</a></td></tr>
<tr><td align='left'><span class="smcap">The Centenary of Sainte-Beuve</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_54">54</a></td></tr>
<tr><td align='left'><span class="smcap">The Scotch Novels and Scotch History</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_82">82</a></td></tr>
<tr><td align='left'><span class="smcap">Swinburne</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_100">100</a></td></tr>
<tr><td align='left'><span class="smcap">Christina Rossetti</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_124">124</a></td></tr>
<tr><td align='left'><span class="smcap">Why is Browning Popular?</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_143">143</a></td></tr>
<tr><td align='left'><span class="smcap">A Note on Byron's "Don Juan"</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_166">166</a></td></tr>
<tr><td align='left'><span class="smcap">Laurence Sterne</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_177">177</a></td></tr>
<tr><td align='left'><span class="smcap">J. Henry Shorthouse</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_213">213</a></td></tr>
<tr><td align='left'><span class="smcap">The Quest of a Century</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_244">244</a></td></tr>
</table></div>
<hr style="width: 65%;" />
<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
<h1><a name="SHELBURNE_ESSAYS" id="SHELBURNE_ESSAYS"></a>SHELBURNE ESSAYS</h1>
<h3>THIRD SERIES</h3>
<hr style="width: 65%;" />
<h2>THE CORRESPONDENCE OF WILLIAM<br />
COWPER</h2>
<p>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 <i>Correspondence of
William Cowper</i>.<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> 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
<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span>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 <i>frigus</i> 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,
<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span>to turn to more serious things, how much the
pathetic stanzas <i>To Mary</i> 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.</p>
<p>A still more striking example would be the
lines written <i>On the Receipt of My Mother's Picture</i>.
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.</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Oh that those lips had language! Life has passed<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With me but roughly since I heard thee last.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Those lips are thine—thy own sweet smile I see,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The same that oft in childhood solaced me;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Voice only fails, else how distinct they say,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">"Grieve not, my child, chase all thy fears away!"<br /></span>
</div></div>
<hr class="half" />
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Short-lived possession! but the record fair,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That memory keeps of all thy kindness there,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Still outlives many a storm that has effaced<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A thousand other themes less deeply traced.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thy nightly visits to my chamber made,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That thou mightst know me safe and warmly laid;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thy morning bounties as I left my home,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The biscuit or confectionary plum:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The fragrant waters on my cheeks bestowed<br /></span>
<span class="i0">By thy own hand, till fresh they shone and glowed:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">All this, and more enduring still than all,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thy constant flow of love, that knew no fall,—<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span></p>
<p class="noidt">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 <i>confectionary plum</i>—somehow
the savour of it has long ago evaporated. Even
the closing lines—</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Me howling blasts drive devious, tempest-tost,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Sails ripped, seams opening wide, and compass lost—<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">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:</p>
<div class="blockquot"><p>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
<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span>her, and which have endeared her memory to me beyond
expression.</p></div>
<p class="noidt">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.</p>
<p>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.
<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span>Paul's."<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> 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 <i>Hebdomada mortium</i>, 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.</p>
<div class="blockquot"><p>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.</p></div>
<p>After leaving Westminster he spent a few
months at Berkhampstead, and then came to Lon<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span>don
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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span>
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?</p>
<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span>
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:</p>
<div class="blockquot"><p>... 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span>
suits me exactly; go when I will, I find a house full of
peace and cordiality in all its parts.</p></div>
<p class="noidt">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.</p>
<p>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;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span>
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.</p>
<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span>
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 <i>The Freedom of the Will</i>, 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span>
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.</p>
<p>And he was in another way the victim of his
age. We have heard him comparing his days at
Huntingdon with <i>Rousseau's description of an
English morning</i>. 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:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">This all-too humble soul would arrogate<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Unto itself some signalising hate<br /></span>
<span class="i0">From the supreme indifference of Fate!<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span></p>
<p class="noidt">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.</p>
<p>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:</p>
<div class="blockquot"><p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span>
loudest among them all is he who is continually crying
with a loud voice, <i>Actum est de te; periisti!</i> 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.</p></div>
<p class="noidt">That apparently was the sentence which sounded
his doom on the night of dreams: <i>Actum est de te;
periisti</i>—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."</p>
<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span>
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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span>
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—<i>The Ballad Singers</i>,
<i>The Rival Bells</i>, the <i>Epitaph on a Dog:</i></p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Poor Irus' faithful wolf-dog here I lie,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That wont to tend my old blind master's steps,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">His guide and guard; nor, while my service lasted,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Had he occasion for that staff, with which<br /></span>
<span class="i0">He now goes picking out his path in fear<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Over the highways and crossings, but would plant<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Safe in the conduct of my friendly string,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A firm foot forward still, till he had reached<br /></span>
<span class="i0">His poor seat on some stone, nigh where the tide<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of passers-by in thickest confluence flowed:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To whom with loud and passionate laments<br /></span>
<span class="i0">From morn to eve his dark estate he wailed.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">Cowper just as inevitably selected the fables and
country-pieces—<i>The Glowworm</i>, <i>The Jackdaw</i>,
<i>The Cricket:</i></p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Little inmate, full of mirth,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Chirping on my kitchen hearth,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Wheresoe'er be thine abode,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Always harbinger of good,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Pay me for thy warm retreat,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With a song more soft and sweet;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In return thou shalt receive<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Such a strain as I can give.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<hr class='half' />
<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span></p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Though in voice and shape they be<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Formed as if akin to thee,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thou surpassest, happier far,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Happiest grasshoppers that are;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Theirs is but a summer song,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thine endures the winter long,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Unimpaired, and shrill, and clear,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Melody throughout the year.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Neither night nor dawn of day<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Puts a period to thy play:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Sing, then—and extend thy span<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Far beyond the date of man;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Wretched man, whose years are spent<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In repining discontent,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Lives not, agèd though he be,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Half a span, compared with thee.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p>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 fright<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span>ened
his guest back to his hiding-place in the
wilderness:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">. . . me silva cavusque<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Tutus ab insidiis tenui solabitur ervo!<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span>
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 <i>la grande
absence de Dieu?</i></p>
<p>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:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Sunt res humanæ flebile ludibrium."<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">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—</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Thy needles, once a shining store,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For my sake restless heretofore,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Now rust disused, and shine no more,<br /></span>
<span class="i10">My Mary!—<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span></p>
<p class="noidt">and while Cowper read aloud from some book of
travels and mingled his comments with the story
of the wanderer:</p>
<div class="blockquot"><p>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.</p></div>
<p>And here I cannot but regret again that we
have not an edition of these letters interspersed
with the passages of <i>The Task</i>, 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 <i>Hope</i> (that superb
moralising on the poet's own life) and <i>Retirement</i>,
to name the best of the series. But the fourth
book of <i>The Task</i>, and, indeed, all the exquisite
genre pictures of the poem:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Throws up a steamy column, and the cups<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">So let us welcome peaceful evening in—<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">all this intimate correspondence with the world
in verse is not only interesting in itself, but gains<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span>
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
<i>The Task</i>:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">One sheltered hare<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Has never heard the sanguinary yell<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of cruel man, exulting in her woes.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Innocent partner of my peaceful home,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Whom ten long years' experience of my care<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Has made at last familiar; she has lost<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Much of her vigilant instinctive dread,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Not needful here beneath a roof like mine.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Yes—thou mayst eat thy bread, and lick the hand<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That feeds thee; <i>thou mayst frolic on the floor</i><br /></span>
<span class="i0"><i>At evening</i>, and at night retire secure</span>
<span class="i0">To thy straw couch, and slumber unalarmed;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For I have gained thy confidence, have pledged<br /></span>
<span class="i0">All that is human in me, to protect<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thine unsuspecting gratitude and love.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">If I survive thee, I will dig thy grave;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And when I place thee in it, sighing say,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I knew at least one hare that had a friend.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span>
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,<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a>
"smoke-inhaling Bull," "Dear Taureau"—as a
change from the more serious theme, and then
pass on:</p>
<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Mon aimable et très cher Ami</i>—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
<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span>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.</p></div>
<p class="noidt">Might not that have been written by Lamb to one
of his cronies—by a Lamb still of the eighteenth
century?</p>
<p>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:</p>
<div class="blockquot"><p>The world is before me; I am not shut up in the Bastille;
there are no moats about my castle, <i>no locks upon
my gates of which I have not the key</i>; 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span>
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.</p></div>
<p class="noidt">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 <i>Task</i>. 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:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">The twentieth year is well-nigh past,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Since first our sky was overcast;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Ah would that this might be the last!<br /></span>
<span class="i10">My Mary!<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Thy spirits have a fainter flow,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I see thee daily weaker grow—<br /></span>
<span class="i0">'T was my distress that brought thee low,<br /></span>
<span class="i10">My Mary!<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span></p>
<p>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:</p>
<div class="blockquot"><p>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.</p></div>
<p class="noidt">There is in this that sheer physical horror which
it is not good to write or to read. Somewhere in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span>
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.</p>
<hr style="width: 65%;" />
<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span></p>
<h2><a name="WHITTIER_THE_POET" id="WHITTIER_THE_POET"></a>WHITTIER THE POET</h2>
<p>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.</p>
<p>It should seem that no one could go through
Whittier's poems even casually without remarking
the peculiar beauty of the idyl called <i>The
Pennsylvania Pilgrim</i>. It is one of the longest
and, all things considered, quite the most char<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span>acteristic
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 <i>The Pennsylvania
Pilgrim</i> 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 <i>Snow-Bound</i>,
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,"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span>
says one of them, "will be remembered even more
as the trumpet-voice of Emancipation than as the
peaceful singer of rural New England."</p>
<p>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 <i>Snow-Bound</i> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span>
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 <i>Free Press</i> 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.</p>
<p>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,
<i>Whittier-Land</i>, 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span>
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.</p>
<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span>
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:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Hater of din and riot,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">He lived in days unquiet;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And, lover of all beauty,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Trod the hard ways of duty.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p>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 <i>Massachusetts to Virginia</i>
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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span>
of unacknowledged shame; in <i>Ichabod</i> 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:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Of all we loved and honoured, naught<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Save power remains;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A fallen angel's pride of thought,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Still strong in chains.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">All else is gone; from those great eyes<br /></span>
<span class="i1">The soul has fled;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">When faith is lost, when honour dies,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">The man is dead!<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Then pay the reverence of old days<br /></span>
<span class="i1">To his dead fame;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Walk backward, with averted gaze,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">And hide the shame!<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p>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 <i>Uncle Tom's Cabin</i>:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Dry the tears for holy Eva,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With the blessed angels leave her. . . .<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p>What he needed above everything else, what
his surroundings were least of all able to give<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span>
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 <i>Psalm of Life</i>: "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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span>
to attain that <i>simplex munditiis</i> 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:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i2">Of mystic beauty, dreamy grace,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">No rounded art the lack supplies;<br /></span>
<span class="i2">Unskilled the subtle line to trace,<br /></span>
<span class="i2">Or softer shades of Nature's face,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I view her common forms with unanointed eyes.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i2">Nor mine the seer-like power to show<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The secrets of the heart and mind;<br /></span>
<span class="i2"><i>To drop the plummet line below</i><br /></span>
<span class="i2"><i>Our common world of joy and woe,</i><br /></span>
<span class="i0"><i>A more intense despair or brighter hope to find.</i><br /></span>
</div></div>
<p>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 <i>ideal of the home</i> which Cowper first
brought intimately into letters, and added to it
those <i>homely comforts of the spirit</i> which Cowper
never felt. With Longfellow he was destined to
throw the glamour of the imagination over "our
common world of joy and woe."</p>
<p>Perhaps something in his American surroundings
fitted him peculiarly for this humbler rôle.
The fact that the men who had made the new
colony belonged to the middle class of society<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span>
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—</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">But when we come where comfort is,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">She never will say No.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">And often, after fatiguing the brain with the
searchings and inquisitive flight of the Masters,
we are ready to say with Whittier:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">I break my pilgrim staff, I lay<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Aside the toiling oar;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The angel sought so far away<br /></span>
<span class="i1">I welcome at my door.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span></p>
<p>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 <i>Cassandra
Southwick</i>, 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
<i>Snow-Bound</i>:</p>
<div class="blockquot"><p>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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span>
told us of the inroads of the savages, and the narrow
escape of her ancestors.</p></div>
<p>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 <i>Snow-Bound</i>
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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span>
even Concord, where the light of fancy lies so
entrancingly:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">A tender glow, exceeding fair,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A dream of day without its glare.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span>
what I call the poetry of the hearth and the poetry
of intimate nature. It was written to celebrate a
gift of <i>Pressed Gentian</i> that hung at the poet's
window, presenting to wayside travellers only a
"grey disk of clouded glass":</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">They cannot from their outlook see<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The perfect grace it hath for me;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For there the flower, whose fringes through<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The frosty breath of autumn blew,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Turns from without its face of bloom<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To the warm tropic of my room,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As fair as when beside its brook<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The hue of bending skies it took.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">So from the trodden ways of earth<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Seem some sweet souls who veil their worth,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And offer to the careless glance<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The clouding grey of circumstance. . . .<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">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 <i>grey disk of
clouded glass</i>.</p>
<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span>
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, <i>Memories</i>, 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 <i>Maud Muller</i>, which is supposed
to appeal only to the unsophisticated, is attuned
to that shamelessly provincial rhyme,</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">For of all sad words of tongue or pen,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The saddest are these: "It might have been!"<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">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."</p>
<p>If love was a memory, religion was for Whittier
a hope and an ever-present consolation—peculiarly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span>
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:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">O friends! with whom my feet have trod<br /></span>
<span class="i1">The quiet aisles of prayer,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Glad witness to your zeal for God<br /></span>
<span class="i1">And love of man I bear.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">I trace your lines of argument;<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Your logic linked and strong<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I weigh as one who dreads dissent,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">And fears a doubt as wrong.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">But still my human hands are weak<br /></span>
<span class="i1">To hold your iron creeds:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Against the words ye bid me speak<br /></span>
<span class="i1">My heart within me pleads. . . .<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">And the inimitably tender conclusion:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">And so beside the Silent Sea<br /></span>
<span class="i1">I wait the muffled oar;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">No harm from Him can come to me,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">On ocean or on shore.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">I know not where His islands lift<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Their fronded palms in air;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span><br /></span>
<span class="i0">I only know I cannot drift<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Beyond His love and care.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">O brothers! if my faith is vain,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">If hopes like these betray,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Pray for me that my feet may gain<br /></span>
<span class="i1">The sure and safer way.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">And Thou, O Lord! by whom are seen<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Thy creatures as they be,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Forgive me if too close I lean<br /></span>
<span class="i1">My human heart on Thee!<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p>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 <i>leaned his human heart on God</i>.
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:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">We search the world for truth; we cull<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The good, the pure, the beautiful,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">From graven stone and written scroll,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">From all old flower-fields of the soul;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And, weary seekers of the best,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">We come back laden from our quest,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span><br /></span>
<span class="i0">To find that all the sages said<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Is in the Book our mothers read.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p>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."</p>
<p>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:</p>
<div class="blockquot"><p>"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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span>
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?"</p></div>
<p>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 <i>At Last</i>:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">When on my day of life the night is falling,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">And, in the winds from unsunned spaces blown,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I hear far voices out of darkness calling<br /></span>
<span class="i1">My feet to paths unknown,<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Thou who hast made my home of life so pleasant,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Leave not its tenant when its walls decay;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">O Love Divine, O Helper ever present,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Be Thou my strength and stay!<br /></span>
</div></div>
<hr class="half" />
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">I have but Thee, my Father! let Thy spirit<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Be with me then to comfort and uphold;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">No gate of pearl, no branch of palm I merit,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Nor street of shining gold.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Suffice it if—my good and ill unreckoned,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">And both forgiven through Thy abounding grace—<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I find myself by hands familiar beckoned<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Unto my fitting place.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p>I would not call this the highest religious
poetry, pure and sweet as it may be. Something<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span>
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 <i>The Vanishers</i>,
founded on a pretty superstition he had read in
Schoolcraft:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Sweetest of all childlike dreams<br /></span>
<span class="i1">In the simple Indian lore<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Still to me the legend seems<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Of the shapes who flit before.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Flitting, passing, seen, and gone,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Never reached nor found at rest,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Baffling search, but beckoning on<br /></span>
<span class="i1">To the Sunset of the Blest.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">From the clefts of mountain rocks,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Through the dark of lowland firs,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Flash the eyes and flow the locks<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Of the mystic Vanishers!<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">Now Vaughan, too, wrote a poem on those gone
from him:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">They are all gone into the world of light,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">And I alone sit lingering here;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Their very memory is fair and bright,<br /></span>
<span class="i3">And my sad thoughts doth clear.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span><br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">It glows and glitters in my cloudy breast,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Like stars upon some gloomy grove,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Or those faint beams in which this hill is dress'd,<br /></span>
<span class="i3">After the sun's remove.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">I see them walking in an air of glory,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Whose light doth trample on my days:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">My days, which are at best but dull and hoary,<br /></span>
<span class="i3">Mere glimmering and decays.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">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 <i>ecstasy</i>. 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.</p>
<p>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, <i>The
Pennsylvania Pilgrim</i>. 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span>
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":</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Who knows what goadings in their sterner way<br /></span>
<span class="i0">O'er jagged ice, relieved by granite grey,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Blew round the men of Massachusetts Bay?<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">What hate of heresy the east-wind woke?<br /></span>
<span class="i0">What hints of pitiless power and terror spoke<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In waves that on their iron coast-line broke?<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p>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—</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Where, forest-walled, the scattered hamlets lay<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Along the wedded rivers—<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span>
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—</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">And read, in half the languages of man,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">His <i>Rusca Apium</i>, which with bees began,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And through the gamut of creation ran.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">(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,</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i4">Lovely even then<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With its fair women and its stately men<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Gracing the forest court of William Penn;<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">or some neighbour of the country, the learned
Swedish pastor who, like Pastorius, "could baffle
Babel's lingual curse,"</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Or painful Kelpius, from his forest den<br /></span>
<span class="i0">By Wissahickon, maddest of good men.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span></p>
<p>Such was the life within, and out of doors were
the labours of the gardener and botanist, while</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">the seasons went<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Their rounds, and somewhat to his spirit lent<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of their own calm and measureless content.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">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,</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Slow, overhead, the dusky night-birds sailed?<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p>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:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">A Voice spake in his ear,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And lo! all other voices far and near<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Died at that whisper, full of meanings clear.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span><br /></span>
<span class="i0">The Light of Life shone round him; one by one<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The wandering lights, that all misleading run,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Went out like candles paling in the sun.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">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:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">But nature is not solitude;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">She crowds us with her thronging wood;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Her many hands reach out to us,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Her many tongues are garrulous;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Perpetual riddles of surprise<br /></span>
<span class="i0">She offers to our ears and eyes.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<hr class='half' />
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">And so I find it well to come<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For deeper rest to this still room,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For here the habit of the soul<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Feels less the outer world's control;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The strength of mutual purpose pleads<br /></span>
<span class="i0">More earnestly our common needs;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And from the silence multiplied<br /></span>
<span class="i0">By these still forms on every side,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The world that time and sense have known<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Falls off and leaves us God alone.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p>For the dinner given to Whittier on his seventieth
birthday Longfellow wrote a sonnet on
<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span>
<i>The Three Silences of Molinos</i>—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.</p>
<hr style="width: 65%;" />
<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span></p>
<h2><a name="THE_CENTENARY_OF_SAINTE-BEUVE" id="THE_CENTENARY_OF_SAINTE-BEUVE"></a>THE CENTENARY OF SAINTE-BEUVE</h2>
<p>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.<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a>
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 <i>Port-Royal</i>, 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 "Père 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-<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span>stricken
hack and his foibles were the ridicule of
Paris.</p>
<p>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 <i>dont le front démesurément haut rayonne
de sérénité froide</i>), 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 <i>maître universel</i> of the century, as, indeed, he
has been called.</p>
<p>And the time of his life contributed as much to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span>
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
<i>Macbeth</i>. 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span>
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.</p>
<p>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 <i>Globe</i> 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 <i>cénacle</i> 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 <i>Revue de Paris</i>,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span>
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 <i>éducation sentimentale</i> which made him so
cunning in the secrets of the feminine breast.</p>
<p>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 <i>Port-Royal</i>. There he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span>
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.</p>
<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span>
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.</p>
<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span>
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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span>
on all that remained to him,—inquisitive doubt
and a scientific demand for positive truth. It is
the history of the century.</p>
<p>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
<i>demi-converti</i>. 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 <i>Cromwell</i>.
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 insinu<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span>ating
certain admonitions. "Toutes ces critiques
rentrent dans une seule que je m'étais déjà permis
d'adresser à votre talent, l'excès, l'abus de la
<i>force</i>, et passez-moi le mot, la <i>charge</i>." 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.</p>
<p>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
<i>Portraits</i>, the <i>Chateaubriand</i>, even the <i>Port-Royal</i>,—but
the writer of the incomparable <i>Lundis</i>.
In 1849 he had returned from Liège 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 <i>Constitutionnel</i> 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 <i>Causeries</i> continued
until 1860, and are published in fourteen
solid volumes. There was a brief respite then,
and in 1861 he began the <i>Nouveaux Lundis</i>,
which continued in the <i>Moniteur</i> and the <i>Temps</i>
until his last illness in 1869, filling thirteen<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span>
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.</p>
<p>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 <i>Lundis</i> 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. Chéron,
who was librarian of the Bibliothèque Impériale,
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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span>
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 <i>Lundi</i>
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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span>
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 <i>Journal</i> 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.</p>
<p>And the integrity of mind displayed in the
<i>Lundis</i> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span>
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 <i>Lundis</i> 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,"—<i>dans
laquelle la conscience peut toujours être
sauve mais où tout idéal périt.</i> Just about this time
he was thinking seriously of migrating with the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span>
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:</p>
<div class="blockquot"><p>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.</p></div>
<p>Those were the words with which he had closed
his chapters on <i>Chateaubriand</i>; 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 <i>true</i>, the <i>true</i> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span>
was brought to bear on him, he still refused to
write a review of the Emperor's <i>History of Cæsar</i>.</p>
<p>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 <i>nuance</i> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span>
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 Molière
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:</p>
<div class="blockquot"><p>Let us salute and acknowledge to-day the noble and
mighty harmony of the <i>grand siècle</i>. 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
<i>Bérénice</i>; La Fontaine fewer <i>Fables</i> and more <i>Contes</i>;
Molière himself would have run to <i>Scapins</i>, and might
not have attained to the austere eminence of <i>Le Misanthrope</i>.
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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span>
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.</p></div>
<p>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:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">Ill-fated, impious race!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That blasphemed the bright Lyrist face to face,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And did not know it,—no, they went about,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Holding a poor decrepit standard out<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Marked with most flimsy mottoes, and in large<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The name of one Boileau!<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span>
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 dénouements; 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.</p>
<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span>
the end he found the Democritean maxim too
strong for him: <i>Excludit sanos Helicone poetas</i>;
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 (<i>le droit, je ne
dis des tièdes, mais des neutres</i>), 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 <i>History
of English Literature</i> to speak out strongly for the
admirable qualities of Pope:</p>
<div class="blockquot"><p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span>
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 naïve 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.</p></div>
<p>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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span>—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.</p>
<p>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 Abbé 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span>
bringing its share of disappointment. Only, perhaps,
when the hope of love (the <i>spes animi
credula mutui</i>) 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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span>
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.</p>
<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span>
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 <i>(l'esprit)</i>
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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span>
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 <i>la bella scuola</i> 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.</p>
<p>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'à
la dernière extrémité et à son corps défendant."
Something of this, too, must be held to account<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span>
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. Brunetière, 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, Molière,
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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span>
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.</p>
<p>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
Theologiæ. 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.</p>
<hr style="width: 65%;" />
<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span></p>
<h2><a name="THE_SCOTCH_NOVELS_AND_SCOTCH" id="THE_SCOTCH_NOVELS_AND_SCOTCH"></a>THE SCOTCH NOVELS AND SCOTCH<br />
HISTORY</h2>
<p>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
<i>History of Scotland</i>. 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 <i>selva oscura</i> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span>
anarchy and noise of endless wars. Yet with this
bold adventurer it might be said by me:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i10">I come no spy,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With purpose to explore or to disturb<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The secrets of your realm; but by constraint<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Wandering this darksome desert, as my way<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Led through your spacious empire up to light.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span>
principle of isolation and exclusion—the <i>principium
individuationis</i>, 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.</p>
<p>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 inspira<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span>tion
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</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Back to this meadow of calamity,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">This uncongenial place, this human life.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span>
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.</p>
<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span>
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.</p>
<p>Balzac, in some respects the master novelist,
was clearly conscious of this aim of his art; and
his <i>Comédie Humaine</i> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span>
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 <i>gai monde</i> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span>
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.</p>
<p>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 <i>Ivanhoe</i> and <i>Quentin
Durward</i>, 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 <i>Ivanhoe</i> or <i>The Talisman</i>, because
very little is required to evoke illusion with them.
More mature readers turn oftenest to <i>Guy Mannering</i>
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.</p>
<p>These negligences of the indifferent craftsman
might, perhaps, need no such compensation, for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span>
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 <i>Rob Roy</i>, 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 whim<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span>sicalities
corresponding to the "originals" or
"humourists" of the Elizabethan comedy.</p>
<p>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 <i>The Bride
of Lammermoor</i>, 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 <i>Macbeth</i>, 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:</p>
<div class="blockquot"><p>"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."</p>
<p>"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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span>
never be laid on his back, make you your market of that,
for I hae it frae a sure hand."</p>
<p>"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?"</p>
<p>"Ask nae mair questions about it—he'll no be graced
sae far," replied the sage.</p>
<p>"I ken ye are wiser than ither folk, Ailsie Gourlay.
But wha tell'd ye this?"</p>
<p>"Fashna your thumb about that, Annie Winnie," answered
the sibyl. "I hae it frae a hand sure eneugh."</p>
<p>"But ye said ye never saw the foul thief," reiterated
her inquisitive companion.</p>
<p>"I hae it frae as sure a hand," said Ailsie, "and frae
them that spaed his fortune before the sark gaed ower
his head."</p>
<p>"Hark! I hear his horse's feet riding aff," said the
other; "they dinna sound as if good luck was wi'
them."</p>
<p>"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."</p></div>
<p>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—</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Bawd, squire, impostor, many persons more,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Whose manners, now called humours, feed the stage.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">You cannot read through the <i>dramatis personæ</i> of
one of these plays (Witgood, Lucre, Hoard,
Limber, Kix, Lamprey, Spichcock, Dampit, etc.)<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span>
without being reminded of the long list of originals
that figure in the Scotch novels; and in one
case at least, Baron Bradwardine of <i>Waverley</i>,
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.</p>
<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span>
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 <i>The Pirate</i>, 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.</p>
<p>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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span>
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.</p>
<p>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
<i>Waverley</i> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span>
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.</p>
<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span>
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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span>
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.</p>
<p>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 na<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span>tional
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 <i>principium individuationis</i> 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.</p>
<hr style="width: 65%;" />
<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span></p>
<h2><a name="SWINBURNE" id="SWINBURNE"></a>SWINBURNE</h2>
<p>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<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> 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,
<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span>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 <i>Theodore Watts-Dunton</i> 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.</p>
<p>Such is the meagre outline of Swinburne's life,
nor do the few other events recorded or the
<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span>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 <i>Poems and Ballads</i> (that <i>péché de jeunesse</i>, 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 <i>scornful or mournful</i>, and yet I
should feel much easier in my appreciation of the
<i>Poems and Ballads</i> 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 <i>Atalanta</i> and the first
<i>Poems and Ballads</i>, 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.</p>
<p>The publication of <i>Atalanta</i> at the age of
twenty-eight made him famous, <i>Poems and Ballads</i>
the next year made him almost infamous. The
alarm aroused in England by <i>Dolores</i> and <i>Faustine</i><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span>
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 <i>Laus Veneris</i>; the satiety of disappointment
clings "with sullen savour of poisonous
pain" to <i>The Triumph of Time</i>; satiety speaks in
the <i>Hymn to Proserpine</i>, with its regret for the
passing of the old heathen gods; it seeks relief in
the unnatural passion of <i>Anactoria</i>—</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Clothed with deep eyelids under and above—<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Yea, all thy beauty sickens me with love;<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">turns to the abominations of cruelty in <i>Faustine</i>;
sings enchantingly of rest in <i>The Garden of
Proserpine</i>—</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Here, where the world is quiet,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Here, where all trouble seems<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Dead winds' and spent waves' riot<br /></span>
<span class="i1">In doubtful dreams of dreams;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I watch the green field growing<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For reaping folk and sowing,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For harvest-time and mowing,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">A sleepy world of streams.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">I am tired of tears and laughter,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">And men that laugh and weep,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of what may come hereafter<br /></span>
<span class="i1">For men that sow to reap:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I am weary of days and hours,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Blown buds of barren flowers,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Desires and dreams and powers<br /></span>
<span class="i1">And everything but sleep.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span></p>
<p>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 <i>Poems and
Ballads</i>. There is a certain contagion in such a
song as <i>Dolores</i>. 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span>
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:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Fruits fail and love dies and time ranges;<br /></span>
<span class="i2">Thou art fed with perpetual breath,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And alive after infinite changes,<br /></span>
<span class="i2">And fresh from the kisses of death;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of languors rekindled and rallied,<br /></span>
<span class="i2">Of barren delights and unclean,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Things monstrous and fruitless, a pallid<br /></span>
<span class="i2">And poisonous queen.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Could you hurt me, sweet lips, though I hurt you?<br /></span>
<span class="i2">Men touch them, and change in a trice<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The lilies and languors of virtue<br /></span>
<span class="i2">For the raptures and roses of vice;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Those lie where thy foot on the floor is,<br /></span>
<span class="i2">These crown and caress thee and chain,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">O splendid and sterile Dolores,<br /></span>
<span class="i2">Our Lady of Pain.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span>
lines in <i>Jenny</i> where Rossetti has expressed the
same idea of man's inveterate lust:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Like a toad within a stone<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Seated while Time crumbles on;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which sits there since the earth was cursed<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For Man's transgression at the first—<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">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 <i>Dolores</i>
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.</p>
<p>The <i>Poems and Ballads</i> are splendid but <i>malsain</i>;
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 <i>Songs Before Sunrise</i>
(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 con<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span>jures
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 <i>Eve of Revolution</i>,
for instance, with which the <i>Songs Before
Sunrise</i> open, rings with the stirring noise of
trumpets:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">I hear the midnight on the mountains cry<br /></span>
<span class="i1">With many tongues of thunders, and I hear<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Sound and resound the hollow shield of sky<br /></span>
<span class="i1">With trumpet-throated winds that charge and cheer,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And through the roar of the hours that fighting fly,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Through flight and fight and all the fluctuant fear. . . .<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span>
hymns to liberty are nearly unreadable—at least
if any one can endure to the end of <i>A Song of
Italy</i>, 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:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">. . . the truth whose witness now draws near<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To scourge these dogs, agape with jaws afoam,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Down out of life.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">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."</p>
<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span>
"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.</p>
<p>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 <i>Beowulf</i> to <i>The Seven Seas</i>
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 <i>Poems and Ballads</i> there is a hint of the
sympathy between the poet and this realm of
water and air. One of the finest passages in <i>The
Triumph of Time</i> is that which begins:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">I will go back to the great sweet mother,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Mother and lover of men, the sea.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I will go down to her, I and none other,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Close with her, kiss her and mix her with me.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span></p>
<p class="noidt">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 <i>Songs Before Sunrise</i>, 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 Æolus; at least
he is forced to admire the genius that presides
over the gusty concourse:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">Hic vasto rex Æolus antro<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Luctantis ventos tempestatesque sonoras<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Imperio premit ac vinclis et carcere frenat.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Illi indignantes magno cum murmure montis<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Circum claustra fremunt.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p>The comparison is not so far-fetched as it might
seem. There is a picture of Swinburne in the
<i>Recollections</i> of the late Henry Treffry Dunn which
almost personifies him as the storm-king:</p>
<div class="blockquot"><p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span>
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.</p></div>
<p>The scattered poems in his later books that rise
above the <i>Poems and Ballads</i> with a kind of
grandiose suggestiveness are for the most part
filled with echoes of wind and water. That
haunting picture of crumbling desolation, <i>A
Forsaken Garden</i>, 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,
<i>At a Month's End</i>, combines this aspect of nature
admirably with human emotion:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Silent we went an hour together,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Under grey skies by waters white.<br /></span>
<span class="i0"><i>Our hearts were full of windy weather,</i><br /></span>
<span class="i1"><i>Clouds and blown stars and broken light.</i><br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">And the sensation left from a reading of <i>Tristram
of Lyonesse</i> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span>
the sea with Tristram, takes this magnificent
comparison:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">And as the august great blossom of the dawn<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Burst, and the full sun scarce from sea withdrawn<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Seemed on the fiery water a flower afloat,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">So as a fire the mighty morning smote<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Throughout her, and incensed with the influent hour<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Her whole soul's one great mystical red flower<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Burst. . . .<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">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:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">And swordlike was the sound of the iron wind,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And as a breaking battle was the sea.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span>
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:</p>
<div class="blockquot"><p>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.</p></div>
<p>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 <i>By the North Sea</i>. The picture of desolate
and barren waste is one of the most powerful
creations in his later works (it was published in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span>
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 <i>Childe Roland</i> 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 <i>First Footsteps</i>
and a <i>A Baby's Death</i>:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">A little way, more soft and sweet<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Than fields aflower with May,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A babe's feet, venturing, scarce complete<br /></span>
<span class="i1">A little way.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Eyes full of dawning day<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Look up for mother's eyes to meet,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Too blithe for song to say.<br /></span>
<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span></div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Glad as the golden spring to greet<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Its first live leaflet's play,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Love, laughing, leads the little feet<br /></span>
<span class="i1">A little way.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<hr class='half' />
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">The little feet that never trod<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Earth, never strayed in field or street,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">What hand leads upward back to God<br /></span>
<span class="i1">The little feet?<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">A rose in June's most honied heat,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">When life makes keen the kindling sod,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Was not more soft and warm and sweet.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Their pilgrimage's period<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A few swift moons have seen complete<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Since mother's hands first clasped and shod<br /></span>
<span class="i1">The little feet.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">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.</p>
<p>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 <i>motion</i>. 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span>
subsiding sea, in the lines of <i>Atalanta</i> and the
<i>Poems and Ballads</i>. 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 cæsura 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:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Hills and <i>valleys</i> where April <i>rallies</i> his radiant squadron of flowers and <i>birds</i>,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Steep strange <i>beaches</i> and lustrous <i>reaches</i> of fluctuant sea that the land <i>engirds</i>,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Fields and <i>downs</i> that the sunrise <i>crowns</i> with life diviner than lives in <i>words</i>,—<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">a page of this sets the nerves all a-jangle.</p>
<p>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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span>
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 <i>A Channel Passage</i>:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">As a tune that is played by the fingers of death on the keys of life or of sleep.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">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 <i>Walter
Savage Landor</i> and find this passage marked:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">High from his throne in heaven Simonides,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Crowned with mild aureole of memorial tears<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That the everlasting sun of all time sees<br /></span>
<span class="i1">All golden, molten from the forge of years.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span>
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 <i>At a
Dog's Grave</i>:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">The shadow shed round those we love shines bright<br /></span>
<span class="i1">As <i>love's</i> own face.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">It is only a mannerism such as another, but it
recurs with sufficient frequency to have an appreciable
effect on the mind.</p>
<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span>
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 <i>The Heptalogia, or Seven
against Sense</i>, a series of parodies which does not
spare his own mannerisms. Some scandalised
Philistines, I doubt, might even need to be told
that <i>Nephelidia</i> was a parody:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Nay, for the nick of the tick of the time is a tremulous touch on the temples of terror,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Strained as the sinews yet strenuous with strife of the dead who is dumb as the dust-heaps of death:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Surely no soul is it, sweet as the spasm of erotic emotional exquisite error,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Bathed in the balms of beatified bliss, beatific itself by beatitude's breath.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p>Pretty much all the traits of Swinburne's style
are there—the long breathless lines with their
flowing dactyls or anapæsts, 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span>
the Channel. Let us take, then, a stanza from
<i>A Swimmer's Dream</i>:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">All the strength of the waves that perish<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Swells beneath me and laughs and sighs,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Sighs for love of the life they cherish,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Laughs to know that it lives and dies,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Dies for joy of its life, and lives<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thrilled with joy that its brief death gives—<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Death whose laugh or whose breath forgives<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Change that bids it subside and rise.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">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 <i>Chastelard</i>) almost intolerably
tedious.</p>
<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span>
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 <i>Atalanta in Calydon</i>, 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.</p>
<p>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-<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span></p>
<p>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 <i>conceit</i> 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, <i>épater le bourgeois</i>, 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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span></p>
<hr style="width: 65%;" />
<h2><a name="CHRISTINA_ROSSETTI" id="CHRISTINA_ROSSETTI"></a>CHRISTINA ROSSETTI</h2>
<p>Probably the first impression one gets from
reading the <i>Complete Poetical Works</i> of Christina
Rossetti, now collected and edited by her brother,
Mr. W. M. Rossetti,<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a> 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
æolian 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
<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span>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 <i>Goblin Market and Other Poems</i>,
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!"</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Passing away, saith the World, passing away:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Chances, beauty, and youth, sapped day by day,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thy life never continueth in one stay.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Is the eye waxen dim, is the dark hair changing to grey,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That hath won neither laurel nor bay?<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I shall clothe myself in Spring and bud in May:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thou, root-stricken, shalt not rebuild thy decay<br /></span>
<span class="i0">On my bosom for aye.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Then I answered: Yea.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Passing away, saith my Soul, passing away:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With its burden of fear and hope, of labour and play,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Hearken what the past doth witness and say:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Rust in thy gold, a moth is in thine array,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A canker is in thy bud, thy leaf must decay.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">At midnight, at cockcrow, at morning, one certain day<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Lo the Bridegroom shall come and shall not delay;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Watch thou and pray.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Then I answered: Yea.<br /></span>
<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span></div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Passing away, saith my God, passing away:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Winter passeth after the long delay:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">New grapes on the vine, new figs on the tender spray,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Turtle calleth turtle in Heaven's May.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Though I tarry, wait for Me, trust Me, watch and pray:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Arise, come away, night is past and lo it is day:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">My love, My sister, My spouse, thou shalt hear Me say.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Then I answered: Yea.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p>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 ex<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span>pression
of the feminine genius as the world has
yet heard.</p>
<p>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
(ϰαλαὶ δέ τε πᾶσαι),
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:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">And still she bowed herself and stooped<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Out of the circling charm;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Until her bosom must have made<br /></span>
<span class="i1">The bar she leaned on warm,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And the lilies lay as if asleep<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Along her bended arm.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p>I have likened the artlessness of much of her
writing to the sweet monotony of an æolian 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span>
head, humbled but not broken, nor ever forgetful
of her gentle mission,—</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">And strong in patient weakness till the end.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">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:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">She stands there like a beacon through the night,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">A pale clear beacon where the storm-drift is—<br /></span>
<span class="i0">She stands alone, a wonder deathly-white:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">She stands there patient, nerved with inner might,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Indomitable in her feebleness,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Her face and will athirst against the light.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span>
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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span>
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 <i>Athenæum</i>
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:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">How should I rest in Paradise,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Or sit on steps of heaven alone?<br /></span>
<span class="i0">If Saints and Angels spoke of love,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Should I not answer from my throne,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Have pity upon me, ye my friends,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For I have heard the sound thereof?<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">She seems even not to have been unfamiliar with
the hope of joy, and I would persuade myself that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span>
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:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">A voice said, "Follow, follow": and I rose<br /></span>
<span class="i1">And followed far into the dreamy night,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Turning my back upon the pleasant light.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">It led me where the bluest water flows,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And would not let me drink: where the corn grows<br /></span>
<span class="i1">I dared not pause, but went uncheered by sight<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Or touch: until at length in evil plight<br /></span>
<span class="i0">It left me, wearied out with many woes.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Some time I sat as one bereft of sense:<br /></span>
<span class="i1">But soon another voice from very far<br /></span>
<span class="i2">Called, "Follow, follow": and I rose again.<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Now on my night has dawned a blessed star:<br /></span>
<span class="i2">Kind steady hands my sinking steps sustain,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">And will not leave me till I go from hence.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span>
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:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">He broke my will from day to day;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">He read my yearnings unexprest,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And said them nay.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">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:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">O dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter sweet,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Whose wakening should have been in Paradise,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Where souls brimful of love abide and meet;<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Where thirsting longing eyes<br /></span>
<span class="i2">Watch the slow door<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That opening, letting in, lets out no more.<br /></span>
<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span></div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live<br /></span>
<span class="i1">My very life again though cold in death:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Come back to me in dreams, that I may give<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Pulse for pulse, breath for breath:<br /></span>
<span class="i2">Speak low, lean low,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As long ago, my love, how long ago.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span>
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 <i>idea</i> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span>
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.</p>
<p>There is a curious comment on this contrast in
the introduction to Christina Rossetti's <i>Monna
Innominata</i>, 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 <i>Portuguese
Sonnets</i>, 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;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span>
only the higher inspiration is lacking to them in
comparison with her <i>Passing Away</i>, 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 <i>Portuguese Sonnets</i>, one
of the most perfect in the series:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">When our two souls stand up erect and strong,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Face to face, drawing nigher and nigher,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Until the lengthening wings break into fire<br /></span>
<span class="i0">At either curvèd point,—What bitter wrong<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Can earth do to us, that we should not long<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Be here contented? Think. In mounting higher,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The angels would press on us, and aspire<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To drop some golden orb of perfect song<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Into our deep, dear silence. Let us stay<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Rather on earth, Beloved,—where the unfit<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Contrarious moods of men recoil away<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And isolate pure spirits, and permit<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A place to stand and love in for a day,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With darkness and the death-hour rounding it.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">That is noble verse, undoubtedly. The point is
that it might just as well have been written by a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span>
man to a woman as the contrary; it would, for
example, fit perfectly well into Dante Gabriel
Rossetti's <i>House of Life</i>. 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.</p>
<p>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 <i>Monna
Innominata</i>, but expressing the same spirit of
resignation. It is entitled simply <i>Rest</i>:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">O Earth, lie heavily upon her eyes;<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Seal her sweet eyes weary of watching, Earth;<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Lie close around her; leave no room for mirth<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With its harsh laughter, nor for sound of sighs.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">She hath no questions, she hath no replies,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Hushed in and curtained with a blessed dearth<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Of all that irked her from the hour of birth;<br /></span>
<span class="i0"><i>With stillness that is almost Paradise.</i><br /></span>
<span class="i0"><i>Darkness more clear than noonday holdeth her,</i><br /></span>
<span class="i1"><i>Silence more musical than any song;</i><br /></span>
<span class="i0">Even her very heart has ceased to stir:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Until the morning of Eternity<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Her rest shall not begin nor end, but be;<br /></span>
<span class="i1">And when she wakes she will not think it long.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">Am I misguided in thinking that in this stillness,
this silence more musical than any song, the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span>
feminine heart speaks with a simplicity and consummate
purity such as I quite fail to hear in the
<i>Portuguese Sonnets</i>, 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:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Our wills are ours, we know not how;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Our wills are ours, to make them Thine.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">It will be better to quote one other poem, perhaps
her most perfect work artistically, and to pass on:</p>
<p class="center">UP-HILL</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Does the road wind up-hill all the way?<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Yes, to the very end.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Will the day's journey take the whole long day?<br /></span>
<span class="i1">From morn to night, my friend.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">But is there for the night a resting-place?<br /></span>
<span class="i1">A roof for when the slow dark hours begin.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">May not the darkness hide it from my face?<br /></span>
<span class="i1">You cannot miss that inn.<br /></span>
<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span></div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Shall I meet other wayfarers at night?<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Those who have gone before.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Then must I knock, or call when just in sight?<br /></span>
<span class="i1">They will not keep you standing at that door.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Of labour you shall find the sum.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Will there be beds for me and all who seek?<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Yea, beds for all who come.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p>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 <i>amari aliquid</i> 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, <i>The Lowest Room</i>, which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span>
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 <i>The Lowest
Room</i> even evoke a reminiscence of that scene in
Thomson's <i>City of Dreadful Night</i>, where the
"shrill and lamentable cry" breaks through the
silence of the shadowy congregation:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">In all eternity I had one chance,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">One few years' term of gracious human life,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The splendours of the intellect's advance,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">The sweetness of the home with babes and wife.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p>But if occasionally this residue of bitterness in
Christina Rossetti recalls the more acrid genius<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span>
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 <i>Our Lady of Oblivion</i>
Thomson might seem to be speaking for both,
only in a more deliberately metaphorical style:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Take me, and lull me into perfect sleep;<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Down, down, far hidden in thy duskiest cave;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">While all the clamorous years above me sweep<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Unheard, or, like the voice of seas that rave<br /></span>
<span class="i0">On far-off coasts, but murmuring o'er my trance,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A dim vast monotone, that shall enhance<br /></span>
<span class="i1">The restful rapture of the inviolate grave.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span>
world; whereto the second replies, and it is the
poet himself who speaks:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">The world rolls round forever as a mill;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">It grinds out death and life and good and ill;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">It has no purpose, heart or mind or will. . . .<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Man might know one thing were his sight less dim;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That it whirls not to suit his petty whim,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That it is quite indifferent to him.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">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:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Passing away, saith the World, passing away. . . .<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Then I answered: Yea.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<hr style="width: 65%;" />
<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span></p>
<h2><a name="WHY_IS_BROWNING_POPULAR" id="WHY_IS_BROWNING_POPULAR"></a>WHY IS BROWNING POPULAR?</h2>
<p>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 <i>vade mecum</i> 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<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a> 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
<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span>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?</p>
<p>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:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">O lyric Love, half-angel and half-bird,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And all a wonder and a wild desire—<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span>
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 <i>The Ring and the Book</i>, 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 <i>Paracelsus</i>, 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:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">The herded pines commune and have deep thoughts,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A secret they assemble to discuss<br /></span>
<span class="i0">When the sun drops behind their trunks which glare<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Like grates of hell.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span>
of poetry into the Browningite. Even his common-sense
admirers are probably held by something
more recondite than this occasional charm.</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">You see one lad o'erstride a chimney-stack;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Him you must watch—he's sure to fall, yet stands!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Our interest 's on the dangerous edge of things—<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">says Bishop Blougram, and the attraction of
Browning to many is just watching what may
be called his acrobatic psychology. Consider this
same <i>Bishop Blougram's Apology</i>, 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span>
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, <i>Men and
Women</i>, that form the heart of his work, but in
<i>Paracelsus</i>, in <i>The Ring and the Book</i>, even in the
songs and the formal dramas.</p>
<p>Perhaps the most remarkable and most obvious
example of this suspended psychology is to be
found in <i>The Ring and the Book</i>. 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span>
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.</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">We did go on all night; but at its close<br /></span>
<span class="i0">She was troubled, restless, moaned low, talked at whiles<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To herself, her brow on quiver with the dream:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Once, wide awake, she menaced, at arms' length<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Waved away something—"Never again with you!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">My soul is mine, my body is my soul's:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">You and I are divided ever more<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In soul and body: get you gone!" Then I—<br /></span>
<span class="i0">"Why, in my whole life I have never prayed!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Oh, if the God, that only can, would help!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Am I his priest with power to cast out fiends?<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Let God arise and all his enemies<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Be scattered!" By morn, there was peace, no sigh<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Out of the deep sleep—<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">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.</p>
<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span>
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
<i>Sordello</i> with such a poem as Goethe's <i>Tasso</i>
(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.</p>
<p>There is even a certain significance in what is
perhaps the most immediately personal poem
Browning ever wrote, that <i>One Word More</i> which
he appended to his <i>Men and Women</i>. Did he
himself quite understand this lament for Raphael's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span>
lost sonnets and Dante's interrupted angel, this
desire to find his love a language,</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Fit and fair and simple and sufficient—<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Using nature that's an art to others,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Not, this one time, art that's turned his nature?<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">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.</p>
<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span>
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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span>
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.</p>
<p>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:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">I <i>won't</i> philosophise, and <i>will</i> be read.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">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 <i>Idee</i> and <i>Begriff</i>, <i>Objektivität</i> and
<i>Subjektivität</i>, 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span>
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.</p>
<p>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:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Ah Love! could you and I with Him conspire<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Would not we shatter it to bits—and then<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire!<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span>
of love, as in <i>James Lee's Wife</i> and <i>In a Balcony</i>,
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.</p>
<p>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:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Nox erat et cælo fulgebat luna sereno<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Inter minora sidera.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">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 <i>Paracelsus</i> 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 <i>Easter-Day</i>:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">And as I said<br /></span>
<span class="i0">This nonsense, throwing back my head<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span><br /></span>
<span class="i0">With light complacent laugh, I found<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Suddenly all the midnight round<br /></span>
<span class="i0">One fire. The dome of heaven had stood<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As made up of a multitude<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of handbreadth cloudlets, one vast rack<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of ripples infinite and black,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">From sky to sky. Sudden there went,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Like horror and astonishment,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A fierce vindictive scribble of red<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Quick flame across, as if one said<br /></span>
<span class="i0">(The angry scribe of Judgment), "There—<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Burn it!" And straight I was aware<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That the whole ribwork round, minute<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Cloud touching cloud beyond compute,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Was tinted, each with its own spot<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of burning at the core, till clot<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Jammed against clot, and spilt its fire<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Over all heaven. . . .<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">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!"</p>
<p>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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span>
"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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span>
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.</p>
<p>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
<i>Cleon</i>. 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:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">It is so horrible,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I dare at times imagine to my need<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Some future state revealed to us by Zeus,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Unlimited in capability<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For joy, as this is in desire for joy.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">. . . . . . . . . . But no!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Zeus has not yet revealed it; and alas,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">He must have done so, were it possible!<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p>The poem, one begins to suspect, is a specimen
of Browning's peculiar manner of indirection; in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span>
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:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i10">And for the rest,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I cannot tell thy messenger aright<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Where to deliver what he bears of thine<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To one called Paulus; we have heard his fame<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Indeed, if Christus be not one with him—<br /></span>
<span class="i0"><i>I know not, nor am troubled much to know.</i><br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thou canst not think a mere barbarian Jew,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As Paulus proves to be, one circumcised,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Hath access to a secret shut from us?<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thou wrongest our philosophy, O King,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In stooping to inquire of such an one,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As if his answer could impose at all!<br /></span>
<span class="i0"><i>He writeth, doth he? well, and he may write.</i><br /></span>
<span class="i0">Oh, the Jew findeth scholars! certain slaves<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Who touched on this same isle, preached him and Christ;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And (as I gathered from a bystander)<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Their doctrine could be held by no sane man.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span>
would scarcely have been possible were not the
rhythm and the mechanism of the verse unusually
free of Browning's prosaic mannerism.</p>
<p>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, <i>Sordello</i>, for one, he simply
refuses to bother himself with. <i>Le jeu</i>, he says
candidly, <i>ne vaut pas les chandelles</i>. 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: <i>C'est magnifique,
mais ce n'est pas la poésie!</i> 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 <i>Paradise
Lost</i>. 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span>
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.</p>
<p>And here again I am tempted to abscond behind
those blessed words <i>Platonische Ideen</i> and
<i>Begriffe, universalia ante rem</i> and <i>universalia post
rem</i>, 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span>
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:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Over the ball of it,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Peering and prying,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">How I see all of it,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Life there, outlying!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Roughness and smoothness,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Shine and defilement,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Grace and uncouthness:<br /></span>
<span class="i1">One reconcilement.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">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:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Let us not always say,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">"Spite of this flesh to-day<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole!"<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As the bird wings and sings,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Let us cry, "All good things<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul!"<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">Passion to Shakespeare was the source of tragedy;
there is no tragedy, properly speaking, in
Browning, for the reason that passion is to him<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span>
essentially good. By sheer bravado of human
emotion we justify our existence, nay—</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">We have to live alone to set forth well<br /></span>
<span class="i0">God's praise.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">His notion of "moral strength," as Professor Santayana
so forcibly says, "is a blind and miscellaneous
vehemence."</p>
<p>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:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">In my own heart love had not been made wise<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To trace love's faint beginnings in mankind,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To know even hate is but a mask of love's.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">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:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">For the loving worm within its clod<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Were diviner than a loveless god.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">And in the closing vision of <i>Saul</i> this thought of
the identity of man's love and God's love is uttered
by David in a kind of delirious ecstasy:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">'T is the weakness in strength, that I cry for! my flesh, that I seek<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In the Godhead! I seek and I find it. O Saul, it shall be<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A Face like my face that receives thee; a Man like to me,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thou shalt love and be loved by, forever: a Hand like this hand<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee! See the Christ stand!<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span></p>
<p>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:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i3">Guardami ben: ben son, ben son Beatrice.<br /></span>
<span class="i3">Come degnasti d' accedere al monte?<br /></span>
<span class="i3">Non sapei to the qui è l'uom felice?<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">(Behold me well: lo, Beatrice am I.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And thou, how daredst thou to this mount draw nigh?<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Knew'st thou not here was man's felicity?)—<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span>
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 <i>Fifine at
the Fair</i>, "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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span>
It used to be believed that Calderon was a bearer
of the message, Calderon who expressed the doctrine
of the saints and the poets:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Pues el delito mayor<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Del hombre es haber nacido—<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">(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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<hr style="width: 65%;" />
<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span></p>
<h2><a name="A_NOTE_ON_BYRONS_DON_JUAN" id="A_NOTE_ON_BYRONS_DON_JUAN"></a>A NOTE ON BYRON'S "DON JUAN"</h2>
<p>It has often been a source of wonder to me that
I was able to read and enjoy Byron's <i>Don Juan</i>
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 <i>Don Juan</i> among the great epics which
might have seemed in finer accord with the sublimity
and peace of that memorable day.</p>
<p>In one respect, at least, it needed no return to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span>
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
<i>minynthadion</i> 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:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Out of the day and night<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A joy has taken flight:<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight<br /></span>
<span class="i1">No more—oh, never more!<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p>This, I repeat, is a strange fact, for it appears
that these poets, prophets who spoke in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span>
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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span>
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."
Θνητῶν γὰρ οὐδείς
ἐστιν εὐδαίμων,
indeed!—would any one be shameless
enough to utter such words under the new dispensation
of official optimism?</p>
<p>It is necessary to think of these things before
we attempt to criticise Byron, for <i>Don Juan</i>, 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
Haidée 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span>
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 <i>Don
Juan</i> as it is—with all its enormities upon it.</p>
<p>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 <i>sæva indignatio</i> that devoured the heart and
brain of poor Swift. There is in <i>Don Juan</i> 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 <i>Epistle to Dr.
Arbuthnot</i>, or the spasmodic gaiety of the Menip<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span>pean
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.</p>
<p>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 <i>Don Juan</i> for you; it is an
epic as much in the spirit of our day as the <i>Iliad</i>
was in that of Homer." And in one of the asides
in the poem itself he avows the same design:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i2">A panoramic view of Hell's in training,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">After the style of Virgil and of Homer,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">So that my name of Epic's no misnomer.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">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</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">reveled in the fancies of the time,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">True Knights, chaste Dames, huge Giants, Kings despotic;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But all these, save the last, being obsolete,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I chose a modern subject as more meet.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span>
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 <i>Don Juan</i>
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.</p>
<p>I have said that the great poets all took a
sombre view of the world. Man is but <i>the dream
of a shadow</i>, 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</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i4">this scene of all-confessed inanity,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">By Saint, by Sage, by Preacher, and by Poet,<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">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:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">I say no more than hath been said in Dante's<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Verse, and by Solomon and by Cervantes.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">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 narrow<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span>ing
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.</p>
<p>Now Byron came at a time of transition from
the old to the new. The triumphs of material
discovery, "<i>Le magnifiche sorti e progressive</i>,"
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</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Who knew this life was not worth a potato,—<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span></p>
<p class="noidt">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 <i>vis medica</i>. 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 <i>Don Juan</i>. 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:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">There was not now a luggage boy, but sought<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Danger and spoil with ardour much increased;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And why? because a little—odd—old man,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Stripped to his shirt, was come to lead the van.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">In the gruesome shipwreck scene the tale of suffering
which leads to cannibalism is interrupted thus:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">At length they caught two Boobies, and a Noddy,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And then they left off eating the dead body.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span></p>
<p class="noidt">The description of London town as seen from
Shooter's Hill ends with this absurd metaphor:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">A huge, dun Cupola, like a foolscap crown<br /></span>
<span class="i0">On a fool's head—and there is London Town!<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">Even Death laughs,—death that "<i>hiatus maxime
defiendus</i>," "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:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Here I must leave him, for I grow pathetic,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Moved by the Chinese nymph of tears, green tea!<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p>I trust, however, it has been made sufficiently
clear that <i>Don Juan</i> 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:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">But almost sanctify the sweet excess<br /></span>
<span class="i0">By the immortal wish and power to bless.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">He who could write such lines as those was not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span>
merely indulging his humour. <i>Don Juan</i> is
something more than</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">A versified Aurora Borealis,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Which flashes o'er a waste and icy clime.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<hr style="width: 65%;" />
<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span></p>
<h2><a name="LAURENCE_STERNE" id="LAURENCE_STERNE"></a>LAURENCE STERNE</h2>
<p>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.<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a></p>
<p>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 <i>Journal to Eliza</i> 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 differ<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span>ence
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
<i>Journal</i> 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 <i>Brahmine</i>. 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span>
sympathy enough and facile tears enough for the
genial Costigans and the others who followed
their hearts too readily; have you no <i>Alas, poor
Yorick!</i> 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 <i>Journal</i> 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 <i>Tristram Shandy</i>; add but a touch<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span>
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 <i>Sermons</i> 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 <i>Roundabout Papers</i> he tells how he
slept in Sterne's old hotel at Calais: "When I
went to bed in the room, in <i>his</i> 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 <i>English Humourists</i>.</p>
<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span>
not attempt a panegyric of Sterne, as did Mr.
Fitzgerald in the first edition of the <i>Life</i>, 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.</p>
<p>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 <i>Memoir</i>
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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span>
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:</p>
<div class="blockquot"><p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span>
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.</p></div>
<p>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 <i>Henry Esmond</i>;
the very texture of the language, the turn of the
quizzical pathos, are Thackeray's.</p>
<p>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, <span class="smcap">Lau.
Sterne</span>. The usher whipped him severely, but,
says the <i>Memoir</i>, "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 <i>Yorkshire<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span>
Anecdotes</i>, 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 <i>not</i> sentimental."</p>
<p>But the lawful Mrs. Sterne was not the only<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span>
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 <i>Tristram
Shandy</i>), 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span>
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 <i>Journal</i> 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 <i>Journal</i> 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:</p>
<div class="blockquot"><p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span>—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<sup>cḥ</sup> a rich Vally can
produce)—with a Bottle of wine on my right hand (as in
Bond street) to drink y<sup>ṛ</sup> health—I have a hundred hens
& chickens [he sometimes spelt it <i>chickings</i>] ab<sup>ṭ</sup> 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<sup>tḥ</sup> w<sup>cḥ</sup> heaven has distinguish'd You...</p>
<p>—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—</p></div>
<p>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 Abbé
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.</p>
<p>All this new material throws light on a phase
of this matter which cannot be avoided in any<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span>
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:</p>
<div class="blockquot"><p>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.</p></div>
<p class="noidt">Follows a polite offer of services, which is nothing
to our purpose.</p>
<p>Now it is easy to say that such a letter was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span>
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 <i>Journal to Eliza</i>, 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span>
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 <i>Journal</i> 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:</p>
<div class="blockquot"><p>Nov: 1<sup>sṭ</sup> All my dearest Eliza has turnd out more
favourable than my hopes—M<sup>rṣ</sup> 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<sup>rṣ</sup> 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<sup>ḍ</sup> every one else, by humanity & Generosity—&
she leaves me, more than half in Love w<sup>tḥ</sup> 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<sup>cḥ</sup> I am to remit her three hundred guineas a
<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span>year—& give
my dear Girl two thousand p<sup>dṣ</sup>—w<sup>tḥ</sup> w<sup>cḥ</sup> all
Joy, I agree to,—but tis to be sunk into an annuity in
the french Loans—</p>
<p>—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.</p></div>
<p>So ends the famous <i>Journal</i>, 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 <i>Journal</i> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span>
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.</p>
<p>"Un prêtre corrumpu ne l'est jamais à 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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span>
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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span>
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.</p>
<p>Here, then, in the library of his compromising
friend, he gathered the material for his great
work, <i>Tristram Shandy</i>; 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 <i>Anatomy of Melancholy</i>
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. <i>Tristram Shandy</i> and the
<i>Sentimental Journey</i> 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.</p>
<p>The fact is that this trick of borrowing scarcely
does more than affect a few of those set pieces or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span>
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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span>
if those who call it pathetic really mean that it
has touched their heart; I am sure it never cost
me a sigh.</p>
<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span>
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
<i>hobbyhorsical</i> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span>
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 <i>Flanders</i>, cried my
Uncle <i>Toby</i>—but nothing to this.—For my own
part, I could not have a heart to curse my dog
so."</p>
<p>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 ex<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span>hibition
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:</p>
<div class="blockquot">
<p>——My young master in <i>London</i> is dead! said Obadiah.—</p>
<p>——A green sattin night-gown of my mother's, which
had been twice scoured, was the first idea which <i>Obadiah's</i>
exclamation brought into <i>Susannah's</i> head....</p>
<p>—O! 'twill be the death of my poor mistress, cried
<i>Susannah</i>.—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.—"<i>No,—she
will never look up again</i>," said <i>Susannah</i>.</p>
<p>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 <i>Obadiah</i>,—he
is certainly dead!—So am not I, said the foolish
scullion.</p>
<p>——Here is sad news, <i>Trim</i>, cried <i>Susannah</i>, wiping
her eyes as <i>Trim</i> stepp'd into the kitchen,—master
<i>Bobby</i> is dead and <i>buried</i>—the funeral was an interpolation
of <i>Susannah's</i>—we shall have all to go into mourning,
said <i>Susannah</i>.</p>
<p>I hope not, said <i>Trim</i>.—You hope not! cried <i>Susannah</i>
earnestly.—The mourning ran not in <i>Trim's</i> head, whatever
it did in <i>Susannah's</i>.—I hope—said <i>Trim</i>, explaining
himself, I hope in God the news is not true—I heard
the letter read with my own ears, answered <i>Obadiah</i>;
and we shall have a terrible piece of work of it in
stubbing the Ox-moor.—Oh! he's dead, said <i>Susannah</i>.—As
sure, said the scullion, as I'm alive.</p>
<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span></p>
<p>I lament for him from my heart and my soul, said
<i>Trim</i>, fetching a sigh.—Poor creature!—poor boy!—poor
gentleman!</p>
<p>—He was alive last <i>Whitsontide</i>! said the coachman.—<i>Whitsontide!</i>
alas! cried <i>Trim</i>, extending his right
arm, and falling instantly into the same attitude in which
he read the sermon,—what is <i>Whitsontide</i>, <i>Jonathan</i> (for
that was the coachman's name), or <i>Shrovetide</i>, 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! <i>Susannah</i> burst into a flood of tears.—We are
not stocks and stones.—<i>Jonathan, Obadiah</i>, 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.</p></div>
<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span>
magnified by the author's fantastic disquisition on
its precise nature and significance.</p>
<p>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
rôles. 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 mediæval 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span>
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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span>
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span>
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 <i>Tristram Shandy</i>, 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 <i>Toby</i>, or the sins and follies
of the <i>Shandy</i> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span>
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 <i>Tristram Shandy</i> 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.</p>
<p>Sterne, on one side of his character, was a sentimentalist.
That, and little more than that, we
see in his letters and <i>Journal</i>. And in a form,
subtilised no doubt to a kind of exquisite felicity,
that is the essence of his <i>Sentimental Journey</i>, as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span>
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 <i>faire école</i>. It flooded English
literature with tearful trash like Mackenzie's
<i>Man of Feeling</i>, and, in a happier manner, it influenced
even Thackeray more than he would
have been willing to admit. It is present in
<i>Tristram Shandy</i>, but only as a milder and half-concealed
flavour, subduing the satire of that
travesty to the uses of a genial and sympathetic
humour.</p>
<p>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 man<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span>ners,
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.</p>
<p>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 <i>pueris reverentia</i> 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 <i>Venus
and Adonis</i>, 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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span>
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 <i>Tristram Shandy</i> 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.</p>
<p>The first two volumes of <i>Tristram Shandy</i> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span>
sent their Complim<sup>tṣ</sup> to me, & I set out on Monday
Morning to pay my Visits to them all. I am
to dine w<sup>ḥ</sup> Lord Chesterfield this Week, &c. &c.,
and next Sunday L<sup>ḍ</sup> 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.</p>
<p>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 <i>Sermons by Mr. Yorick</i>,
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.</p>
<p>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
<i>Tristram Shandy</i> and for the <i>Sentimental Journey</i>.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span>
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 <i>Journal to Eliza</i>; 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.</p>
<p>He sent this appeal from Bond Street, on Tues<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span>day,
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:</p>
<div class="blockquot"><p>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.</p></div>
<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span>
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.</p>
<hr style="width: 65%;" />
<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span></p>
<h2><a name="J_HENRY_SHORTHOUSE" id="J_HENRY_SHORTHOUSE"></a>J. HENRY SHORTHOUSE</h2>
<p>Probably few people expected a work of more
than mediocre interest when they heard that Mrs.
Shorthouse was preparing her husband's <i>Letters
and Literary Remains</i> for the the press.<a name="FNanchor_9_9" id="FNanchor_9_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_9" class="fnanchor">[9]</a> 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 <i>John
Inglesant</i>, and it is worthy of notice that his early
<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span>sketches are, on the whole, better work than the
more elaborate essays, such as that on <i>The Platonism
of Wordsworth</i>, which followed the production
of his masterpiece. He was to an extraordinary
degree <i>homo unius libri</i>, 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 <i>John Inglesant</i> are already present, lacking a
little, perhaps, in the perfect assurance that came
later, but still unmistakable. And at times—in
<i>The Autumn Walk</i>, for instance, with its "attempt
to find language for nameless sights and voices,"
in <i>Sundays at the Seaside</i>, with their benediction
<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span>of outpoured light upon the waters, offering to
the beholder as it were the sacrament of beauty,
or in the <i>Recollections of a London Church</i>,—at
times, I say, we seem almost to be reading some
lost or discarded chapter of the finished romance.
This closing paragraph of the <i>Recollections</i>, written
apparently when Shorthouse was not much more
than a boy—might it not be a memory of King
Charles's cavalier himself?—</p>
<div class="blockquot"><p>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:</p>
<p>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.</p></div>
<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span>
pale white mist trembling into blue," as he writes
to Mr. Gosse from Llandudno, and we know we
are with the author of <i>John Inglesant</i>. 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.</p>
<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span>
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
<i>John Inglesant</i>:</p>
<div class="blockquot"><p>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.</p>
<p>Below, but accessible by stone steps, lay the low garden,
surrounded by brick lichen-covered walls, beyond<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span>
which rose banks of trees. [The "blue door" in this
garden wall is introduced in the <i>Countess Eve</i>, and another
part of the garden in <i>Sir Percival</i>.] 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.</p></div>
<p><i>Qualis ab incepto!</i> 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 '<i>Incola
cœli in terrâ</i>,' 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 <i>John Inglesant</i>, but all
of Mr. Shorthouse's stories could not be better<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span>
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:</p>
<div class="blockquot"><p>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 <i>Twice-Told Tales</i> 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."]....</p>
<p>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....</p>
<p>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."</p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span></p>
<p>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 <i>John Inglesant</i>, 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 distri<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span>bution.
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 <i>John Inglesant</i> was always at his side, a
comfort and a consoling voice to the author as it
had been to so many other readers.</p>
<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span>
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.</p>
<p>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
<i>Broad</i> and <i>High</i> and <i>Low</i> 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 <i>Le Mouvement Ritualiste dans
l'Église Anglicane</i>, which M. Paul Thureau-Dangin
has just published in the <i>Revue des Deux
Mondes</i>. 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span>
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.</p>
<p>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 <i>Christian
Year</i>, although the "Advertisement" to that
famous book showed no promise of a startling<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span>
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.</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">What sudden blaze of song<br /></span>
<span class="i2">Spreads o'er the expanse of Heaven?<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In waves of light it thrills along,<br /></span>
<span class="i2">The angelic signal given—<br /></span>
<span class="i0">"Glory to God!" from yonder central fire<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Flows out the echoing lay beyond the starry choir;—<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">such words men read in the hymn for <i>Christmas
Day</i>, 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.</p>
<p>Another impulse, more definite in its nature,
was the shock of the reform bill. In his <i>Apologia</i>,
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 <i>National Apostasy</i>, was the first<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span>
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:</p>
<div class="blockquot"><p>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, <i>on what</i> 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?</p></div>
<p>A layman might reply simply, <i>On the truth</i>,
and Shorthouse, as we shall see, had such an
answer to make, though couched in more circuitous
language. But not so the Tract:</p>
<div class="blockquot"><p>I fear we have neglected the real ground on which our
authority is built—<small>OUR APOSTOLICAL DESCENT</small>.</p></div>
<p>That was the Tractarian, or Oxford, Movement,
which united the claims of the imagination
with the claims of priestcraft, and by a logical<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span>
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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span>
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 formulæ.</p>
<p>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
<i>John Inglesant</i> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span>
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.</p>
<p>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
<i>innocuæ silentia vitæ</i>, 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span>
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 <i>you</i> to reveal
to men." One would like to have Mr.
Arnold's reply to this divagation on <i>Don Quixote</i>.
Mr. Shorthouse had, characteristically, adapted
the book to his own spiritual needs as a representation
"of the struggles of the divine<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span>
principle to enter into the everyday details of
human life."</p>
<p>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 <i>The Agnostic at Church</i>,—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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span>
isolation from the religious aspirations of the
community:</p>
<div class="blockquot"><p>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.</p></div>
<p class="noidt">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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span>
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:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1">There strayed awhile, amid the woods of Dart,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">One who could love them, but who durst not love;<br /></span>
<span class="i1">A vow had bound him ne'er to give his heart<br /></span>
<span class="i1">To streamlet bright, or soft secluded grove.<br /></span>
<span class="i1">'T was a hard humbling task, onward to move<br /></span>
<span class="i1">His easy-captured eye from each fair spot,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">With unattached and lonely step to rove<br /></span>
<span class="i1">O'er happy meads which soon its print forgot.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Yet kept he safe his pledge, prizing his pilgrim lot.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">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.</p>
<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span>
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 <i>John Inglesant</i> 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.</p>
<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span>
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 <i>Henry Esmond</i>, 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.</p>
<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span>
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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span>
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.</p>
<p>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 formulæ 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-<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span>
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 <i>John Inglesant</i> lies in
its avoidance of rationalism or the appeal to
precedent, and in its frank search for the human
and the artistic.</p>
<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span>
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:</p>
<div class="blockquot"><p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span>
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.</p></div>
<p>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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span>
which Walter Pater introduced into England, and
<i>John Inglesant</i> will be classed with <i>Marius the
Epicurean</i> as a blossom of æsthetic 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.</p>
<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span>
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."</p>
<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span>
which Inglesant himself closed his confession of
faith at the Cathedral door:</p>
<div class="blockquot"><p>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.</p></div>
<hr style="width: 65%;" />
<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span></p>
<h2><a name="THE_QUEST_OF_A_CENTURY" id="THE_QUEST_OF_A_CENTURY"></a>THE QUEST OF A CENTURY</h2>
<div class="blockquot"><p>[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.]</p></div>
<p>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 <i>The Divine
Comedy</i> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span>
"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:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Man is the shuttle, to whose winding quest<br /></span>
<span class="i1">And passage through these looms<br /></span>
<span class="i0">God ordered motion, but ordained no rest.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p>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</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i2">central peace subsisting at the heart<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of endless agitation.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span></p>
<p class="noidt">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.</p>
<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span>
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.</p>
<p>It is, when rightly considered, this same question
that lends dramatic unity and human value to
the long debate of the mediæval 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 <i>finis quietaque statio</i> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span>
classification, and it is with prefect justice that
Hauréau, 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.</p>
<p>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 mediæval
logomachy. Kant's <i>Critique of Pure Reason</i> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span>
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."</p>
<p>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; <i>fidem rem esse, non
scientiam, non opinionem vel imaginationem</i>, 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</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Passionless bride, divine Tranquillity.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span></p>
<p class="noidt">To the ignorant it was the unquestioning trust in
those who seemed to them endowed with a grace
beyond their untutored comprehension.</p>
<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span>
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.</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">For life is but a dream whose shapes return,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Some frequently, some seldom, some by night<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And some by day, some night and day: we learn,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">The while all change and many vanish quite,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In their recurrence with recurrent changes<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A certain seeming order; where this ranges<br /></span>
<span class="i1">We count things real; such is memory's might.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span>
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.</p>
<p>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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span>
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 <i>præterea nil</i>. 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.</p>
<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span>
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.</p>
<p>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 mediæval
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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span>
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</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">A draught of dull complacency.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p class="noidt">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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span>
peasant by the river side, watching and waiting
while the current flows forever and will ever flow.</p>
<p>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.<a name="FNanchor_10_10" id="FNanchor_10_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_10" class="fnanchor">[10]</a></p>
<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span></p>
<p>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
<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 contem<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span>porary
of Kant did precisely for science what the
sage of Königsberg accomplished in metaphysics.
In the very decade in which <i>The Critique of Pure
Reason</i> 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 <i>Mécanique
Analytique</i>, 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 Poincaré: "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 <i>experimentum
crucis</i> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span>
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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:</p>
<div class="blockquot"><p>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, <i>a priori</i>, 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.</p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span></p>
<p class="noidt">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:</p>
<div class="blockquot"><p>Time is the formal condition, <i>a priori</i>, 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, <i>a
priori</i>, 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 <i>in time</i>, and stand necessarily in
relations of time.</p></div>
<p class="noidt">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.</p>
<p>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 <i>Ding-an-<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span>sich</i>
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.</p>
<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span>
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.</p>
<p>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:</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Qual è'l geomètra, che tutto s'affige<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Per misurar lo cerchio, e non ritrova,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Pensando, quel principio ond' egli indige.<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span></p>
<p class="noidt">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.</p>
<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span>
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.</p>
<p> </p>
<h4>FOOTNOTES</h4>
<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> <i>The Correspondence of William Cowper.</i> Arranged
in chronological order, with annotations, by Thomas
Wright, Principal of Cowper School, Olney. Four volumes.
New York: Dodd, Mead, & Co., 1904.</p></div>
<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> 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.</p></div>
<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> 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 <i>Reminiscences of a
Radical Parson</i>, 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, <i>a hole
in the floor where that mellow divine, the Reverend Mr.
Bull, kept his pipes</i>; 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 <i>Reminiscences</i> were published in the present year,
1905.</p></div>
<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve was born at Boulogne-sur-Mer,
December 23, 1804, and died at Paris, October
13, 1869.</p></div>
<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> <i>The Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne.</i> In six
volumes. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1904.</p></div>
<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> <i>The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti.</i>
With Memoir and Notes, etc. By William Michael Rossetti.
New York: The Macmillan Co., 1904.</p></div>
<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> <i>Robert Browning.</i> By C. H. Herford. New York:
Dodd, Mead & Co., 1905.</p></div>
<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> <i>The Complete Works of Laurence Sterne.</i> Edited by
Wilbur L. Cross. Supplemented with the Life by Percy
Fitzgerald. 12 volumes. New York: J. F. Taylor & Co.
1904.</p></div>
<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9_9" id="Footnote_9_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_9"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> <i>Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of J. H. Shorthouse.</i>
Edited by his wife. In two volumes. New
York: The Macmillan Co., 1905.</p></div>
<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_10_10" id="Footnote_10_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_10"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> Yet even while I read the proof of this page there
lies before me an article in the <i>Contemporary Review</i>
(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
<i>science</i> a comprehension, even an incipient comprehension,
of that which passeth <i>knowledge</i>, 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?</p></div>
<h5>THE END.</h5>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<div class="bbox">
<h2>Shelburne Essays</h2>
<h4>By Paul Elmer More</h4>
<p class="center">3 vols. Crown octavo.</p>
<div class='center'>
<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="" width="100%">
<tr><td align='left'>Sold separately.</td><td align='center'>Net, $1.25.</td><td align='right'>(By mail, $1.35)</td></tr>
</table></div>
<h4><i>Contents</i></h4>
<p class="nblockquot"><span class="smcap">First Series</span>: 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.</p>
<p class="nblockquot"><span class="smcap">Second Series</span>: 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.</p>
<p class="nblockquot"><span class="smcap">Third Series</span>: 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.</p>
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<div class="bbox">
<h3><i>A Few Press Criticisms on<br />
Shelburne Essays</i></h3>
<div class="blockquot"><p>"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."—<i>Harvard Graduates'
Magazine.</i></p></div>
<div class="blockquot"><p>"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."—<i>Independent.</i></p></div>
<div class="blockquot"><p>"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."—<i>London Speaker.</i></p></div>
<div class='center'>
<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="" width="80%">
<tr><td colspan='2' align='center'><big><b>G. P. Putnam's Sons</b></big></td></tr>
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<p> </p>
<div class="bbox">
<h2>The Jessica Letters</h2>
<h4>An Editor's Romance</h4>
<p class="center"><b>
By Paul E. More<br />
<small>and</small><br />
Mrs. Lundy Howard Harris
</b></p>
<div class='center'>
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<p>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.</p>
<div class="blockquot">
<p>"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. <span class="smcap">Thomas Dixon</span>, Jr.</p>
<p>"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."—<i>Newark News.</i></p>
<p>"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."—<i>N. Y. Times.</i></p>
<p>"It is delicate, sincere, and earnest.... A wholesomeness
and sweetness permeates all the book."—<i>Chicago Tribune.</i></p>
<p>"A delightfully romantic love story."—<i>The Outlook.</i></p>
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