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+Project Gutenberg's Essays from 'The Guardian', by Walter Horatio Pater
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Essays from 'The Guardian'
+
+Author: Walter Horatio Pater
+
+Posting Date: June 7, 2009 [EBook #4036]
+Release Date: May, 2003
+First Posted: October 19, 2001
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ESSAYS FROM 'THE GUARDIAN' ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Alfred J. Drake.  HTML version by Al Haines.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ESSAYS FROM 'THE GUARDIAN'
+
+By WALTER HORATIO PATER
+
+
+
+
+NOTES BY THE E-TEXT EDITOR:
+
+Reliability: Although I have done my best to ensure that the text you
+read is error-free in comparison with an exact reprint of the standard
+edition--Macmillan's 1910 Library Edition--please exercise scholarly
+caution in using it.  It is not intended as a substitute for the
+printed original but rather as a searchable supplement.  My e-texts may
+prove convenient substitutes for hard-to-get works in a course where
+both instructor and students accept the possibility of some
+imperfections in the text, but if you are writing a scholarly article,
+dissertation, or book, you should use the standard hard-copy editions
+of any works you cite.
+
+
+Pagination and Paragraphing: To avoid an unwieldy electronic copy, I
+have transferred original pagination to brackets.  A bracketed numeral
+such as [22] indicates that the material immediately following the
+number marks the beginning of the relevant page.  I have preserved
+paragraph structure except for first-line indentation.
+
+Hyphenation: I have not preserved original hyphenation since an e-text
+does not require line-end or page-end hyphenation.
+
+Greek typeface: For this full-text edition, I have transliterated
+Pater's Greek quotations.  If there is a need for the original Greek,
+it can be viewed at my site, http://www.ajdrake.com/etexts, a
+Victorianist archive that contains the complete works of Walter Pater
+and many other nineteenth-century texts, mostly in first editions.
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+
+
+1. English Literature: 1-16
+
+2. Amiel's "Journal Intime": 17-37
+
+3. Browning: 39-51
+
+4. "Robert Elsmere": 53-70
+
+5. Their Majesties' Servants: 71-88
+
+6. Wordsworth: 89-104
+
+7. Mr. Gosse's Poems: 105-118
+
+8. Ferdinand Fabre: 119-134
+
+9. The "Contes" of M. Augustin Filon: 135-149
+
+
+
+
+
+ESSAYS FROM 'THE GUARDIAN'
+
+WALTER HORATIO PATER
+
+
+E-text Editor: Alfred J. Drake, Ph.D. Electronic Version 1.0 / Date
+10-12-01
+
+
+
+
+PATER'S NOTE: The nine papers contained in the following volume
+originally appeared anonymously in The Guardian newspaper.
+
+
+
+
+E-TEXT EDITOR'S NOTE: I have not preserved the title pages of this
+volume, but have instead moved dates to each essay's end and included
+any necessary title-page material in the heading area of the first
+substantive page.
+
+
+
+
+
+I.  ENGLISH LITERATURE
+
+
+
+
+FOUR BOOKS FOR STUDENTS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE
+
+
+[3] THE making of an anthology of English prose is what must have
+occurred to many of its students, by way of pleasure to themselves, or
+of profit to other persons.  Such an anthology, the compass and variety
+of our prose literature being considered, might well follow exclusively
+some special line of interest in it; exhibiting, for instance, what is
+so obviously striking, its imaginative power, or its (legitimately)
+poetic beauty, or again, its philosophical capacity.  Mr. Saintsbury's
+well-considered Specimens of English Prose Style, from Malory to
+Macaulay (Kegan Paul), a volume, as we think, which bears fresh witness
+to the truth of the old remark that it takes a scholar indeed to make a
+[4] good literary selection, has its motive sufficiently indicated in
+the very original "introductory essay," which might well stand, along
+with the best of these extracts from a hundred or more deceased masters
+of English, as itself a document or standard, in the matter of prose
+style.  The essential difference between poetry and prose--"that other
+beauty of prose"--in the words of the motto he has chosen from Dryden,
+the first master of the sort of prose he prefers:--that is Mr.
+Saintsbury's burden.  It is a consideration, undoubtedly, of great
+importance both for the writer and the critic; in England especially,
+where, although (as Mr. Saintsbury rightly points out, in correction of
+an imperfectly informed French critic of our literature) the radical
+distinction between poetry and prose has ever been recognized by its
+students, yet the imaginative impulse, which is perhaps the richest of
+our purely intellectual gifts, has been apt to invade the province of
+that tact and good judgment, alike as to matter and manner, in which we
+are not richer than other people.  Great poetry and great prose, it
+might be found, have most of their qualities in common.  But [5] their
+indispensable qualities are different, or even opposed; and it is just
+the indispensable qualities of prose and poetry respectively, which it
+is so necessary for those who have to do with either to bear ever in
+mind.  Order, precision, directness, are the radical merits of prose
+thought; and it is more than merely legitimate that they should form
+the criterion of prose style, because within the scope of those
+qualities, according to Mr. Saintsbury, there is more than just the
+quiet, unpretending usefulness of the bare sermo pedestris. Acting on
+language, those qualities generate a specific and unique beauty--"that
+other beauty of prose"--fitly illustrated by these specimens, which the
+reader needs hardly be told, after what has been now said, are far from
+being a collection of "purple patches."
+
+Whether or not he admits their practical cogency, an attentive reader
+will not fail to be interested in the attempt Mr. Saintsbury has made
+to give technical rules of metre for the production of the true prose
+rhythm.  Any one who cares to do so might test the validity of those
+rules in the nearest possible way, by applying them to the varied
+examples in this wide [6] survey of what has been actually well done in
+English prose, here exhibited on the side of their strictly prosaic
+merit--their conformity, before all other aims, to laws of a structure
+primarily reasonable.  Not that that reasonable prose structure, or
+architecture, as Mr. Saintsbury conceives it, has been always, or even
+generally, the ideal, even of those chosen writers here in evidence.
+Elizabethan prose, all too chaotic in the beauty and force which
+overflowed into it from Elizabethan poetry, and incorrect with an
+incorrectness which leaves it scarcely legitimate prose at all: then,
+in reaction against that, the correctness of Dryden, and his followers
+through the eighteenth century, determining the standard of a prose in
+the proper sense, not inferior to the prose of the Augustan age in
+Latin, or of the "great age in France": and, again in reaction against
+this, the wild mixture of poetry and prose, in our wild nineteenth
+century, under the influence of such writers as Dickens and Carlyle:
+such are the three periods into which the story of our prose literature
+divides itself.  And Mr. Saintsbury has his well-timed, practical
+suggestions, upon a survey of them.
+
+[7] If the invasion of the legitimate sphere of prose in England by the
+spirit of poetry, weaker or stronger, has been something far deeper
+than is indicated by that tendency to write unconscious blank verse,
+which has made it feasible to transcribe about one-half of Dickens's
+otherwise so admirable Barnaby Rudge in blank-verse lines, a tendency
+(outdoing our old friend M. Jourdain) commoner than Mr. Saintsbury
+admits, such lines being frequent in his favourite Dryden; yet, on the
+other hand, it might be maintained, and would be maintained by its
+French critics, that our English poetry has been too apt to dispense
+with those prose qualities, which, though not the indispensable
+qualities of poetry, go, nevertheless, to the making of all first-rate
+poetry--the  qualities, namely, of orderly structure, and such
+qualities generally as depend upon second thoughts.  A collection of
+specimens of English poetry, for the purpose of exhibiting the
+achievement of prose excellences by it (in their legitimate measure) is
+a desideratum we commend to Mr. Saintsbury. It is the assertion, the
+development, the product of those very different indispensable
+qualities of poetry, in the presence [8] of which the English is equal
+or superior to all other modern literature--the native, sublime, and
+beautiful, but often wild and irregular, imaginative power in English
+poetry from Chaucer to Shakespeare, with which Professor Minto deals,
+in his Characteristics of English Poets (Blackwood), lately reprinted.
+That his book should have found many readers we can well understand, in
+the light of the excellent qualities which, in high degree, have gone
+to the making of it: a tasteful learning, never deserted by that hold
+upon contemporary literature which is so animating an influence in the
+study of what belongs to the past.  Beginning with an elaborate notice
+of Chaucer, full of the minute scholarship of our day, he never forgets
+that his subject is, after all, poetry.  The followers of Chaucer, and
+the precursors of Shakespeare, are alike real persons to him--old
+Langland reminding him of Carlyle's "Gospel of Labour." The product of
+a large store of reading has been here secreted anew for the reader who
+desires to see, in bird's-eye view, the light and shade of a long and
+varied period of poetic literature, by way of preparation for
+Shakespeare, [9] (with a full essay upon whom the volume closes,)
+explaining Shakespeare, so far as he can be explained by literary
+antecedents.
+
+That powerful poetry was twin-brother to a prose, of more varied, but
+certainly of wilder and more irregular power than the admirable, the
+typical, prose of Dryden.  In Dryden, and his followers through the
+eighteenth century, we see the reaction against the exuberance and
+irregularity of that prose, no longer justified by power, but
+cognizable rather as bad taste.  But such reaction was effective only
+because an age had come--the age of a negative, or agnostic
+philosophy--in which men's minds must needs be limited to the
+superficialities of things, with a kind of narrowness amounting to a
+positive gift.  What that mental attitude was capable of, in the way of
+an elegant, yet plain-spoken, and life-like delineation of men's moods
+and manners, as also in the way of determining those moods and manners
+themselves to all that was lively, unaffected, and harmonious, can be
+seen nowhere better than in Mr. Austin Dobson's Selections from Steele
+(Clarendon Press) prefaced by his careful "Life."  The well-known
+qualities of [10] Mr. Dobson's own original work are a sufficient
+guarantee of the taste and discrimination we may look for in a
+collection like this, in which the random lightnings of the first of
+the essayists are grouped under certain heads--"Character Sketches,"
+"Tales and Incidents," "Manners and Fashions," and the like--so as to
+diminish, for the general reader, the scattered effect of short essays
+on a hundred various subjects, and give a connected, book-like
+character to the specimens.
+
+Steele, for one, had certainly succeeded in putting himself, and his
+way of taking the world--for this pioneer of an everybody's literature
+had his subjectivities--into books.  What a survival of one long-past
+day, for instance, in "A Ramble from Richmond to London"!  What truth
+to the surface of common things, to their direct claim on our interest!
+yet with what originality of effect in that truthfulness, when he
+writes, for instance:
+
+"I went to my lodgings, led by a light, whom I put into the discourse
+of his private economy, and made him give me an account of the charge,
+hazard, profit, and loss of a family that depended upon a link."
+
+[11] It was one of his peculiarities, he tells us, to live by the eye
+far more than by any other sense (a peculiarity, perhaps, in an
+Englishman), and this is what he sees at the early daily service then
+common in some City churches.  Among those who were come only to see or
+be seen, "there were indeed a few in whose looks there appeared a
+heavenly joy and gladness upon the entrance of a new day, as if they
+had gone to sleep with expectation of it."
+
+The industrious reader, indeed, might select out of these specimens
+from Steele, a picture, in minute detail, of the characteristic manners
+of that time.  Still, beside, or only a little way beneath, such a
+picture of passing fashion, what Steele and his fellows really deal
+with is the least transitory aspects of life, though still merely
+aspects--those points in which all human nature, great or little, finds
+what it has in common, and directly shows itself up. The natural
+strength of such literature will, of course, be in the line of its
+tendencies; in transparency, variety, and directness.  To the
+unembarrassing matter, the unembarrassed style!  Steele is, perhaps,
+the most impulsive writer of the school [12] to which he belongs; he
+abounds in felicities of impulse.  Yet who can help feeling that his
+style is regular because the matter he deals with is the somewhat
+uncontentious, even, limited soul, of an age not imaginative, and
+unambitious in its speculative flight?  Even in Steele himself we may
+observe with what sureness of instinct the men of that age turned aside
+at the contact of anything likely to make them, in any sense, forget
+themselves.
+
+No one indicates better than Charles Lamb, to whose memory Mr. Alfred
+Ainger has done such good service, the great and peculiar change which
+was begun at the end of the last century, and dominates our own; that
+sudden increase of the width, the depth, the complexity of intellectual
+interest, which has many times torn and distorted literary style, even
+with those best able to comprehend its laws.  In Mrs. Leicester's
+School, with other Writings in Prose and Verse (Macmillan), Mr. Ainger
+has collected and annotated certain remains of Charles and Mary Lamb,
+too good to lie unknown to the present generation, in forgotten
+periodicals or inaccessible reprints.  The story of the Odyssey,
+abbreviated [13] in very simple prose, for children--of all ages--will
+speak for itself.  But the garland of graceful stories which gives name
+to the volume, told by a party of girls on the evening of their
+assembling at school, are in the highest degree characteristic of the
+brother and sister who were ever so successful in imparting to others
+their own enjoyment of books and people.  The tragic circumstance which
+strengthened and consecrated their natural community of interest had,
+one might think, something to do with the far-reaching pensiveness even
+of their most humorous writing, touching often the deepest springs of
+pity and awe, as the way of the highest humour is--a way, however, very
+different from that of the humorists of the eighteenth century.  But
+one cannot forget also that Lamb was early an enthusiastic admirer of
+Wordsworth: of Wordsworth, the first characteristic power of the
+nineteenth century, his essay on whom, in the Quarterly Review, Mr.
+Ainger here reprints.  Would that he could have reprinted it as
+originally composed, and ungarbled by Gifford, the editor!  Lamb, like
+Wordsworth, still kept the charm of a serenity, [14] a precision,
+unsurpassed by the quietest essayist of the preceding age. But it might
+have been foreseen that the rising tide of thought and feeling, on the
+strength of which they too are borne upward, would sometimes overflow
+barriers.  And so it happens that these simple stories are touched,
+much as Wordsworth's verse-stories were, with tragic power.  Dealing
+with the beginnings of imagination in the minds of children, they
+record, with the reality which a very delicate touch preserves from
+anything lugubrious, not those merely preventible miseries of childhood
+over which some writers have been apt to gloat, but the contact of
+childhood with the great and inevitable sorrows of life, into which
+children can enter with depth, with dignity, and sometimes with a kind
+of simple, pathetic greatness, to the discipline of the heart.  Let the
+reader begin with the "Sea Voyage," which is by Charles Lamb; and, what
+Mr. Ainger especially recommends, the "Father's Wedding-Day," by his
+sister Mary.
+
+The ever-increasing intellectual burden of our age is hardly likely to
+adapt itself to the exquisite, but perhaps too delicate and limited,
+[15] literary instruments of the age of Queen Anne.  Yet Mr. Saintsbury
+is certainly right in thinking that, as regards style, English
+literature has much to do.  Well, the good quality of an age, the
+defect of which lies in the direction of intellectual anarchy and
+confusion, may well be eclecticism: in style, as in other things, it is
+well always to aim at the combination of as many excellences as
+possible--opposite excellences, it may be--those other beauties of
+prose.  A busy age will hardly educate its writers in correctness. Let
+its writers make time to write English more as a learned language; and
+completing that correction of style which had only gone a certain way
+in the last century, raise the general level of language towards their
+own.  If there be a weakness in Mr. Saintsbury's view, it is perhaps in
+a tendency to regard style a little too independently of matter.  And
+there are still some who think that, after all, the style is the man;
+justified, in very great varieties, by the simple consideration of what
+he himself has to say, quite independently of any real or supposed
+connection with this or that literary age or school.  Let us close with
+the words of a most [16] versatile master of English--happily not yet
+included in Mr. Saintsbury's book--a writer who has dealt with all the
+perturbing influences of our century in a manner as classical, as
+idiomatic, as easy and elegant, as Steele's:
+
+"I wish you to observe," says Cardinal Newman, "that the mere dealer in
+words cares little or nothing for the subject which he is embellishing,
+but can paint and gild anything whatever to order; whereas the artist,
+whom I am acknowledging, has his great or rich visions before him, and
+his only aim is to bring out what he thinks or what he feels in a way
+adequate to the thing spoken of, and appropriate to the speaker."
+
+17th February 1886
+
+
+
+
+II.  AMIEL'S "JOURNAL INTIME"
+
+
+Amiel's Journal.  The Journal Intime of Henri-Frédéric Amiel.
+Translated, with an Introduction and Notes, by Mrs. Humphry Ward. Two
+vols.  Macmillans.
+
+[19] CERTAIN influential expressions of opinion have attracted much
+curiosity to Amiel's Journal Intime, both in France, where the book has
+already made its mark, and in England, where Mrs. Humphry Ward's
+translation is likely to make it widely known among all serious lovers
+of good literature.  Easy, idiomatic, correct, this English version
+reads like an excellent original English work, and gives fresh proof
+that the work of translation, if it is to be done with effect, must be
+done by those who, possessing, like Mrs. Ward, original literary gifts,
+are willing to make a long act of self-denial or self-effacement [20]
+for the benefit of the public.  In this case, indeed, the work is not
+wholly one of self-effacement, for the accomplished translator has
+prefaced Amiel's Journal by an able and interesting essay of seventy
+pages on Amiel's life and intellectual position.  And certainly there
+is much in the book, thus effectively presented to the English reader,
+to attract those who interest themselves in the study of the finer
+types of human nature, of literary expression, of metaphysical and
+practical philosophy; to attract, above all, those interested in such
+philosophy, at points where it touches upon questions of religion, and
+especially at the present day.
+
+Henri-Frédéric Amiel was born at Geneva in 1821.  Orphaned of both his
+parents at the age of twelve, his youth was necessarily "a little bare
+and forlorn," and a deep interest in religion became fixed in him
+early.  His student days coming to an end, the years which followed,
+from 1842 to 1848--Wanderjahre, in which he visited Holland, Italy,
+Sicily, and the principal towns of Germany--seem to have been the
+happiest of his life.  In 1849 he became a Professor at Geneva, and
+there is little more to tell of him in [21] the way of outward events.
+He published some volumes of verse; to the last apparently still only
+feeling after his true literary métier.  Those last seven years were a
+long struggle against the disease which ended his life, consumption, at
+the age of fifty-three.  The first entry in his Journal is in 1848.
+From that date to his death, a period of over twenty-five years, this
+Journal was the real object of all the energies of his richly-endowed
+nature: and from its voluminous sheets his literary executors have
+selected the deeply interesting volumes now presented in English.
+
+With all its gifts and opportunities it was a melancholy
+life--melancholy with something not altogether explained by the
+somewhat pessimistic philosophy exposed in the Journal, nor by the
+consumptive tendency of Amiel's physical constitution, causing him from
+a very early date to be much preoccupied with the effort to reconcile
+himself with the prospect of death, and reinforcing the far from
+sanguine temperament of one intellectually also a poitrinaire.
+
+You might think him at first sight only an admirable specimen of a
+thoroughly well-educated [22] man, full, of course, of the modern
+spirit; stimulated and formed by the influences of the varied
+intellectual world around him; and competing, in his turn, with many
+very various types of contemporary ability.  The use of his book to
+cultivated people might lie in its affording a kind of standard by
+which they might take measure of the maturity and producible quality of
+their own thoughts on a hundred important subjects.  He will write a
+page or two, giving evidence of that accumulated power and attainment
+which, with a more strenuous temperament, might have sufficed for an
+effective volume.  Continually, in the Journal, we pause over things
+that would rank for beauties among widely differing models of the best
+French prose.  He has said some things in Pascal's vein not unworthy of
+Pascal.  He had a right to compose "Thoughts": they have the force in
+them which makes up for their unavoidable want of continuity.
+
+But if, as Amiel himself challenges us to do, we look below the surface
+of a very equable and even smoothly accomplished literary manner, we
+discover, in high degree of development, that perplexity or complexity
+of soul, the expression [23] of which, so it be with an adequate
+literary gift, has its legitimate, because inevitable, interest for the
+modern reader.  Senancour and Maurice de Guérin in one, seem to have
+been supplemented here by a larger experience, a far greater education,
+than either of them had attained to.  So multiplex is the result that
+minds of quite opposite type might well discover in these pages their
+own special thought or humour, happily expressed at last (they might
+think) in precisely that just shade of language themselves had searched
+for in vain.  And with a writer so vivid and impressive as Amiel, those
+varieties of tendency are apt to present themselves as so many
+contending persons.  The perplexed experience gets the apparent
+clearness, as it gets also the animation, of a long dialogue; only, the
+disputants never part company, and there is no real conclusion.  "This
+nature," he observes, of one of the many phases of character he has
+discovered in himself, "is, as it were, only one of the men which exist
+in me.  It is one of my departments.  It is not the whole of my
+territory, the whole of my inner kingdom"; and again, "there are ten
+men in me, according to time, place, surrounding, [24] and occasion;
+and, in my restless diversity, I am for ever escaping myself."
+
+Yet, in truth, there are but two men in Amiel--two sufficiently opposed
+personalities, which the attentive reader may define for himself;
+compare with, and try by each other--as we think, correct also by each
+other.  There is the man, in him and in these pages, who would be "the
+man of disillusion," only that he has never really been "the man of
+desires"; and who seems, therefore, to have a double weariness about
+him.  He is akin, of course, to Obermann, to René, even to Werther,
+and, on our first introduction to him, we might think that we had to do
+only with one more of the vague "renunciants," who in real life
+followed those creations of fiction, and who, however delicate,
+interesting as a study, and as it were picturesque on the stage of
+life, are themselves, after all, essentially passive, uncreative, and
+therefore necessarily not of first-rate importance in literature.
+Taken for what it is worth, the expression of this mood--the culture of
+ennui for its own sake--is certainly carried to its ideal of negation
+by Amiel.  But the completer, the positive, soul, which will merely
+take [25] that mood into its service (its proper service, as we hold,
+is in counteraction to the vulgarity of purely positive natures) is
+also certainly in evidence in Amiel's "Thoughts"--that other, and far
+stronger person, in the long dialogue; the man, in short, possessed of
+gifts, not for the renunciation, but for the reception and use, of all
+that is puissant, goodly, and effective in life, and for the varied and
+adequate literary reproduction of it; who, under favourable
+circumstances, or even without them, will become critic, or poet, and
+in either case a creative force; and if he be religious (as Amiel was
+deeply religious) will make the most of "evidence," and almost
+certainly find a Church.
+
+The sort of purely poetic tendency in his mind, which made Amiel known
+in his own lifetime chiefly as a writer of verse, seems to be
+represented in these volumes by certain passages of natural
+description, always sincere, and sometimes rising to real distinction.
+In Switzerland it is easy to be pleased with scenery. But the record of
+such pleasure becomes really worth while when, as happens with Amiel,
+we feel that there has been, and with success, an intellectual [26]
+effort to get at the secret, the precise motive, of the pleasure; to
+define feeling, in this matter.  Here is a good description of an
+effect of fog, which we commend to foreigners resident in London:
+
+"Fog has certainly a poetry of its own--a grace, a dreamy charm.  It
+does for the daylight what a lamp does for us at night; it turns the
+mind towards meditation; it throws the soul back on itself.  The sun,
+as it were, sheds us abroad in nature, scatters and disperses us; mist
+draws us together and concentrates us--it is cordial, homely, charged
+with feeling.  The poetry of the sun has something of the epic in it;
+that of fog and mist is elegiac and religious.  Pantheism is the child
+of light; mist engenders faith in near protectors.  When the great
+world is shut off from us, the house becomes itself a small universe.
+Shrouded in perpetual mist, men love each other better; for the only
+reality then is the family, and, within the family, the heart; and the
+greatest thoughts come from the heart--so says the moralist."
+
+It is of Swiss fog, however, that he is speaking, as, in what follows,
+of Swiss frost:
+
+[27] "Three snowstorms this afternoon.  Poor blossoming plum-trees and
+peach-trees!  What a difference from six years ago, when the
+cherry-trees, adorned in their green spring dress and laden with their
+bridal flowers, smiled at my departure along the Vaudois fields, and
+the lilacs of Burgundy threw great gusts of perfume into my face!"  The
+weather is seldom talked of with so much real sensitiveness to it as in
+this:
+
+"The weather is rainy, the whole atmosphere grey; it is a time
+favourable to thought and meditation.  I have a liking for such days as
+these; they revive one's converse with oneself and make it possible to
+live the inner life: they are quiet and peaceful, like a song in a
+minor key.  We are nothing but thought, but we feel our life to its
+very centre.  Our very sensations turn to reverie.  It is a strange
+state of mind; it is like those silences in worship which are not the
+empty moments of devotion, but the full moments, and which are so
+because at such times the soul, instead of being polarized, dispersed,
+localized, in a single impression or thought, feels her own totality
+and is conscious of herself."
+
+[28] "Every landscape," he writes, "is, as it were, a state of the
+soul": and again, "At bottom there is but one subject of study; the
+forms and metamorphoses of mind: all other subjects may be reduced to
+that; all other studies bring us back to this study."  And, in truth,
+if he was occupied with the aspects of nature to such an excellent
+literary result, still, it was with nature only as a phenomenon of the
+moral order.  His interest, after all, is, consistently, that of the
+moralist (in no narrow sense) who deals, from predilection, with the
+sort of literary work which stirs men--stirs their intellect--through
+feeling; and with that literature, especially, as looked at through the
+means by which it became capable of thus commanding men. The powers,
+the culture, of the literary producer: there, is the centre of Amiel's
+curiosity.
+
+And if we take Amiel at his own word, we must suppose that but for
+causes, the chief of which were bad health and a not long life, he too
+would have produced monumental work, whose scope and character he would
+wish us to conjecture from his "Thoughts."  Such indications there
+certainly are in them.  He was [29] meant--we see it in the variety,
+the high level both of matter and style, the animation, the gravity, of
+one after another of these thoughts--on religion, on poetry, on
+politics in the highest sense; on their most abstract principles, and
+on the authors who have given them a personal colour; on the genius of
+those authors, as well as on their concrete works; on outlying isolated
+subjects, such as music, and special musical composers--he was meant,
+if people ever are meant for special lines of activity, for the best
+sort of criticism, the imaginative criticism; that criticism which is
+itself a kind of construction, or creation, as it penetrates, through
+the given literary or artistic product, into the mental and inner
+constitution of the producer, shaping his work.  Of such critical
+skill, cultivated with all the resources of Geneva in the nineteenth
+century, he has given in this Journal abundant proofs.  Corneille,
+Cherbuliez; Rousseau, Sismondi; Victor Hugo, and Joubert; Mozart and
+Wagner--all who are interested in these men will find a value in what
+Amiel has to say of them. Often, as for instance in his excellent
+criticism of Quinet, he has to make large exceptions [30]; limitations,
+skilfully effected by the way, in the course of a really appreciative
+estimate.  Still, through all, what we feel is that we have to do with
+one who criticises in this fearlessly equitable manner only because he
+is convinced that his subject is of a real literary importance.  A
+powerful, intellectual analysis of some well-marked subject, in such
+form as makes literature enduring, is indeed what the world might have
+looked for from him: those institutes of aesthetics, for instance,
+which might exist, after Lessing and Hegel, but which certainly do not
+exist yet.  "Construction," he says--artistic or literary
+construction--"rests upon feeling, instinct, and," alas! also, "upon
+will."  The instinct, at all events, was certainly his. And over and
+above that he had possessed himself of the art of expressing, in quite
+natural language, very difficult thoughts; those abstract and
+metaphysical conceptions especially, in which German mind has been
+rich, which are bad masters, but very useful ministers towards the
+understanding, towards an analytical survey, of all that the intellect
+has produced.
+
+But something held him back: not so much [31] a reluctancy of
+temperament, or of physical constitution (common enough cause why men
+of undeniable gifts fail of commensurate production) but a cause purely
+intellectual--the presence in him, namely, of a certain vein of
+opinion; that other, constituent but contending, person, in his complex
+nature.  "The relation of thought to action," he writes, "filled my
+mind on waking, and I found myself carried towards a bizarre formula,
+which seems to have something of the night still clinging about it.
+Action is but coarsened thought."  That is but an ingenious
+metaphysical point, as he goes on to show.  But, including in "action"
+that literary production in which the line of his own proper activity
+lay, he followed--followed often--that fastidious utterance to a
+cynical and pessimistic conclusion.
+
+Maia, as he calls it, the empty "Absolute" of the Buddhist, the
+"Infinite," the "All," of which those German metaphysicians he loved
+only too well have had so much to say: this was for ever to give the
+go-by to all positive, finite, limited interests whatever.  The vague
+pretensions of an abstract expression acted on him with all the force
+of a prejudice.  "The ideal," he admits, [32] "poisons for me all
+imperfect possession"; and again, "The Buddhist tendency in me blunts
+the faculty of free self-government, and weakens the power of action. I
+feel a terror of action and am only at ease in the impersonal,
+disinterested, and objective line of thought."  But then, again, with
+him "action" meant chiefly literary production.  He quotes with
+approval those admirable words from Goethe, "In der Beschrankung zeigt
+sich erst der Meister"; yet still always finds himself wavering between
+"frittering myself away on the infinitely little, and longing after
+what is unknown and distant."  There is, doubtless, over and above the
+physical consumptive tendency, an instinctive turn of sentiment in this
+touching confession.  Still, what strengthened both tendencies was that
+metaphysical prejudice for the "Absolute," the false intellectual
+conscience.  "I have always avoided what attracted me, and turned my
+back upon the point where secretly I desired to be"; and, of course,
+that is not the way to a free and generous productivity, in literature,
+or in anything else; though in literature, with Amiel at all events, it
+meant the fastidiousness which [33] is incompatible with any but the
+very best sort of production.
+
+And as that abstract condition of Maia, to the kind and quantity of
+concrete literary production we hold to have been originally possible
+for him; so was the religion he actually attained, to what might have
+been the development of his profoundly religious spirit, had he been
+able to see that the old-fashioned Christianity is itself but the
+proper historic development of the true "essence" of the New Testament.
+There, again, is the constitutional shrinking, through a kind of
+metaphysical prejudice, from the concrete--that fear of the actual--in
+this case, of the Church of history; to which the admissions, which
+form so large a part of these volumes, naturally lead.  Assenting, on
+probable evidence, to so many of the judgments of the religious sense,
+he failed to see the equally probable evidence there is for the
+beliefs, the peculiar direction of men's hopes, which complete those
+judgments harmoniously, and bring them into connection with the facts,
+the venerable institutions of the past--with the lives of the saints.
+By failure, as we think, of that historic sense, of [34] which he could
+speak so well, he got no further in this direction than the glacial
+condition of rationalistic Geneva.  "Philosophy," he says, "can never
+replace religion."  Only, one cannot see why it might not replace a
+religion such as his: a religion, after all, much like Seneca's.
+
+"I miss something," he himself confesses, "common worship, a positive
+religion, shared with other people.  Ah!  when will the Church to which
+I belong in heart rise into being?"  To many at least of those who can
+detect the ideal through the disturbing circumstances which belong to
+all actual institutions in the world, it was already there. Pascal,
+from considerations to which Amiel was no stranger, came to the large
+hopes of the Catholic Church; Amiel stopped short at a faith almost
+hopeless; and by stopping short just there he really failed, as we
+think, of intellectual consistency, and missed that appeasing influence
+which his nature demanded as the condition of its full activity, as a
+force, an intellectual force, in the world--in the special business of
+his life.  "Welcome the unforeseen," he says again, by way of a counsel
+of perfection in the matter of culture, "but give to [35] your life
+unity, and bring the unforeseen within the lines of your plan."  Bring,
+we should add, the Great Possibility at least within the lines of your
+plan--your plan of action or production; of morality; especially of
+your conceptions of religion. And still, Amiel too, be it remembered
+(we are not afraid to repeat it), has said some things in Pascal's vein
+not unworthy of Pascal.
+
+And so we get only the Journal.  Watching in it, in the way we have
+suggested, the contention of those two men, those two minds in him, and
+observing how the one might have ascertained and corrected the
+shortcomings of the other, we certainly understand, and can sympathize
+with Amiel's despondency in the retrospect of a life which seemed to
+have been but imperfectly occupied.  But, then, how excellent a
+literary product, after all, the Journal is.  And already we have found
+that it improves also on second reading.  A book of "thoughts" should
+be a book that may be fairly dipped into, and yield good quotable
+sayings.  Here are some of its random offerings:
+
+"Look twice, if what you want is a just [36] conception; look once, if
+what you want is a sense of beauty."
+
+"It is not history which teaches conscience to be honest; it is the
+conscience which educates history.  Fact is corrupting--it is we who
+correct it by the persistence of our ideal."
+
+"To do easily what is difficult for others is the mark of talent.  To
+do what is impossible for talent is the mark of genius."
+
+"Duty has the virtue of making us feel the reality of a positive world,
+while at the same time detaching us from it."
+
+"As it is impossible to be outside God, the best is consciously to
+dwell in Him."
+
+"He also (the Son of Man), He above all, is the great Misunderstood,
+the least comprehended."
+
+"The pensée writer is to the philosopher what the dilettante is to the
+artist."
+
+There are some, we know, who hold that genius cannot, in the nature of
+things, be "sterile"; that there are no "mute" Miltons, or the like.
+Well! genius, or only a very distinguished talent, the gift which Amiel
+nursed so jealously did come into evidence.  And the [37] reader, we
+hope, sees also already how well his English translator has done her
+work.  She may justly feel, as part at least of the reward of a labour
+which must have occupied much time, so many of the freshest hours of
+mind and spirit, that she has done something to help her author in the
+achievement of his, however discouraged still irrepressible, desire, by
+giving additional currency to a book which the best sort of readers
+will recognize as an excellent and certainly very versatile companion,
+not to be forgotten.
+
+17th March 1886
+
+
+
+
+III.  BROWNING
+
+
+An Introduction to the Study of Browning. By Arthur Symons.  Cassells.
+
+
+[41] WHETHER it be true or not that Mr. Browning is justly chargeable
+with "obscurity"--with a difficulty of manner, that is, beyond the
+intrinsic difficulty of his matter--it is very probable that an
+Introduction to the study of his works, such as this of Mr. Symons,
+will add to the number of his readers.  Mr. Symons's opening essay on
+the general characteristics of Mr. Browning is a just and acceptable
+appreciation of his poetry as a whole, well worth reading, even at this
+late day.  We find in Mr. Symons the thoughtful and practised yet
+enthusiastic student in literature--in intellectual problems; always
+quiet and sane, praising Mr. Browning with tact, with a real refinement
+and grace; saying well many [42] things which every competent reader of
+the great poet must feel to be true; devoting to the subject he loves a
+critical gift so considerable as to make us wish for work from his
+hands of larger scope than this small volume. His book is, according to
+his intention, before all things a useful one.  Appreciating Mr.
+Browning fairly, as we think, in all his various efforts, his aim is to
+point his readers to the best, the indisputable, rather than to the
+dubious portions of his author's work.  Not content with his own
+excellent general criticism of Mr. Browning, he guides the reader to
+his works, or division of work, seriatim, making of each a distinct and
+special study, and giving a great deal of welcome information about the
+poems, the circumstances of their composition, and the like, with
+delightful quotations. Incidentally, his Introduction has the interest
+of a brief but effective selection from Mr. Browning's poems; and he
+has added an excellent biography.
+
+Certainly we shall not quarrel with Mr. Symons for reckoning Mr.
+Browning, among English poets, second to Shakespeare alone--"He comes
+very near the gigantic total of [43] Shakespeare."  The quantity of his
+work?  Yes! that too, in spite of a considerable unevenness, is a sign
+of genius.  "So large, indeed, appear to be his natural endowments that
+we cannot feel as if even thirty volumes would have come near to
+exhausting them."  Imaginatively, indeed, Mr. Browning has been a
+multitude of persons; only (as Shakespeare's only untried style was the
+simple one) almost never simple ones; and certainly he has controlled
+them all to profoundly interesting artistic ends by his own powerful
+personality.  The world and all its action, as a show of thought, that
+is the scope of his work.  It makes him pre-eminently a modern poet--a
+poet of the self-pondering, perfectly educated, modern world, which,
+having come to the end of all direct and purely external experiences,
+must necessarily turn for its entertainment to the world within:--
+
+"The men and women who live and move in that new world of his creation
+are as varied as life itself; they are kings and beggars, saints and
+lovers, great captains, poets, painters, musicians, priests and Popes,
+Jews, gipsies and dervishes, street-girls, princesses, dancers with the
+wicked [44] witchery of the daughter of Herodias, wives with the
+devotion of the wife of Brutus, joyous girls and malevolent
+grey-beards, statesmen, cavaliers, soldiers of humanity, tyrants and
+bigots, ancient sages and modern spiritualists, heretics, scholars,
+scoundrels, devotees, rabbis, persons of quality and men of low
+estate--men and women as multiform as nature or society has made them."
+
+The individual, the personal, the concrete, as distinguished from, yet
+revealing in its fulness, the general, the universal--that is Mr.
+Browning's chosen subject-matter: "Every man is for him an epitome of
+the universe, a centre of creation."  It is always the particular soul,
+and the particular act or episode, as the flower of the particular
+soul--the act or episode by which its quality comes to the test--in
+which he interests us.  With him it is always "a drama of the interior,
+a tragedy or comedy of the soul, to see thereby how each soul becomes
+conscious of itself."  In the Preface to the later edition of Sordello,
+Mr. Browning himself told us that to him little else seems worth study
+except the development of a soul, the incidents, the story, of that.
+And, [45] in fact, the intellectual public generally agrees with him.
+It is because he has ministered with such marvellous vigour, and
+variety, and fine skill to this interest, that he is the most modern,
+to modern people the most important, of poets.
+
+So much for Mr. Browning's matter; for his manner, we hold Mr. Symons
+right in thinking him a master of all the arts of poetry.  "These
+extraordinary little poems," says Mr. Symons of "Johannes Agricola" and
+"Porphyria's Lover"--
+
+"Reveal not only an imagination of intense fire and heat, but an almost
+finished art--a power of conceiving subtle mental complexities with
+clearness and of expressing them in a picturesque form and in perfect
+lyric language.  Each poem renders a single mood, and renders it
+completely."
+
+Well, after all, that is true of a large portion of Mr. Browning's
+work.  A curious, an erudite artist, certainly, he is to some extent an
+experimenter in rhyme or metre, often hazardous.  But in spite of the
+dramatic rudeness which is sometimes of the idiosyncrasy, the true and
+native colour of his multitudinous dramatis personae, or monologists,
+Mr. Symons is right in [46] laying emphasis on the grace, the finished
+skill, the music, native and ever ready to the poet himself--tender,
+manly, humorous, awe-stricken--when speaking in his own proper person.
+Music herself, the analysis of the musical soul, in the characteristic
+episodes of its development is a wholly new range of poetic subject in
+which Mr. Browning is simply unique. Mr. Symons tells us:--
+
+"When Mr. Browning was a mere boy, it is recorded that he debated
+within himself whether he should not become a painter or a musician as
+well as a poet.  Finally, though not, I believe, for a good many years,
+he decided in the negative.  But the latent qualities of painter and
+musician had developed themselves in his poetry, and much of his finest
+and very much of his most original verse is that which speaks the
+language of painter and musician as it had never before been spoken.
+No English poet before him has ever excelled his utterances on music,
+none has so much as rivalled his utterances on art.  'Abt Vogler' is
+the richest, deepest, fullest poem on music in the language.  It is not
+the theories of the poet, but the instincts of the [47] musician, that
+it speaks.  'Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha,' another special poem on
+music, is unparalleled for ingenuity of technical interpretation: 'A
+Toccata of Galuppi's' is as rare a rendering as can anywhere be found
+of the impressions and sensations caused by a musical piece; but 'Abt
+Vogler' is a very glimpse into the heaven where music is born."
+
+It is true that "when the head has to be exercised before the heart
+there is chilling of sympathy."  Of course, so intellectual a poet (and
+only the intellectual poet, as we have pointed out, can be adequate to
+modern demands) will have his difficulties.  They were a part of the
+poet's choice of vocation, and he was fully aware of them:--
+
+"Mr. Browning might say, as his wife said in an early preface, I never
+mistook pleasure for the final cause of poetry, nor leisure for the
+hour of the poet--as indeed he has himself said, to much the same
+effect, in a letter printed many years ago: I never pretended to offer
+such literature as should be a substitute for a cigar or a game at
+dominoes to an idle man."
+
+"Moreover, while a writer who deals with [48] easy themes has no excuse
+if he is not pellucid to a glance, one who employs his intellect and
+imagination on high and hard questions has a right to demand a
+corresponding closeness of attention, and a right to say with Bishop
+Butler, in answer to a similar complaint: 'It must be acknowledged that
+some of the following discourses are very abstruse and difficult, or,
+if you please, obscure; but I must take leave to add that those alone
+are judges whether or no, and how far this is a fault, who are judges
+whether or no, and how far it might have been avoided--those only who
+will be at the trouble to understand what is here said, and to see how
+far the things here insisted upon, and not other things, might have
+been put in a plainer manner.'"
+
+In Mr. Symons's opinion Pippa Passes is Mr. Browning's most perfect
+piece of work, for pregnancy of intellect, combined with faultless
+expression in a perfectly novel yet symmetrical outline: and he is very
+likely right.  He is certainly right in thinking Mas they formerly
+stood, Mr. Browning's most delightful volumes.  It is only to be
+regretted [49] that in the later collected edition of the works those
+two magical old volumes are broken up and scattered under other
+headings.  We think also that Mr. Symons in his high praise does no
+more than justice to The Ring and the Book.  The Ring and the Book is
+at once the largest and the greatest of Mr. Browning's works, the
+culmination of his dramatic method, and the turning-point more
+decisively than Dramatis Personae of his style.  Yet just here he
+rightly marks a change in Mr. Browning's manner:--
+
+"Not merely the manner of presentment, the substance, and also the
+style and versification have undergone a change.  I might point to the
+profound intellectual depth of certain pieces as its characteristic,
+or, equally, to the traces here and there of an apparent carelessness
+of workmanship; or, yet again, to the new and very marked partiality
+for scenes and situations of English and modern rather than mediæval
+and foreign life."
+
+Noble as much of Mr. Browning's later work is, full of intellect, alive
+with excellent passages (in the first volume of the Dramatic Idyls [50]
+perhaps more powerful than in any earlier work); notwithstanding all
+that, we think the change here indicated matter of regret.  After all,
+we have to conjure up ideal poets for ourselves out of those who stand
+in or behind the range of volumes on our book-shelves; and our ideal
+Browning would have for his entire structural type those two volumes of
+Men and Women with Pippa Passes.
+
+Certainly, it is a delightful world to which Mr. Browning has given us
+the key, and those volumes a delightful gift to our age-record of so
+much that is richest in the world of things, and men, and their
+works--all so much the richer by the great intellect, the great
+imagination, which has made the record, transmuted them into
+imperishable things of art:--
+
+"'With souls should souls have place'--this, with Mr. Browning, is
+something more than a mere poetical conceit.  It is the condensed
+expression of an experience, a philosophy, and an art.  Like the lovers
+of his lyric, Mr. Browning has renounced the selfish serenities of
+wild-wood and dream-palace; he has fared up and down among men,
+listening to the music of humanity, [51] observing the acts of men, and
+he has sung what he has heard, and he has painted what he has seen.
+Will the work live? we ask; and we can answer only in his own words--
+
+  It lives,
+  If precious be the soul of man to man."
+
+9th November 1887
+
+
+
+
+IV.  "ROBERT ELSMERE"
+
+
+[55] THOSE who, in this bustling age, turn to fiction not merely for a
+little passing amusement, but for profit, for the higher sort of
+pleasure, will do well, we think (after a conscientious perusal on our
+own part) to bestow careful reading on Robert Elsmere.  A chef d'oeuvre
+of that kind of quiet evolution of character through circumstance,
+introduced into English literature by Miss Austen, and carried to
+perfection in France by George Sand (who is more to the point, because,
+like Mrs. Ward, she was not afraid to challenge novel-readers to an
+interest in religious questions), it abounds in sympathy with people as
+we find them, in aspiration towards something better--towards a certain
+ideal--in a refreshing sense of second thoughts everywhere.  The author
+clearly has developed a remarkable natural aptitude for literature by
+liberal reading and most patient care [56] in composition--composition
+in that narrower sense which is concerned with the building of a good
+sentence; as also in that wider sense, which ensures, in a work like
+this, with so many joints, so many currents of interest, a final unity
+of impression an the part of the reader, and easy transition by him
+from one to the other.  Well-used to works of fiction which tell all
+they have to tell in one thin volume, we have read Mrs. Ward's three
+volumes with unflagging readiness.
+
+For, in truth, that quiet method of evolution, which she pursues
+undismayed to the end, requires a certain lengthiness; and the reader's
+reward will be in a secure sense that he has been in intercourse with
+no mere flighty remnants, but with typical forms, of character, firmly
+and fully conceived.  We are persuaded that the author might have
+written a novel which should have been all shrewd impressions of
+society, or all humorous impressions of country life, or all quiet fun
+and genial caricature.  Actually she has chosen to combine something of
+each of these with a very sincerely felt religious interest; and who
+will deny that to trace the influence of religion upon human character
+is one of the [57] legitimate functions of the novel?  In truth, the
+modern "novel of character" needs some such interest, to lift it
+sufficiently above the humdrum of life; as men's horizons are enlarged
+by religion, of whatever type it may be--and we may say at once that
+the religious type which is dear to Mrs. Ward, though avowedly "broad,"
+is not really the broadest.  Having conceived her work thus, she has
+brought a rare instinct for probability and nature to the difficult
+task of combining this religious motive and all the learned thought it
+involves, with a very genuine interest in many  varieties of average
+mundane life.
+
+We should say that the author's special ethical gift lay in a
+delicately intuitive sympathy, not, perhaps, with all phases of
+character, but certainly with the very varied class of persons
+represented in these volumes.  It may be congruous with this, perhaps,
+that her success should be more assured in dealing with the characters
+of women than with those of men.  The men who pass before us in her
+pages, though real and tangible and effective enough, seem,
+nevertheless, from time to time to reveal their joinings.  They are
+composite of many different men we seem to have [58] known, and fancy
+we could detach again from the ensemble and from each other.  And their
+goodness, when they are good, is--well! a little conventional; the kind
+of goodness that men themselves discount rather largely in their
+estimates of each other.  Robert himself is certainly worth knowing--a
+really attractive union of manliness and saintliness, of shrewd sense
+and unworldly aims, and withal with that kindness and pity the absence
+of which so often abates the actual value of those other gifts.  Mrs.
+Ward's literary power is sometimes seen at its best (it is a proof of
+her high cultivation of this power that so it should be) in the
+analysis of minor characters, both male and female. Richard Leyburn,
+deceased before the story begins, but warm in the memory of the few who
+had known him, above all of his great-souled daughter Catherine,
+strikes us, with his religious mysticism, as being in this way one of
+the best things in the book:--
+
+"Poor Richard Leyburn!  Yet where had the defeat lain?
+
+"'Was he happy in his school life?' Robert asked gently.  'Was teaching
+what he liked?'
+
+[59] "'Oh! yes, only--' and then added hurriedly, as though drawn on in
+spite of herself by the grave sympathy of his look, 'I never knew
+anybody so good who thought himself of so little account.  He always
+believed that he had missed everything, wasted everything, and that
+anybody else would have made infinitely more out of his life.  He vas
+always blaming, scourging himself.  And all the time he was the
+noblest, purest, most devoted--'
+
+"She stopped.  Her voice had passed beyond her control.  Elsmere was
+startled by the feeling she showed.  Evidently he had touched one of
+the few sore places in this pure heart.  It was as though her memory of
+her father had in it elements of almost intolerable pathos, as though
+the child's brooding love and loyalty were in perpetual protest even
+now after this lapse of years against the verdict which an
+over-scrupulous, despondent soul had pronounced upon itself.  Did she
+feel that he had gone uncomforted out of life--even by her--even by
+religion?  Was that the sting?"
+
+A little later she gives the record of his last hours:--
+
+[60] "'Catherine!  Life is harder, the narrower way narrower than ever.
+I die--and memory caught still the piteous long-drawn breath by which
+the voice was broken--'in much--much perplexity about many things.  You
+have a clear soul, an iron will.  Strengthen the others. Bring them
+safe to the day of account.'"
+
+And then the smaller--some of them, ethically, very small--women; Lady
+Wynnstay, Mrs. Fleming, Mrs. Thornburgh; above all, Robert's delightful
+Irish mother, and Mrs. Darcy; how excellent they are! Mrs. Darcy we
+seem to have known, yet cannot have enough of, rejoiced to catch sight
+of her capital letter on the page, as we read on.  In truth, if a high
+and ideal purpose, really learned in the school of Wordsworth and among
+the Westmorland hills which Mrs. Ward describes so sympathetically,
+with fitting dignity and truth of style, has accompanied the author
+throughout; no less plain, perhaps more pleasing to some readers, is
+the quiet humour which never fails her, and tests, while it relieves,
+the sincerity of her more serious thinking:--
+
+"At last Mrs. Darcy fluttered off, only, however, to come hurrying back
+with little, short, [61] scudding steps, to implore them all to come to
+tea with her as soon as possible in the garden that was her special
+hobby, and in her last new summer-house.
+
+"'I build two or three every summer,' she said; 'now there are
+twenty-one!  Roger laughs at me,' and there was a momentary bitterness
+in the little eerie face; 'but how can one live without hobbies?
+That's one--then I've two more.  My album--oh, you will all write in my
+album, won't you?  When I was young--when I was Maid of Honour'--and
+she drew herself up slightly--'everybody had albums. Even the dear
+Queen herself!  I remember how she made M. Guizot write in it;
+something quite stupid, after all.  Those hobbies--the garden and the
+album--are quite harmless, aren't they?  They hurt nobody, do they?'
+Her voice dropped a little, with a pathetic expostulating intonation in
+it, as of one accustomed to be rebuked."
+
+Mrs. Ward's women, as we have said, are more organic, sympathetic, and
+really creative, than her men, and make their vitality evident by
+becoming, quite naturally, the centres of very [62] life-like and
+dramatic groups of people, family or social; while her men are the very
+genii of isolation and division.  It is depressing to see so really
+noble a character as Catherine soured, as we feel, and lowered, as time
+goes on, from the happy resignation of the first volume (in which
+solemn, beautiful, and entire, and so very real, she is like a poem of
+Wordsworth) down to the mere passivity of the third volume, and the
+closing scene of Robert Elsmere's days, very exquisitely as this
+episode of unbelieving yet saintly biography has been conceived and
+executed.  Catherine certainly, for one, has no profit in the
+development of Robert's improved gospel.  The "stray sheep," we think,
+has by no means always the best of the argument, and her story is
+really a sadder, more testing one than his.  Though both alike, we
+admit it cordially, have a genuine sense of the eternal moral charm of
+"renunciation," something even of the thirst for martyrdom, for those
+wonderful, inaccessible, cold heights of the Imitation, eternal also in
+their aesthetic charm.
+
+These characters and situations, pleasant or profoundly interesting,
+which it is good to have [63] come across, are worked out, not in rapid
+sketches, nor by hazardous epigram, but more securely by patient
+analysis; and though we have said that Mrs. Ward is most successful in
+female portraiture, her own mind and culture have an unmistakable
+virility and grasp and scientific firmness.  This indispensable
+intellectual process, which will be relished by admirers of George
+Eliot, is relieved constantly by the sense of a charming landscape
+background, for the most part English.  Mrs. Ward has been a true
+disciple in the school of Wordsworth, and really undergone its
+influence.  Her Westmorland scenery is more than a mere background; its
+spiritual and, as it were, personal hold on persons, as understood by
+the great poet of the Lakes, is seen actually at work, in the
+formation, in the refining, of character.  It has been a stormy day:--
+
+"Before him the great hollow of High Fell was just coming out from the
+white mists surging round it.  A shaft of sunlight lay across its upper
+end, and he caught a marvellous apparition of a sunlit valley hung in
+air, a pale strip of blue above it, a white thread of stream wavering
+[64] through it, and all around it and below it the rolling
+rain-clouds."
+
+There is surely something of "natural magic" in that!  The wilder
+capacity of the mountains is brought out especially in a weird story of
+a haunted girl, an episode well illustrating the writer's more
+imaginative psychological power; for, in spite of its quiet general
+tenour, the book has its adroitly managed elements of
+sensation--witness the ghost, in which the average human susceptibility
+to supernatural terrors takes revenge on the sceptical Mr. Wendover,
+and the love-scene with Madame de Netteville, which, like those other
+exciting passages, really furthers the development of the proper
+ethical interests of the book.  The Oxford episodes strike us as being
+not the author's strongest work, as being comparatively conventional,
+coming, as they do, in a book whose predominant note is reality.  Yet
+her sympathetic command over, her power of evoking, the genius of
+places, is clearly shown in the touches by which she brings out the so
+well-known grey and green of college and garden--touches which bring
+the real Oxford to the mind's eye better than any elaborate description
+[65] --for the beauty of the place itself resides also in delicate
+touches.  The book passes indeed, successively, through distinct,
+broadly conceived phases of scenery, which, becoming veritable parts of
+its texture, take hold on the reader, as if in an actual sojourn in the
+places described.  Surrey--its genuine though almost suburban wildness,
+with the vicarage and the wonderful abode, above all, the ancient
+library of Mr. Wendover, all is admirably done, the landscape naturally
+counting for a good deal in the development of the profoundly
+meditative, country-loving souls of Mrs. Ward's favourite characters.
+
+Well!  Mrs. Ward has chosen to use all these varied gifts and
+accomplishments for a certain purpose.  Briefly, Robert Elsmere, a
+priest of the Anglican Church, marries a very religious woman; there is
+the perfection of "mutual love"; at length he has doubts about
+"historic Christianity"; he gives up his orders; carries his learning,
+his fine intellect, his goodness, nay, his saintliness, into a kind of
+Unitarianism; the wife becomes more intolerant than ever; there is a
+long and faithful effort on both sides, eventually successful, on the
+part of these mentally [66] divided people, to hold together; ending
+with the hero's death, the genuine piety and resignation of which is
+the crowning touch in the author's able, learned, and thoroughly
+sincere apology for Robert Elsmere's position.
+
+For good or evil, the sort of doubts which troubled Robert Elsmere are
+no novelty in literature, and we think the main issue of the "religious
+question" is not precisely where Mrs. Ward supposes--that it has
+advanced, in more senses than one, beyond the point raised by Renan's
+Vie de Jésus.  Of course, a man such as Robert Elsmere came to be ought
+not to be a clergyman of the Anglican Church.  The priest is still, and
+will, we think, remain, one of the necessary types of humanity; and he
+is untrue to his type, unless, with whatever inevitable doubts in this
+doubting age, he feels, on the whole, the preponderance in it of those
+influences which make for faith.  It is his triumph to achieve as much
+faith as possible in an age of negation.  Doubtless, it is part of the
+ideal of the Anglican Church that, under certain safeguards, it should
+find room for latitudinarians even among its clergy.  Still, with
+these, as [67] with all other genuine priests, it is the positive not
+the negative result that justifies the position.  We have little
+patience with those liberal clergy who dwell on nothing else than the
+difficulties of faith and the propriety of concession to the opposite
+force.  Yes! Robert Elsmere was certainly right in ceasing to be a
+clergyman.  But it strikes us as a blot on his philosophical
+pretensions that he should have been both so late in perceiving the
+difficulty, and then so sudden and trenchant in dealing with so great
+and complex a question.  Had he possessed a perfectly philosophic or
+scientific temper he would have hesitated.  This is not the place to
+discuss in detail the theological position very ably and seriously
+argued by Mrs. Ward.  All we can say is that, one by one, Elsmere's
+objections may be met by considerations of the same genus, and not less
+equal weight, relatively to a world so obscure, in its origin and
+issues, as that in which we live.
+
+Robert Elsmere was a type of a large class of minds which cannot be
+sure that the sacred story is true.  It is philosophical, doubtless,
+and a duty to the intellect to recognize our doubts, [68] to locate
+them, perhaps to give them practical effect.  It may be also a moral
+duty to do this.  But then there is also a large class of minds which
+cannot be sure it is false--minds of very various degrees of
+conscientiousness and intellectual power, up to the highest.  They will
+think those who are quite sure it is false unphilosophical through lack
+of doubt.  For their part, they make allowance in their scheme of life
+for a great possibility, and with some of them that bare concession of
+possibility (the subject of it being what it is) becomes the most
+important fact in the world.
+
+The recognition of it straightway opens wide the door to hope and love;
+and such persons are, as we fancy they always will be, the nucleus of a
+Church.  Their particular phase of doubt, of philosophic uncertainty,
+has been the secret of millions of good Christians, multitudes of
+worthy priests.  They knit themselves to believers, in various degrees,
+of all ages.  As against the purely negative action of the scientific
+spirit, the high-pitched Grey, the theistic Elsmere, the "ritualistic
+priest," the quaint Methodist Fleming, both so admirably sketched,
+present [69] perhaps no unconquerable differences.  The question of the
+day is not between one and another of these, but in another sort of
+opposition, well defined by Mrs. Ward herself, between--
+
+"Two estimates of life--the estimate which is the offspring of the
+scientific spirit, and which is for ever making the visible world
+fairer and more desirable in mortal eyes; and the estimate of Saint
+Augustine."
+
+To us, the belief in God, in goodness at all, in the story of
+Bethlehem, does not rest on evidence so diverse in character and force
+as Mrs. Ward supposes.  At his death Elsmere has started what to us
+would be a most unattractive place of worship, where he preaches an
+admirable sermon on the purely human aspect of the life of Christ.  But
+we think there would be very few such sermons in the new church or
+chapel, for the interest of that life could hardly be very varied, when
+all such sayings as that "though He was rich, for our sakes He became
+poor" have ceased to be applicable to it.  It is the infinite nature of
+Christ which has led to such diversities of genius in preaching as St.
+Francis, and Taylor, and Wesley.
+
+[70] And after all we fear we have been unjust to Mrs. Ward's work. If
+so, we should read once more, and advise our readers to read, the
+profoundly thought and delicately felt chapter--chapter forty-three in
+her third volume--in which she describes the final spiritual reunion,
+on a basis of honestly diverse opinion, of the husband and wife.  Her
+view, we think, could hardly have been presented more attractively.
+For ourselves we can only thank her for pleasure and profit in the
+reading of her book, which has refreshed actually the first and deepest
+springs of feeling, while it has charmed the literary sense.
+
+28th March 1888
+
+
+
+
+V.  THEIR MAJESTIES' SERVANTS
+
+
+Annals of the English Stage, from Thomas Betterton to Edmund Kean. By
+Dr. Doran, F.S.A.  Edited and revised by Robert W. Lowe.  John C. Nimmo.
+
+[73] THOSE who care for the history of the drama as a branch of
+literature, or for the history of that general development of human
+manners of which the stage has been always an element and a very lively
+measure or index, will be grateful to Mr. Lowe for this revised and
+charmingly illustrated edition of Dr. Doran's pleasant old book.  Three
+hundred years and more of a singularly varied and vivacious sort of
+history!--it was a bold thing to undertake; and Dr. Doran did his work
+well--did it with adequate "love."  These Annals of the English Stage,
+from Thomas Betterton to Edmund [74] Kean, are full of the colours of
+life in their most emphatic and motley contrasts, as is natural in
+proportion as the stage itself concentrates and artificially
+intensifies the character and conditions of ordinary life.  The long
+story of "Their Majesties' Servants," treated thus, becomes from age to
+age an agreeable addition to those personal memoirs--Evelyn's, and the
+like--which bring the influence and charm of a visible countenance to
+the dry tenour of ordinary history, and the critic's work upon it
+naturally becomes, in the first place, a mere gathering of some of the
+flowers which lie so abundantly scattered here and there.
+
+A history of the English stage must necessarily be in part a history of
+one of the most delightful of subjects--old London, of which from time
+to time we catch extraordinary glimpses in Dr. Doran's pages. From 1682
+to 1695, as if the Restoration had not come, there was but one theatre
+in London.  In Charles I.'s time Shoreditch was the dramatic quarter of
+London par excellence.--
+
+"The popular taste was not only there directed towards the stage, but
+it was a district [75] wherein many actors dwelt, and consequently
+died.  The baptismal register of St.  Leonard's, Shoreditch, contains
+Christian names which appear to have been chosen with reference to the
+heroines of Shakespeare; and the record of burials bears the name of
+many an old actor of mark whose remains now lie within the churchyard."
+
+Earlier and later, the Surrey side of the Thames was the favourite
+locality for play-houses.  The Globe was there, and the Bear-garden,
+represented in Mr. Lowe's luxurious new edition by delightful woodcuts.
+For this new edition adds to the original merits of the work the very
+substantial charm of abundant illustrations, first-rate in subject and
+execution, and of three kinds--copper-plate likenesses of actors and
+other personages connected with theatrical history; a series of
+delicate, picturesque, highly detailed woodcuts of theatrical
+topography, chiefly the little old theatres; and, by way of tail-pieces
+to the chapters, a second series of woodcuts of a vigour and reality of
+information, within very limited compass, which make one think of
+Callot and the German [76] "little masters," depicting Garrick and
+other famous actors in their favourite scenes.
+
+In the vignettes of the Bear-garden and the Swan Theatre, for instance,
+the artist has managed to throw over his minute plate a wonderful air
+of pleasantness, a light which, though very delicate, is very
+theatrical.  The river and its tiny craft, the little gabled houses of
+the neighbourhood, with a garden or two dropped in, tell delightfully
+in the general effect.  They are worthy to rank with Cruikshank's
+illustrations of Jack Sheppard and The Tower of London, as mementoes of
+the little old smokeless London before the century of Johnson, though
+that, too, as Dr. Doran bears witness, knew what fogs could be.  Then
+there is the Fortune Theatre near Cripplegate, and, most charming of
+all, two views--street and river fronts--the Duke's Theatre, Dorset
+Garden, in Fleet Street, designed by Wren, decorated by
+Gibbons--graceful, naïve, dainty, like the work of a very refined
+Palladio, working minutely, perhaps more delicately than at Vicenza, in
+the already crowded city on the Thames side.
+
+[77] The portraits of actors and other theatrical celebrities range
+from Elizabeth, from the melodramatic costumes and faces of the
+contemporaries of Shakespeare, to the conventional costumes, the rotund
+expression, of the age of the Georges, masking a power of imaginative
+impersonation probably unknown in Shakespeare's day. Edward Burbage,
+like Shakespeare's own portrait, is, we venture to think, a trifle
+stolid.  Field--Nathaniel Field, author of The Fatal Dowry, and an
+actor of reputation--in his singular costume, and with a face of
+perhaps not quite reassuring subtlety, might pass for the original of
+those Italian, or Italianized, voluptuaries in sin which pleased the
+fancy of Shakespeare's age.  Mixed up with many striking, thoroughly
+dramatic physiognomies, it must be confessed that some of these
+portraits scarcely help at all to explain the power of the players to
+whom they belonged.  That, perhaps, is what we might naturally expect;
+the more, in proportion as the dramatic art is a matter in which many
+very subtle and indirect channels to men's sympathy are called into
+play.  Edward Alleyn, from the portrait preserved at [78] his noble
+foundation at Dulwich, like a fine Holbein, figures, in blent strength
+and delicacy, as a genial, or perhaps jovial, soul, finding time for
+sentiment,--Prynne (included, we suppose, in this company, like the
+skull at the feast) as a likable if somewhat melancholic young man;
+while Garrick and his wife playing cards, after Zoffany, present a pair
+of just very nice young people.  On the other hand, the tail-pieces,
+chiefly devoted to Garrick, prove what a wonderful natural variety
+there was in Garrick's soul, and are well worth comparative study.
+Noticeable again, among the whole-plate portraits, is the thoroughly
+reassuring countenance of Steele, the singularly fine heads of John,
+Charles, and Fanny Kemble, while the certainly plain, pinched
+countenance of William Davenant reminds one of Charles Kean, and might
+well have lighted up, as did his, when the soul came into it, into
+power and charm, as the speaking eyes assure us even in its repose.
+
+The Renaissance inherited the old foolish prejudice of Roman times,
+when, although the writers of plays were the intimate friends of
+emperors, the actors were thought infamous. [79] Still, on the whole,
+actors fared better in England than in Romanist France, where Molière
+was buried with less ceremony than a favourite dog.  Very different was
+the treatment of the eminent Mrs. Oldfield, who died in 1730:--
+
+"Poor 'Narcissa' after death (says Walpole) was attired in a Holland
+nightdress, with tucker and double ruffles of Brunswick lace, of which
+latter material she also wore a headdress, and a pair of new kid
+gloves.  In this dress the deceased actress received such honour as
+actress never received before, nor has ever received since.  The lady
+lay in state in the Jerusalem Chamber.  Had she been really a queen the
+public could not have thronged more eagerly to the spectacle; and after
+the lying in state there was a funeral of as much ceremony as has been
+observed at the obsequies of many a queen. There were anthems and
+prayers and a sermon; and Dr. Parker, who officiated, remarked, when
+all was over, to a few particular friends, and with some equivocation,
+as it seems to me, that he  'buried her very willingly, and with much
+satisfaction.'"
+
+Yet even in England players had need of [80] powerful protectors.
+"Wit," said Chesterfield, opposing an unjust licensing Act, "Wit, my
+lords! is the property of those who have it, and too often the only
+property they have to depend on."  Wit, indeed, with the other gifts
+that make good company, has largely gone with theatrical talents, too
+often little to the benefit of the gifted persons.  Theatrical society,
+rather than the theatre, has made the lives of actors as we see them in
+these volumes, in many cases so tragic, even sordidly tragic.
+
+If misery and madness abound in stage life, so also does an indomitable
+cheerfulness, always at least a cheerful countenance. Dr. Doran's book
+abounds, as might be expected, with admirable impromptus and the like;
+one might collect a large posy of them. Foote, seeing a sweep on a
+blood-horse, remarked, "There goes Warburton on Shakespeare!"  When he
+heard that the Rockingham Cabinet was fatigued to death and at its
+wits' end, he exclaimed that it could not have been the length of the
+journey which had tired it. Again, when Lord Carmarthen, at a party,
+told him his handkerchief was hanging from his pocket, Foote replaced
+[81] it with a "Thank you, my lord; you know the company better than
+I."  Jevon, a century earlier, was in the habit of taking great
+liberties with authors and audience.  He made Settle half mad and the
+house ecstatic when having, as Lycurgus, Prince of China, to "fall on
+his sword," he placed it flat on the stage, and, falling over it,
+"died," according to the direction of the acting copy.  Quaint enough,
+but certainly no instance of anybody's wit, is the account of how a
+French translation of a play of Vanbrugh--not architect of Blenheim
+only, but accomplished in many other ways--appeared at the Odéon, in
+1862, with all fitting raptures, as a posthumous work of Voltaire
+recently discovered.  The Voltairean wit vas found as "delightful in
+this as in the last century."
+
+Of Shakespeare on the stage Dr. Doran has a hundred curious things to
+note:--that Richard the Third, for instance, who has retained a so
+unflattering possession of the stage, was its "first practically useful
+patron."  We see Queen Elizabeth full of misgiving at a difficult time
+at the popularity of Richard the Second:--"The deposition and death of
+King Richard the [82] Second."  "Tongues whisper to the Queen that this
+play is part of a great plot to teach her subjects how to murder
+kings."  It is perhaps not generally known that Charles Shakespeare,
+William's brother, survived till the Restoration.
+
+Oldys says, à propos of the restoration of the stage at that time:--
+
+"The actors were greedily inquisitive into every little circumstance,
+more especially in Shakespeare's dramatic character, which his brother
+could relate of him.  But he, it seems, was so stricken in years, and
+possibly his memory so weakened by infirmities, that he could give them
+but little light into their inquiries; and all that could be
+recollected from him of his brother Will in that station was the faint,
+general, and almost lost ideas he had of having once seen him act a
+part in one of his own comedies, wherein being present to personate a
+decrepit old man, he wore a long beard, and appeared so weak and
+drooping and unable to walk, that he was forced to be supported and
+carried by another person to a table, at which he was seated among some
+company who were eating, and one of them sang a song."
+
+[83] This description applies to old Adam in As You Like It.  Many are
+the evidences that Shakespeare's reputation had from time to time a
+struggle to maintain itself.  James Howard, in Pepys's day--
+
+"Belonged to the faction which affected to believe that there was no
+popular love for Shakespeare, to render whom palatable he arranged
+Romeo and Juliet for the stage, with a double dénouement--one serious,
+the other hilarious.  If your heart were too sensitive to bear the
+deaths of the loving pair, you had only to go on the succeeding
+afternoon to see them wedded, and set upon the way of a well-assured
+domestic felicity."
+
+In 1678 Rymer asserted (was it undesignedly a true testimony to the
+acting of his time?) that Shakespeare had depicted Brutus and Cassius
+as "Jack Puddins."
+
+Here, as in many another detail, we are reminded, of course, of the
+difference between our own and past times in mimic as in real life. For
+Prynne one of the great horrors of the stage was the introduction of
+actresses from France by Henrietta Maria, to take the place of young
+[84] male actors of whom Dr. Doran has some interesting notices.  Who
+the lady was who first trod the stage as a professional actress is not
+known, but her part was Desdemona.  And yet it was long after that--
+
+"Edward Kynaston died (in 1712).  He lies buried in the churchyard of
+St. Paul's, Covent Garden.  If not the greatest actor of his day,
+Kynaston was the greatest of the 'boy-actresses.'  So exalted was his
+reputation 'that,' says Downes, 'it has since been disputable among the
+judicious, whether any woman that succeeded him so sensibly touched the
+audience as he.'"
+
+In Charles II.'s time it was a custom to return the price of admission
+to all persons who left the theatre before the close of the first act.
+Consequently, many shabby persons were wont to force their way in
+without paying, on the plea that they did not intend to remain beyond
+the time limited.  Hence much noisy contention, to the great discomfort
+even of Royalty.  The brawling, drinking habits of the time were even
+more discomforting.  An angry word, passed one April evening of 1682
+between the son of Sir Edward Dering and a hot-blooded young [85]
+Welshman, led to recrimination and sword-drawing. The two young fellows
+not having elbow-room in the pit, clambered on to the stage, and fought
+there, to the greater comfort of the audience, and with a more excited
+fury on the part of the combatants. The mingling of the public with the
+players was a practice which so annoyed the haughty French actor,
+Baron, that to suggest to the audience the absurdity of it, he would
+turn his back on them for a whole act, and play to the audience on the
+stage.  Sometimes the noise was so loud that an actor's voice would
+scarcely be heard.  It was about 1710 that the word encore was
+introduced at the operatic performances in the Haymarket, and very much
+objected to by plain-going Englishmen.  It was also the custom of some
+who desired the repetition of a song to cry Altra volta!  Altra volta!
+
+Even indirectly the history of the stage illustrates life, and affords
+many unexpected lights on historical characters.  Oliver Cromwell,
+though he despised the stage, could condescend to laugh at, and with,
+men of less dignity than actors.  Buffoonery was not entirely expelled
+[86] from his otherwise grave court.  Oxford and Drury Lane itself
+dispute the dignity of giving birth to Nell Gwynne with Hereford, where
+a mean house is still pointed out as the first home of this mother of a
+line of dukes, whose great-grandson was to occupy the neighbouring
+palace as Bishop of Hereford for forty years. At her burial in St.
+Martin's-in-the-Fields, Archbishop Tenison preached the sermon.  When
+this was subsequently made the ground of exposing him to the reproof of
+Queen Mary, she remarked that the good doctor, no doubt, had said
+nothing but what the facts authorized.
+
+"Who should act genteel comedy perfectly," asks Walpole, "but people of
+fashion, that have sense?"  And, in truth, the seventeenth century gave
+many ladies to the stage, Mrs. Barry being the most famous of them.
+Like many eminent actors, she was famous for the way in which she would
+utter one single expression in a play.  Dr. Doran gives some curious
+instances from later actors.  "What mean my grieving subjects?" uttered
+in the character of Queen Elizabeth, was invested by her with such
+emphatic grace and dignity as to call up murmurs of approbation [87]
+which swelled into thunders of applause.  Her noble head is here
+engraved after Kneller, like the head of a magnificent visionary man.
+
+Should we really care for the greatest actors of the past could we have
+them before us?  Should we find them too different from our accent of
+thought, of feeling, of speech, in a thousand minute particulars which
+are of the essence of all three?  Dr. Doran's long and interesting
+records of the triumphs of Garrick, and other less familiar, but in
+their day hardly less astonishing, players, do not relieve one of the
+doubt.  Garrick himself, as sometimes happens with people who have been
+the subject of much anecdote and other conversation, here as elsewhere,
+bears no very distinct figure.  One hardly sees the wood for the trees.
+On the other hand, the account of Betterton, "perhaps the greatest of
+English actors," is delightfully fresh.  That intimate friend of
+Dryden, Tillatson, Pope, who executed a copy of the actor's portrait by
+Kneller which is still extant, was worthy of their friendship; his
+career brings out the best elements in stage life.  The stage in these
+volumes presents itself indeed not merely [88] as a mirror of life, but
+as an illustration of the utmost intensity of life, in the fortunes and
+characters of the players.  Ups and downs, generosity, dark fates, the
+most delicate goodness, have nowhere been more prominent than in the
+private existence of those devoted to the public mimicry of men and
+women.  Contact with the stage, almost throughout its history, presents
+itself as a kind of touchstone, to bring out the bizarrerie, the
+theatrical tricks and contrasts, of the actual world.
+
+27th June 1888
+
+
+
+
+VI.  WORDSWORTH
+
+
+The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth.  With an
+Introduction by John Morley.  Macmillans.
+
+The Recluse.  By William Wordsworth.  Macmillans.
+
+Selections from Wordsworth.  By William Knight and other Members of the
+Wordsworth Society.  With Preface and Notes.  Kegan Paul.
+
+[91] THE appearance, so close to each other, of Professor Knight's
+careful and elaborately annotated Selections from William Wordsworth,
+of Messrs. Macmillan's collected edition of the poet's works, with the
+first book of The Recluse, now published for the first time, and of an
+excellent introductory essay by Mr. John Morley, forms a welcome proof
+that the study of the [92] most philosophic of English poets is
+increasing among us.  Surely nothing could be better, hardly anything
+more directly fitted than careful reading of Wordsworth, to counter the
+faults and offences of our busy generation, in regard both to thought
+and taste, and to remind people, amid the enormous expansion, at the
+present time, of all that is material and mechanical in life, of the
+essential value, the permanent ends, of life itself.  In the collected
+edition the poems are printed with the dates, so far as can be
+ascertained, in the order of their composition--an arrangement which
+has indisputable recommendations for the student of Wordsworth's
+genius; though the former method of distributing his work into large
+groups of subject had its value, as throwing light upon his poetic
+motives, and more especially as coming from himself.
+
+In his introductory essay Mr. Morley has dwelt strongly on the
+circumstance of Wordsworth's remarkable personal happiness, as having
+had much to do with the physiognomy of his poetic creation--a calm,
+irresistible, well-being--almost mystic in character, and yet doubtless
+[93] connected with physical conditions.  Long ago De Quincey noted it
+as a strongly determinant fact in Wordsworth's literary career,
+pointing, at the same time, to his remarkable good luck also, on the
+material side of life.  The poet's own flawless temperament, his fine
+mountain atmosphere of mind (so to express it), had no doubt a good
+deal to do with that.  What a store of good fortune, what a goodly
+contribution to happiness, in the very best sense of that term, is
+really involved in a cheerful, grateful, physical temperament;
+especially, in the case of a poet--a great poet--who will, of course,
+have to face the appropriate trials of a great poet.
+
+Coleridge and other English critics at the beginning of the present
+century had a great deal to say concerning a psychological distinction
+of much importance (as it appeared to them) between the fancy and the
+imagination.  Stripped of a great deal of somewhat obscure metaphysical
+theory, this distinction reduced itself to the certainly vital one,
+with which all true criticism more or less directly has to do, between
+the lower and higher degrees of intensity in the [94] poet's conception
+of his subject, and his concentration of himself upon his work.  It was
+Wordsworth who made most of this distinction, assuming it as the basis
+for the final classification (abandoned, as we said, in the new
+edition) of his poetical writings. And nowhere is the distinction more
+realizable than in Wordsworth's own work.  For though what may be
+called professed Wordsworthians, including Matthew Arnold, found a
+value in all that remains of him--could read anything he wrote, "even
+the 'Thanksgiving Ode,'--everything, I think, except 'Vaudracour and
+Julia,'"--yet still the decisiveness of such selections as those made
+by Arnold himself, and now by Professor Knight, hint at a certain very
+obvious difference of level in his poetic work.
+
+This perpetual suggestion of an absolute duality between his lower and
+higher moods, and the poetic work produced in them, stimulating the
+reader to look below the immediate surface of his poetry, makes the
+study of Wordsworth an excellent exercise for the training of those
+mental powers in us, which partake both of thought and imagination.  It
+begets in those [95] who fall in with him at the right moment of their
+spiritual development, a habit of reading between the lines, a faith in
+the effect of concentration and collectedness of mind on the right
+appreciation of poetry, the expectation that what is really worth
+having in the poetic order will involve, on their part, a certain
+discipline of the temper not less than of the intellect.  Wordsworth
+meets them with the assurance that he has much to give them, and of a
+very peculiar kind, if they will follow a certain difficult way, and
+seems to possess the secret of some special mental illumination.  To
+follow that way is an initiation, by which they will become able to
+distinguish, in art, speech, feeling, manners, in men and life
+generally, what is genuine, animated, and expressive from what is only
+conventional and derivative, and therefore inexpressive.
+
+A very intimate sense of the expressiveness of outward things, which
+ponders, listens, penetrates, where the earlier, less developed
+consciousness passed lightly by, is an important element in the general
+temper of our modern poetry.  Critics of literary history have again
+[96] and again remarked upon it; it is a characteristic which reveals
+itself in many different forms, but is strongest and most sympathetic
+in what is strongest and most serious in modern literature; it is
+exemplified by writers as unlike Wordsworth as the French romanticist
+poets.  As a curious chapter in the history of the human mind, its
+growth might be traced from Rousseau and St. Pierre to Chateaubriand,
+from Chateaubriand to Victor Hugo; it has no doubt some obscure
+relationship to those pantheistic theories which have greatly occupied
+people's minds in many modern readings of philosophy; it makes as much
+difference between the modern and the earlier landscape art as there is
+between the roughly outlined masks of a Byzantine mosaic and a portrait
+by Reynolds or Romney.  Of this new landscape sense the poetry of
+Wordsworth is the elementary and central exposition; he is more
+exclusively occupied with its development than any other poet.
+Wordsworth's own character, as we have already observed, was dominated
+by a certain contentment, a sort of naturally religious placidity, not
+often found in union with a poetic sensibility so [97] active as his;
+and this gentle sense of well-being was favourable to the quiet,
+habitual observation of the inanimate, or imperfectly animate, world.
+His life of eighty placid years was almost without what, with most
+human beings, count for incidents.  His flight from the active world,
+so genially celebrated in this newly published poem of The Recluse; his
+flight to the Vale of Grasmere, like that of some pious youth to the
+Chartreuse, is the most marked event of his existence.  His life's
+changes are almost entirely inward ones; it falls into broad,
+untroubled, perhaps somewhat monotonous, spaces; his biographers have
+very little to tell.  What it really most resembles, different as its
+superficies may look, is the career of those early mediaeval religious
+artists, who, precisely because their souls swarmed with heavenly
+visions, passed their fifty or sixty years in tranquil, systematic
+industry, seemingly with no thoughts beyond it.  This placid life
+developed in Wordsworth, to an extraordinary degree, an innate
+sensibility to natural sights and sounds--the flower and its shadow on
+the stone, the cuckoo and its echo.  The poem of [98] "Resolution and
+Independence" is a storehouse of such records; for its fulness of
+lovely imagery it may be compared to Keats's "Saint Agnes' Eve."  To
+read one of his greater pastoral poems for the first time is like a day
+spent in a new country; the memory is crowded for a while with its
+precise and vivid incidents:--
+
+  The pliant harebell swinging in the breeze,
+  On some grey rock:
+  The single sheep, and the one blasted tree,
+  And the bleak music from that old stone wall:--
+  In the meadows and the lower ground,
+  Was all the sweetness of a common dawn:--
+  And that green corn all day is rustling in thine ears!
+
+Clear and delicate at once as he is in the outlining of visible
+imagery, he is more finely scrupulous still in the noting of sounds; he
+conceives of noble sound as even moulding the human countenance to
+nobler types, and as something actually "profaned" by visible form or
+colour.  He has a power likewise of realizing and conveying to the
+consciousness of his reader abstract and elementary impressions,
+silence, darkness, absolute motionlessness, or, again, the whole
+complex sentiment of a particular place, the abstract expression of
+desolation in the long [99] white road, of peacefulness in a particular
+folding of the hills.
+
+That sense of a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but a
+rhetorical artifice, was, then, in Wordsworth the assertion of what was
+for him almost literal fact.  To him every natural object seemed to
+possess something of moral or spiritual life, to be really capable of a
+companionship with man, full of fine intimacies.  An emanation, a
+particular spirit, belonged not to the moving leaves or water only, but
+to the distant peak arising suddenly, by some change of perspective,
+above the nearer horizon of the hills, to the passing space of light
+across the plain, to the lichened Druidic stone even, for a certain
+weird fellowship in it with the moods of men.  That he awakened "a sort
+of thought in sense" is Shelley's just estimate of this element in
+Wordsworth's poetry.
+
+It was through nature, ennobled in this way by the semblance of passion
+and thought, that the poet approached the spectacle of human life.  For
+him, indeed, human life is, in the first instance, only an additional,
+and as it were incidental grace, upon this expressive landscape.
+
+[100] When he thought of men and women, it was of men and women as in
+the presence and under the influence of those effective natural
+objects, and linked to them by many associations.  Such influences have
+sometimes seemed to belittle those who are the subject of them, at the
+least to be likely to narrow the range of their sympathies. To
+Wordsworth, on the contrary, they seemed directly to dignify human
+nature, as tending to tranquillize it.  He raises physical nature to
+the level of human thought, giving it thereby a mystic power and
+expression; he subdues man to the level of nature, but gives him
+therewith a certain breadth and vastness and solemnity.
+
+Religious sentiment, consecrating the natural affections and rights of
+the human heart, above all that pitiful care and awe for the perishing
+human clay of which relic-worship is but the corruption, has always had
+much to do with localities, with the thoughts which attach themselves
+to definite scenes and places.  And what is true of it everywhere is
+truest in those secluded valleys, where one generation after another
+maintains the same abiding-place; and [101] it was on this side that
+Wordsworth apprehended religion most strongly.  Having so much to do
+with the recognition of local sanctities, the habit of connecting the
+very trees and stones of a particular spot of earth with the great
+events of life, till the low walls, the green mounds, the
+half-obliterated epitaphs, seemed full of oracular voices, even the
+religion of those people of the dales appeared but as another link
+between them and the solemn imageries of the natural world.  And,
+again, this too tranquillized them, by bringing them under the rule of
+traditional, narrowly localized observances.  "Grave livers," they
+seemed to him under this aspect, of stately speech, and something of
+that natural dignity of manners which underlies the highest courtesy.
+
+And, seeing man thus as a part of nature, elevated and solemnized in
+proportion as his daily life and occupations brought him into
+companionship with permanent natural objects, he was able to appreciate
+passion in the lowly.  He chooses to depict people from humble life,
+because, being nearer to nature than others, they are on the whole more
+impassioned, certainly [102] more direct in their expression of
+passion, than other men; it is for this direct expression of passion
+that he values their humble words.  In much that he said in exaltation
+of rural life he was but pleading indirectly for that sincerity, that
+perfect fidelity to one's own inward presentations, to the precise
+features of the picture within, without which any profound poetry is
+impossible.  It was not for their tameness, but for their impassioned
+sincerity, that he chose incidents and situations from common life,
+"related in a selection of language really used by men."  He constantly
+endeavours to bring his language nearer to the real language of men;
+but it is to the real language of men, not on the dead level of their
+ordinary intercourse, but in certain select moments of vivid sensation,
+when this language is winnowed and ennobled by sentiment.  There are
+poets who have chosen rural life for their subject for the sake of its
+passionless repose; and there are times when Wordsworth himself extols
+the mere calm and dispassionate survey of things as the highest aim of
+poetical culture.  But it was not for such passionless calm that he
+preferred the scenes of [103] pastoral life; and the meditative poet,
+sheltering himself from the agitations of the outward world, is in
+reality only clearing the scene for the exhibition of great emotions,
+and what he values most is the almost elementary expression of
+elementary feelings.
+
+In Wordsworth's prefatory advertisement to the first edition of The
+Prelude, published in 1850, it is stated that that work was intended to
+be introductory to The Recluse: and that The Recluse, if completed,
+would have consisted of three parts.  The second part is The Excursion.
+The third part was only planned; but the first book of the first part
+was left in manuscript by Wordsworth--though in manuscript, it is said,
+in no great condition of forwardness for the printers.  This book, now
+for the first time printed in extenso (a very noble passage from it
+found place in that prose advertisement to The Excursion), is the great
+novelty of this latest edition of Wordsworth's poetic works.  It was
+well worth adding to the poet's great bequest to English literature.
+The true student of his work, who has formulated for himself what he
+supposes to be the leading characteristics [104] of Wordsworth's
+genius, will feel, we think, a lively interest in putting them to test
+by the many and various striking passages in what is there presented
+for the first time.
+
+17th February 1889
+
+
+
+
+VII.  MR. GOSSE'S POEMS
+
+
+On Viol and Flute.  By Edmund Gosse.
+
+[107] PERHAPS no age of literature, certainly no age of literature in
+England, has been so rich as ours in excellent secondary poetry; and it
+is with our poetry (in a measure) as with our architecture, constrained
+by the nature of the case to be imitative.  Our generation, quite
+reasonably, is not very proud of its architectural creations; confesses
+that it knows too much--knows, but cannot do. And yet we could name
+certain modern churches in London, for instance, to which posterity may
+well look back puzzled.--Could these exquisitely pondered buildings
+have been indeed works of the nineteenth century?  Were they not the
+subtlest creations of the age in which Gothic art was spontaneous?  In
+truth, we have had instances of workmen, who, through long, large,
+[108] devoted study of the handiwork of the past, have done the thing
+better, with a more fully enlightened consciousness, with full
+intelligence of what those early workmen only guessed at.  And
+something like this is true of some of our best secondary poetry.  It
+is the least that is true--the least that can fairly be said in praise
+of the poetic work of Mr. Edmund Gosse.
+
+Of course there can be no exact parallel between arts so different as
+architecture and poetic composition: But certainly in the poetry of our
+day also, though it has been in some instances powerfully initiative
+and original, there is great scholarship, a large comparative
+acquaintance with the poetic methods of earlier workmen, and a very
+subtle intelligence of their charm.  Of that fine scholarship in this
+matter there is no truer example than Mr. Gosse. It is manifested
+especially in the even finish of his varied work, in the equality of
+his level--a high level--in species of composition so varied as the
+three specimens which follow.
+
+Far away, in late spring, "by the sea in the south," the swallows are
+still lingering around "white Algiers."  In Mr. Gosse's "Return of
+[109] the Swallows," the northern birds--lark and thrush--have long
+been calling to them:--
+
+  And something awoke in the slumbering heart
+  Of the alien birds in their African air,
+  And they paused, and alighted, and twittered apart,
+  And met in the broad white dreamy square,
+  And the sad slave woman, who lifted up
+  From the fountain her broad-lipped earthen cup,
+  Said to herself, with a weary sigh,
+  "To-morrow the swallows will northward fly."
+
+Compare the following stanzas, from a kind of palinode, "1870-1871,"
+years of the Franco-German war and the Parisian Commune:--
+
+  The men who sang that pain was sweet
+  Shuddered to see the mask of death
+  Storm by with myriad thundering feet;
+  The sudden truth caught up our breath
+  Our throats like pulses beat.
+
+  The songs of pale emaciate hours,
+  The fungus-growth of years of peace,
+  Withered before us like mown flowers;
+  We found no pleasure more in these
+  When bullets fell in showers.
+
+  For men whose robes are dashed with blood,
+  What joy to dream of gorgeous stairs,
+  Stained with the torturing interlude
+  That soothed a Sultan's midday prayers,
+  In old days harsh and rude?
+
+[110]
+
+  For men whose lips are blanched and white,
+  With aching wounds and torturing thirst,
+  What charm in canvas shot with light,
+  And pale with faces cleft and curst,
+  Past life and life's delight?
+
+And then Mr. Gosse's purely descriptive power, his aptitude for
+still-life and landscape, is unmistakably vivid and sound.  Take, for
+an instance, this description of high-northern summer:--
+
+  The ice-white mountains clustered all around us,
+  But arctic summer blossomed at our feet;
+  The perfume of the creeping sallows found us,
+  The cranberry-flowers were sweet.
+
+  Below us through the valley crept a river,
+  Cleft round an island where the Lap-men lay;
+  Its sluggish water dragged with slow endeavour
+  The mountain snows away.
+
+  There is no night-time in the northern summer,
+  But golden shimmer fills the hours of sleep,
+  And sunset fades not, till the bright new-comer,
+  Red sunrise, smites the deep.
+
+  But when the blue snow-shadows grew intenser
+  Across the peaks against the golden sky,
+  And on the hills the knots of deer grew denser,
+  And raised their tender cry,
+
+[111]
+
+  And wandered downward to the Lap-men's dwelling,
+  We knew our long sweet day was nearly spent,
+  And slowly, with our hearts within us swelling,
+  Our homeward steps we bent.
+
+"Sunshine before Sunrise!"  There's a novelty in that, for poetic use
+at least, so far as we know, though we remember one fine paragraph
+about it in Sartor Resartus.  The grim poetic sage of Chelsea, however,
+had never seen what he describes: not so Mr. Gosse, whose acquaintance
+with northern lands and northern literature is special. We have indeed
+picked out those stanzas from a quiet personal record of certain
+amorous hours of early youth in that quaint arctic land, Mr. Gosse's
+description of which, like his pretty poem on Lübeck, made one think
+that what the accomplished group of poets to which he belongs requires
+is, above all, novelty of motive, of subject.
+
+He takes, indeed, the old themes, and manages them better than their
+old masters, with more delicate cadences, more delicate transitions of
+thought, through long dwelling on earlier practice.  He seems to
+possess complete command of the technique of poetry--every form of what
+may be called skill of hand in it; and what marks in [112] him the
+final achievement of poetic scholarship is the perfect balance his work
+presents of so many and varied effects, as regards both matter and
+form.  The memories of a large range of poetic reading are blent into
+one methodical music so perfectly that at times the notes seem almost
+simple.  Sounding almost all the harmonies of the modern lyre, he has,
+perhaps as a matter of course, some of the faults also, the "spasmodic"
+and other lapses, which from age to age, in successive changes of
+taste, have been the "defects" of excellent good "qualities."  He is
+certainly not the--
+
+  Pathetic singer, with no strength to sing,
+
+as he says of the white-throat on the tulip-tree,
+
+  Whose leaves unfinished ape her faulty song.
+
+In effect, a large compass of beautiful thought and expression, from
+poetry old and new, have become to him matter malleable anew for a
+further and finer reach of literary art.  And with the perfect grace of
+an intaglio, he shows, as in truth the minute intaglio may do, the
+faculty of structure, the logic of poetry.  "The New Endymion" is a
+good instance of such sustained [113] power.  Poetic scholar!--If we
+must reserve the sacred name of "poet" to a very small number, that
+humbler but perhaps still rarer title is due indisputably to Mr. Gosse.
+His work is like exquisite modern Latin verse, into the academic shape
+of which, discreet and coy, comes a sincere, deeply felt consciousness
+of modern life, of the modern world as it is.  His poetry, according
+with the best intellectual instincts of our critical age, is as pointed
+out recently by a clever writer in the Nineteenth Century, itself a
+kind of exquisite, finally revised criticism.
+
+Not that he fails in originality; only, the graces, inborn certainly,
+but so carefully educated, strike one more.  The sense of his
+originality comes to one as but an after-thought; and certainly one
+sign of his vocation is that he has made no conscious effort to be
+original.  In his beautiful opening poem of the "White-throat," giving
+his book its key-note, he seems, indeed, to accept that position,
+reasons on and justifies it.  Yet there is a clear note of originality
+(so it seems to us) in the peculiar charm of his strictly personal
+compositions; and, generally, in such touches as he gives us of the
+soul, the life, of the [114] nineteenth century.  Far greater, we
+think, than the charm of poems strictly classic in interest, such as
+the "Praise of Dionysus," exquisite as that is, is the charm of those
+pieces in which, so to speak, he transforms, by a kind of
+colour-change, classic forms and associations into those--say! of
+Thames-side--pieces which, though in manner or subject promising a
+classic entertainment, almost unaware bring you home.--No! after all,
+it is not imagined Greece, dreamy, antique Sicily, but the present
+world about us, though mistakable for a moment, delightfully, for the
+land, the age, of Sappho, of Theocritus:--
+
+  There is no amaranth, no pomegranate here,
+  But can your heart forget the Christmas rose,
+  The crocuses and snowdrops once so dear?
+
+Quite congruously with the placid, erudite, quality of his culture,
+although, like other poets, he sings much of youth, he is often most
+successful in the forecast, the expression, of the humours, the
+considerations, that in truth are more proper to old age:--
+
+  When age comes by and lays his frosty hands
+  So lightly on mine eyes, that, scarce aware
+
+[115]
+
+  Of what an endless weight of gloom they bear,
+  I pause, unstirred, and wait for his commands.
+  When time has bound these limbs of mine with bands,
+  And hushed mine ears, and silvered all my hair,
+  May sorrow come not, nor a vain despair
+  Trouble my soul that meekly girdled stands.
+
+  As silent rivers into silent lakes,
+  Through hush of reeds that not a murmur breaks,
+  Wind, mindful of the poppies whence they came,
+  So may my life, and calmly burn away,
+  As ceases in a lamp at break of day
+  The flagrant remnant of memorial flame.
+
+Euthanasia!--Yet Mr. Gosse, with all his accomplishment, is still a
+young man.  His youthful confidence in the perpetuity of poetry, of the
+poetical interests in life, creed-less as he may otherwise seem to be,
+is, we think, a token, though certainly an unconscious token, of the
+spontaneous originality of his muse.  For a writer of his peculiar
+philosophic tenets, at all events, the world itself, in truth, must
+seem irretrievably old or even decadent.
+
+Old, decadent, indeed, it would seem with Mr. Gosse to be also
+returning to the thoughts, the fears, the consolations, of its youth in
+Greece, in Italy:--
+
+[116]
+
+  Nor seems it strange indeed
+  To hold the happy creed
+  That all fair things that bloom and die
+  Have conscious life as well as I.
+
+  Then let me joy to be
+  Alive with bird and tree,
+  And have no haughtier aim than this,
+  To be a partner in their bliss.
+
+Convinced, eloquent,--again and again the notes of Epicurean philosophy
+fall almost unconsciously from his lips.  With poetry at hand, he
+appears to feel no misgivings.  A large faith he might seem to have in
+what is called "natural optimism," the beauty and benignity of nature,
+if let alone, in her mechanical round of changes with man and beast and
+flower.  Her method, however, certainly involves forgetfulness for the
+individual; and to this, to the prospect of oblivion, poetry, too, may
+help to brace us, if, unlike so genial and cheerful a poet as Mr.
+Gosse, we need bracing thereto:--
+
+  Now, giant-like, the tall young ploughmen go
+  Between me and the sunset, footing slow;
+  My spirit, as an uninvited guest,
+  Goes with them, wondering what desire, what aim,
+  May stir their hearts and mine with common flame,
+  Or, thoughtless, do their hands suffice their soul?
+
+[117]
+
+  I know not, care not, for I deem no shame
+  To hold men, flowers, and trees and stars the same,
+  Myself, as these, one atom in the whole.
+
+That is from one of those half-Greek, half-English idylls, reminding
+one of Frederick Walker's "Ploughman," of Mason's "Evening Hymn," in
+which Mr. Gosse is at his best.  A favourite motive, he has treated it
+even more melodiously in "Lying in the Grass":--
+
+  I do not hunger for a well-stored mind,
+  I only wish to live my life, and find
+  My heart in unison with all mankind.
+
+  My life is like the single dewy star
+  That trembles on the horizon's primrose-bar,--
+  A microcosm where all things living are.
+
+  And if, among the noiseless grasses, Death
+  Should come behind and take away my breath,
+  I should not rise as one who sorroweth;
+
+  For I should pass, but all the world would be
+  Full of desire and young delight and glee,
+  And why should men be sad through loss of me?
+
+  The light is flying; in the silver-blue
+  The young moon shines from her bright window through:
+  The mowers are all gone, and I go too.
+
+A vein of thought as modern as it is old!  More not less depressing,
+certainly, to our over-meditative [118], susceptible, nervous, modern
+age, than to that antiquity which was indeed the genial youth of the
+world, but, sweetly attuned by his skill of touch, it is the sum of
+what Mr. Gosse has to tell us of the experience of life.  Or is it,
+after all, to quote him once more, that beyond those ever-recurring
+pagan misgivings, those pale pagan consolations, our generation feels
+yet cannot adequately express--
+
+  The passion and the stress
+  Of thoughts too tender and too sad to be
+  Enshrined in any melody she knows?
+
+29th October 1890
+
+
+
+
+VIII.  FERDINAND FABRE
+
+
+[NORINE]: AN IDYLL OF THE CEVENNES
+
+
+[121] A FRENCH novelist who, with much of Zola's undoubted power,
+writes always in the interest of that high type of Catholicism which
+still prevails in the remote provinces of France, of that high type of
+morality of which the French clergy have nobly maintained the ideal, is
+worth recommending to the more serious class of English readers.
+Something of the gift of François Millet, whose peasants are veritable
+priests, of those older religious painters who could portray saintly
+heads so sweetly and their merely human protégés so truly, seems indeed
+to have descended to M. Ferdinand Fabre.  In the Abbé Tigrane, in
+Lucifer, and elsewhere, he has delineated, with wonderful power and
+patience, a strictly ecclesiastical portraiture-- [122] shrewd,
+passionate, somewhat melancholy heads, which, though they are often of
+peasant origin, are never by any chance undignified.  The passions he
+treats of in priests are, indeed, strictly clerical, most often their
+ambitions--not the errant humours of the mere man in the priest, but
+movements of spirit properly incidental to the clerical type itself.
+Turning to the secular brothers and sisters of these peasant
+ecclesiastics, at first sight so strongly contrasted with them, M.
+Fabre shows a great acquaintance with the sources, the effects, of
+average human feeling; but still in contact--in contact, as its
+conscience, its better mind, its ideal--with the institutions of
+religion.  What constitutes his distinguishing note as a writer is the
+recognition of the religious, the Catholic, ideal, intervening
+masterfully throughout the picture he presents of life, as the only
+mode of poetry realizable by the poor; and although, of course, it does
+a great deal more beside, certainly doing the high work of poetry
+effectively.  For his background he has chosen, has made his own and
+conveys very vividly to his readers, a district of France, gloomy, in
+spite of its almonds, its [123] oil and wine, but certainly grandiose.
+The large towns, the sparse hamlets, the wide landscape of the
+Cevennes, are for his books what the Rhineland is to those delightful
+authors, Messrs. Erckmann-Chatrian.  In Les Courbezon, the French Vicar
+of Wakefield, as Sainte-Beuve declared, with this imposing background,
+the Church and the world, as they shape themselves in the Cevennes, the
+priest and the peasant, occupy about an equal share of interest.
+Sometimes, as in the charming little book we wish now to introduce,
+unclerical human nature occupies the foreground almost exclusively;
+though priestly faces will still be found gazing upon us from time to
+time.
+
+In form, the book is a bundle of letters from a Parisian littérateur to
+the friend of his boyhood, now the curé of one of those mountain
+villages.  He is refreshing himself, in the midst of dusty,
+sophisticated Paris, with memories of their old, delightful
+existence--vagabonde, libre, agreste, pastorale--in their upland
+valley.  He can appeal safely to the aged curé's friendly justice, even
+in exposing delicacies of sentiment which most men conceal:--
+
+[124] "As for you, frank, certain of your own mind, joyous of heart,
+methinks scarce understanding those whose religion makes their souls
+tremble instead of fortifying them--you, I am sure, take things by the
+large and kindly side of human life."
+
+The story our Parisian has to tell is simple enough, and we have no
+intention of betraying it, but only to note some of the faces, the
+scenes, that peep out in the course of it.
+
+The gloom of the Cevennes is the impression M. Fabre most commonly
+conveys.  In this book it is rather the cheerful aspect of summer,
+those upland valleys of the Cevennes presenting then a symphony in red,
+so to call it--as in a land of cherries and goldfinches; and he has a
+genial power certainly of making you really feel the sun on the backs
+of the two boys out early for a long ramble, of old peasants resting
+themselves a little, with spare enjoyment, ere the end:--
+
+"As we turned a sharp elbow of the stream the aspect of the country
+changed.  It seemed to me entirely red.  Cherries in enormous bunches
+were hanging everywhere over our heads....
+
+[125] "It was a hut, rather low, rather dark.  A log of chestnut was
+smouldering in a heap of ashes.  Every object was in its place: the
+table, the chairs, the plates ranged on the dresser.  A fairy, in
+truth, reigned there, and, by the touch of her wand, brought
+cleanliness and order on every side.
+
+"'Is it you, Norine?' asked a voice from a dark corner, three steps
+from the fireplace.
+
+"'Yes, mon grand, it is I!  The heat was growing greater every moment,
+and I have taken in the goats.'
+
+"Norine unclosed the window.  A broad light spread over the floor of
+beaten earth, like a white cloth.  The cottage was illuminated.  I saw
+an old man seated on a wooden stool in a recess, where an ample serge
+curtain concealed a bed.  He held himself slightly bent, the two hands
+held forth, one over the other, on the knob of a knotty staff, highly
+polished.  In spite of eighty years, Norine's grandfather--le grand, as
+they say up there--had not lost a hair: beautiful white locks fell over
+his shoulders--crisp, thick, outspread.  I thought of those fine wigs
+of tow or hemp with which the distaff of [126] our Prudence was always
+entangled.  He was close shaved, after the manner of our peasants; and
+the entire mask was to be seen disengaged, all its admirable lines
+free, commanded by a full-sized nose, below which the good, thick lips
+were smiling, full of kindness.  The eyes, however, though still clear
+and soft in expression, had a certain fixity which startled me.  He
+raised himself.  His stature seemed to me beyond proportion.  He was
+really beautiful, with the contentment of his face, straight as the
+trunk of a chestnut, his old velvet coat thrown back, his shirt of
+coarse cloth open at the breast, so that one saw the play of the ribs.
+
+"'Monsieur le neveu!' he cried; 'where are you? Come to me!  I am
+blind.'
+
+"I approached.  He felt me, with ten fingers, laying aside his staff.
+
+"'And you would not take offence if a poor peasant like me embraced
+you?'
+
+"'Quick, Jalaguier!'  I cried, throwing myself into his arms. 'Quick!'
+He pressed me till the joints started.  Leaned upon his broad chest, I
+heard the beating of his heart.  It beat under my ears with a burden
+like our bell at [126] Camplong.  What powerful vitality in Norine's
+grand!  'It does an old man good:--a good hug!' he said, letting me go."
+
+The boyish visitors are quite ready to sit down there to dinner:--
+
+"With the peasant of the Cevennes (M. Fabre tells us) the meal is what
+nature meant it to be--a few moments for self-recovery after fatigue, a
+short space of silence of a quite elevated character, almost sacred.
+The poor human creature has given the sweat of his brow to extort from
+an ungrateful soil his daily bread; and now he eats that well-savoured
+bread in silent self-respect.
+
+"'It is a weary thing to be thinking always of one's work (says the
+grand to the somewhat sparing Norine).  We must also think of our
+sustenance.  You are too enduring, my child! it is a mistake to demand
+so much of your arms.  In truth, le bon Dieu has cut you out after the
+pattern of your dead father.  Every morning, in my prayers, I put in my
+complaint thereanent.  My poor boy died from going too fast.  He could
+never sit still when it was a question of gathering a few sous from the
+[128] fields; and those fields took and consumed him.'"
+
+The boy fancies that the blind eyes are turned towards a particular
+spot in the landscape, as if they saw:--
+
+"'I often turn my eyes in that direction (the old man explains) from
+habit.  One might suppose that a peasant had the scent of the earth on
+which he has laboured.  I have given so much of the sweat of my
+brow--there--towards Rocaillet!  Angélique, my dead wife, was of
+Rocaillet; and when she married me, brought a few morsels of land in
+her apron.  What a state they're in now!--those poor morsels of land we
+used to weed and rake and hoe, my boy and I!  What superb crops of
+vetches we mowed then, for feeding, in due time, our lambs, our calves!
+All is gone to ruin since my blindness, and especially since Angélique
+left me for the churchyard, never to come back.'  He paused to my great
+relief.  For every one of those phrases he modulated under the
+fig-trees more sadly than the Lamentations of Jeremiah on Jeudi Saint
+overset me--was like death."
+
+[129] That is good drawing, in its simple and quiet way!  The actual
+scene, however, is cheerful enough on this early summer day--a
+symphony, as we said, in cherries and goldfinches, in which the higher
+valleys of the Cevennes abound.  In fact, the boys witness the
+accordailles, the engagement, of Norine and Justin Lebasset.  The
+latter is calling the birds to sing good luck to the event:--
+
+"He had a long steady look towards the fruit-trees, and then whistled,
+on a note at once extremely clear and extremely soft.  He paused,
+watched awhile, recommenced.  The note became more rapid, more
+sonorous.  What an astounding man he was, this Justin Lebasset!
+Upright, his red beard forward, his forehead thrown back, his eyes on
+the thick foliage of the cherry-trees, his hands on his haunches, in an
+attitude of repose, easy, superb, he was like some youthful pagan god,
+gilded with red gold, on his way across the country--like Pan, if he
+chose to amuse himself by charming birds.  You should have seen the
+enthusiastic glances with which Norine watched him.  Upright--she too,
+slim, at full height, inclining from [130] time to time towards Justin
+with a movement of irresistible fascination, she followed the notes of
+her mate; and sometimes, her, lips half opening, added thereto a
+sigh--something of a sigh, an aspiration, a prayer, towards the
+goldfinch, withdrawn into the shadows.
+
+"The leaves were shaken in the clear, burning green; and, on a sudden,
+a multitude of goldfinches, the heads red in the wind, the wings half
+spread, were fluttering from branch to branch.  I could have fancied,
+amid the quivering of the great bunches of fruit, that they were
+cherries on the wing.  Justin suffered his pipe to die away: the birds
+were come at his invitation, and performed their prelude."
+
+It is forty years afterwards that the narrator, now a man of letters in
+Paris, writes to his old friend, with tidings of Justin and Norine:--
+
+"In 1842 (he observes) you were close on fifteen; I scarcely twelve. In
+my eyes your age made you my superior.  And then, you were so strong,
+so tender, so amiteux, to use a word from up there--a charming word.
+And so God, Who had His designs for you, whereas I, in spite of my
+pious childhood, wandered on [131] my way as chance bade me, led you by
+the hand, attached, ended by keeping you for Himself.  He did well
+truly when He chose you and rejected me!"
+
+His finding the pair in the wilds of Paris is an adventure, in which,
+in fact, a goldfinch again takes an important part--a goldfinch who is
+found to understand the Cevenol dialect:--
+
+"The goldfinch (escaped from its cage somewhere, into the dreary court
+of the Institute) has seen me: is looking at me.  If he chose to make
+his way into my apartment, he would be very welcome.  I feel a strong
+impulse to try him with that unique patois word, which, whistled after
+a peculiar manner, when I was a boy never failed to succeed in the
+mountains of Orb--Béni!  Béni!  Viens!  Viens!  I dare not!  He might
+take fright and fly away altogether."
+
+In effect, the Cevenol bird, true to call, introduces Norine, his
+rightful owner, whose husband Justin is slowly dying.  Towards the end
+of a hard life, faithful to their mountain ideal, they have not lost
+their dignity, though in a comparatively sordid medium: [132]
+
+"As for me, my dear Arribas, I remained in deep agitation, an attentive
+spectator of the scene; and while Justin and Norine, set both alike in
+the winepress of sorrow, le pressoir de la douleur, as your good books
+express it, murmured to each other their broken consoling words, I saw
+them again, in thought, young, handsome, in the full flower of life,
+under the cherry-trees, the swarming goldfinches, of blind Barthélemy
+Jalaguier.  Ah me!  It was thus that, five-and-forty years after, in
+this dark street of Paris, that festive day was finishing, blessed, in
+the plenitude of nature, by that august old man, celebrated by the
+alternate song of all the birds of Rocaillet."
+
+Justin's one remaining hope is to go home to those native mountains, if
+it may be, with the dead body of his boy, dead "the very morning on
+which he should have received the tonsure from the hands of Mgr.
+l'Archevêque," and buried now temporarily at the cemetery of
+Montparnasse:--
+
+Theodore calls me.  I saw him distinctly to-night.  He gave me a sign.
+After all said, life is heavy, sans le fillot, and but [133] for you it
+were well to be released from it....'
+
+"I have seen Justin Lebasset die, dear Arribas, and was touched,
+edified, to the bottom of my soul.  God grant, when my hour comes, I
+may find that calm, that force, in the last struggle with life.  Not a
+complaint!  not a sigh!  Once only he gave Norine a sorrowful,
+heartrending look; then, from lips already cold, breathed that one
+word, 'Theodore!'  Marcus Aurelius used to say: 'A man should leave the
+world as a ripe olive falls from the tree that bore it, and with a kiss
+for the earth that nourished it.'  Well! the peasant of Rocaillet had
+the beautiful, noble, simple death of the fruit of the earth, going to
+the common receptacle of all mortal beings, with no sense that he was
+torn away.  Pardon, I pray, my quotation from Marcus Aurelius, who
+persecuted the Christians.  I give it with the same respect with which
+you would quote some holy writer.  Ah! my dear Arribas! not all the
+saints have received canonization."
+
+It is to the priestly character, in truth, that M. Fabre always comes
+back for tranquillizing [134] effect; and if his peasants have
+something akin to Wordsworth's, his priests may remind one of those
+solemn ecclesiastical heads familiar in the paintings and etchings of
+M. Alphonse Legros.  The reader travelling in Italy, or Belgium
+perhaps, has doubtless visited one or more of those spacious
+sacristies, introduced to which for the inspection of some more than
+usually recherché work of art, one is presently dominated by their
+reverend quiet: simple people coming and going there, devout, or at
+least on devout business, with half-pitched voices, not without touches
+of kindly humour, in what seems to express like a picture the most
+genial side, midway between the altar and the home, of the
+ecclesiastical life.  Just such interiors we seem to visit under the
+magic of M. Fabre's well-trained pen.  He has a real power of taking
+one from Paris, or from London, to places and people certainly very
+different from either, to the satisfaction of those who seek in fiction
+an escape.
+
+12th June 1889
+
+
+
+
+IX.  THE "CONTES" OF M. AUGUSTIN FILON
+
+
+TALES OF A HUNDRED YEARS SINCE ["CONTES DU CENTENAIRE."  PAR AUGUSTIN
+FILON.  PARIS: HACHETTE ET CIE. ]
+
+
+[137] IT was a happy thought of M. Filon to put into the mouth of an
+imaginary centenarian a series of delightfully picturesque studies
+which aim at the minute presentment of life in France under the old
+régime, and end for the most part with the Revolution.  A genial
+centenarian, whose years have told happily on him, he appreciates not
+only those humanities of feeling and habit which were peculiar to the
+last century and passed away with it, but also that permanent humanity
+which has but undergone a change of surface in the new world of our
+own, wholly different though it may look.  With a sympathetic sense of
+life as it is always, [138] M. Filon has transplanted the creations of
+his fancy into an age certainly at a greater distance from ourselves
+than can be estimated by mere lapse of time, and where a fully detailed
+antiquarian knowledge, used with admirable tact and economy, is indeed
+serviceable in giving reality of effect to scene and character.  In
+truth, M. Filon's very lively antiquarianism carries with it a genuine
+air of personal memory.  With him, as happens so rarely, an intimate
+knowledge of historic detail is the secret of life, of the impression
+of life; puts his own imagination on the wing; secures the imaginative
+cooperation of the reader.  A stately age--to us, perhaps, in the
+company of the historic muse, seeming even more stately than it
+actually was--it is pleasant to find it, as we do now and again on
+these pages, in graceful déshabille.  With perfect lightness of touch,
+M. Filon seems to have a complete command of all the physiognomic
+details of old France, of old Paris and its people--how they made a
+holiday; how they got at the news; the fashions.  Did the English
+reader ever hear before of the beautifully dressed doll which came once
+a month [139] from Paris to Soho to teach an expectant world of fashion
+how to dress itself? Old Paris!  For young lovers at their windows; for
+every one fortunate enough to have seen it: "Qu'il est joli ce paysage
+du Paris nocturne d'il y a cent ans!"  We think we shall best do
+justice to an unusually pretty book by taking one of M. Filon's stories
+(not because we are quite sure it is the cleverest of them) with a view
+to the more definite illustration of his method, therein.
+
+Christopher Marteau was a warden of the corporation of Luthiers.  He
+dealt in musical instruments, as his father and grandfather had done
+before him, at the sign of Saint Cecilia.  With his wife, his only
+child Phlipote, and Claude his apprentice, who was to marry Phlipote,
+he occupied a good house of his own.  Of course the disposition of the
+young people, bred together from their childhood, does not at first
+entirely concur with the parental arrangements.  But the story tells,
+reassuringly, how--to some extent how sadly--they came heartily to do
+so.  M. Marteau was no ordinary shopkeeper.  The various distinguished
+people who had fingered his clavecins, and turned over the [140] folios
+of music, for half a century past, had left their memories behind them;
+M. de Voltaire, for instance, who had caressed the head of Phlipote
+with an aged, skeleton hand, leaving, apparently, no very agreeable
+impression on the child, though her father delighted to recall the
+incident, being himself a demi-philosophe.  He went to church, that is
+to say, only twice a year, on the Feast of St. Cecilia and on the
+Sunday when the Luthiers offered the pain bénit.  It was his opinion
+that everything in the State needed reform except the Corporations.
+The relations of the husband to his affectionate, satiric,
+pleasure-seeking wife, who knew so well all the eighteen theatres which
+then existed in Paris, are treated with much quiet humour.  On Sundays
+the four set forth together for a country holiday.  At such times
+Phlipote would walk half-a-dozen paces in advance of her father and
+mother, side by side with her intended.  But they never talked to each
+other: the hands, the eyes, never met.  Of what was Phlipote dreaming?
+and what was in the thoughts of Claude?
+
+It happened one day that, like sister and brother, the lovers exchanged
+confidences.  "It [141] is not always," observes Phlipote, whom every
+one excepting Claude on those occasions sought with admiring eyes--
+
+"'It is not always one loves those one is told to love.'
+
+"'What, have you, too, a secret, my little Phlipote?'
+
+"'I too, Claude!  Then what may be yours?'
+
+"'Listen, Phlipote!' he answered.  'We don't wish to be husband and
+wife, but we can be friends--good and faithful friends, helping each
+other to change the decision of our parents.'
+
+"'Were I but sure you would not betray me--'
+
+"'Would you like me to confess first?  The woman I love--Ah! but you
+will laugh at my folly!'
+
+"'No, Claude!  I shall not laugh.  I know too well what one suffers.'
+
+"'Especially when love is hopeless.'
+
+"'Hopeless?'
+
+"'Alas!  I have never spoken to her.  Perhaps never shall!'
+
+[142] "'Well! as for me, I don't even know the name of him to whom my
+heart is given!'
+
+"'Ah! poor Phlipote!'
+
+"'Poor Claude!'
+
+"They had approached each other.  The young man took the tiny hand of
+his friend, pressing it in his own.
+
+"'The woman I adore is Mademoiselle Guimard!'
+
+"'What!  Guimard of the Opera?--the fiancée of Despréaux?'"
+
+Claude still held the hands of Phlipote, who was trembling now, and
+almost on fire at the story of this ambitious love.  In return she
+reveals her own.  It was Good Friday.  She had come with her mother to
+the Sainte Chapelle to hear Mademoiselle Coupain play the organ and
+witness the extraordinary spectacle of the convulsionnaires, brought
+thither to be touched by the relic of the True Cross.  In the press of
+the crowd at this exciting scene Phlipote faints, or nearly faints,
+when a young man comes kindly to their aid.  "She is so young!" he
+explains to the mother, "she seems so delicate!"  "He looked at me,"
+she tells Claude--"he looked at [143] me, through his half-closed
+eyelids; and his words were like a caress."--
+
+"'And have you seen him no More?' asks Claude, full of sympathy.
+
+"'Yes! once again.  He pretended to be looking at the window of the
+Little Dunkirk, over the way, but with cautious glances towards our
+house.  Only, as he did not know what storey we live on, he failed to
+discover me behind my curtain, where I was but half visible.'
+
+"'You should have shown yourself.'
+
+"'Oh, Claude!' she cried, with a delicious gesture of timidity, of
+shame.
+
+"So they prattled for a long time; he talking of the great Guimard, she
+of her unknown lover, scarce listening to, but completely understanding
+each other.
+
+"'Holloa!'cries the loud voice of Christopher Marteau.  'What are you
+doing out there?'
+
+"The young people arose.  Phlipote linked her arm gaily in that of
+Claude.  'How contented I feel!' she says; 'how good it is to have a
+friend--to have you whom I used to detest, because I thought you were
+in love with me.  Now, when I know you can't bear me, I [144] shall be
+nicely in love with you.'  The soft warmth of her arm seemed to pass
+through Claude, and gave him strange sensations.  He resumed naïvely,
+'Yes! and how odd it is after all that I am not in love with you.  You
+are so pretty!'  Phlipote raised her finger coquettishly, 'No
+compliments, monsieur.  Since we are not to marry each other, it is
+forbidden to pay court to me!'"
+
+From that day a close intimacy established itself between the formerly
+affianced pair, now become accomplices in defeating the good intentions
+of their elders.  In long conversations, they talked in turn, or both
+together, of their respective loves.  Phlipote allows Claude entrance
+to her chamber, full of admiration for its graceful arrangements, its
+virgin cleanliness.  He inspects slowly all the familiar objects daily
+touched by her, her books, her girlish ornaments.  One day she cried
+with an air of mischief, "If she were here in my place, what would you
+do?" and no sooner were the words uttered than his arms were round her
+neck.  "'Tis but to teach you what I would do were she here."  They
+were a little troubled by this adventure.
+
+[145] And the next day was a memorable one.  By the kind contrivance of
+Phlipote herself, Claude gains the much-desired access to the object of
+his affections, but to his immense disillusion.  If he could but speak
+to her, he fancies he should find the courage, the skill, to bend her.
+Breathless, Phlipote comes in secret with the good news.  The great
+actress desires some one to tune her clavecin:--
+
+"'Papa would have gone; but I begged him so earnestly to take me to the
+Théâtre Français that he could not refuse; and it is yourself will go
+this evening to tune the clavecin of your beloved.'
+
+"'Phlipote, you've a better heart than I!  This morning I saw a
+gentleman, who resembled point by point your description of the unknown
+at the Sainte Chapelle, prowling about our shop.'
+
+"'And you didn't tell me!'
+
+"Claude hung his head.
+
+"'But why not?' the young girl asks imperiously.  'Why not?'
+
+"'In truth I could hardly say, hardly understand, myself.  Do you
+forgive me, Phlipote?'
+
+"'I suppose I must.  So make yourself as smart as you can, to please
+your goddess.'"
+
+[146] Next day she hears the story of Claude's grievous disappointment
+on seeing the great actress at home--plain, five-and-forty,
+ill-tempered.  He had tuned the clavecin and taken flight.
+
+And now for Phlipote's idol!  It was agreed that Whitsunday should be
+spent at Versailles.  On that day the royal apartments were open to the
+public, and at the hour of High Mass the crowd flowed back towards the
+vestibule of the chapel to witness what was called the procession of
+the Cordons Bleus.  The "Blue Ribbons" were the knights of the Order Du
+Saint-Esprit in their robes of ceremony, who came to range themselves
+in the choir according to the date of their creation.  The press was so
+great that the parents were separated from the young people.  Claude,
+however, at the side of Phlipote, realized the ideal of a faithful and
+jealous guardian.  The hallebardes of the Suisses rang on the marble
+pavement of the gallery.  Royalty, now unconsciously presenting its
+ceremonies for the last time, advanced through a cloud of splendour;
+but before the Queen appeared it was necessary that all the knights of
+the order down to the youngest should pass by, slow, solemn, majestic.
+
+[147] They wore, besides their ribbons of blue moiré, the silver dove
+on the shoulder, and the long mantle of sombre blue velvet lined with
+yellow satin.  Phlipote watched mechanically the double file of haughty
+figures passing before them: then, on a sudden, with a feeble cry,
+falls fainting into the arms of Claude.
+
+Recovered after a while, under shelter of the great staircase, she wept
+as those weep whose heart is broken by a great blow.  Claude, without a
+word, sustained, soothed her.  A sentiment of gratitude mingled itself
+with her distress.  "How good he is!" she thought.
+
+"It was a pity," says her mother a little later "a pity you did not see
+the Cordons Bleus.  Fancy!  You will laugh at me!  But in one of the
+handsomest of the Chevaliers I felt sure I recognized the stranger who
+helped us at the Sainte Chapelle, and was so gallant with you."
+
+Phlipote did not laugh.  "You are deceived, mother!" she said in a
+faint voice.  "Pardi!" cries the father.  "'Tis what I always say. Your
+stranger was some young fellow from a shop."
+
+Two months later the young people receive [148] the nuptial
+benediction, and continue the musical business when the elders retire
+to the country.  At first a passionate lover, Claude was afterwards a
+good and devoted husband.  Phlipote never again opened her lips
+regarding the vague love which for a moment had flowered in her heart:
+only sometimes, a cloud of reverie veiled her eyes, which seemed to
+seek sadly, beyond the circle of her slow, calm life, a brilliant but
+chimeric image visible for her alone.
+
+And once again she saw him.  It was in the terrible year 1794.  She
+knew the hour at which the tumbril with those condemned to die passed
+the windows; and at the first signal would close them and draw the
+curtain.  But on this day some invincible fascination nailed her to her
+place.  There were ten faces; but she had eyes for one alone. She had
+not forgotten, could not mistake, him--that pale head, so proud and
+fine, but now thin with suffering; the beautiful mobile eyes, now
+encircled with the signs of sorrow and watching.  The convict's shirt,
+open in large, broad folds, left bare the neck, delicate as a woman's,
+and made for that youthful face an aureole, of innocence, of martyrdom.
+His looks [149] met hers.  Did he recognize her?  She could not have
+said.  She remained there, paralyzed with emotion, till the moment when
+the vision disappeared.
+
+Then she flung herself into her chamber, fell on her knees, lost
+herself in prayer.  There was a distant roll of drums.  The man to whom
+she had given her maiden soul was gone.
+
+"Cursed be their anger, for it was cruel!" says the reader.  But
+Monsieur Filon's stories sometimes end as merrily as they begin; and
+always he is all delicacy--a delicacy which keeps his large yet minute
+antiquarian knowledge of that vanished time ever in service to a direct
+interest in humanity as it is permanently, alike before and after '93.
+His book is certainly one well worth possessing.
+
+
+
+THE END
+
+16th July 1890
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Essays from 'The Guardian', by Walter Horatio Pater
+
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+<pre>
+
+Project Gutenberg's Essays from 'The Guardian', by Walter Horatio Pater
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Essays from 'The Guardian'
+
+Author: Walter Horatio Pater
+
+Posting Date: June 7, 2009 [EBook #4036]
+Release Date: May, 2003
+First Posted: October 19, 2001
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ESSAYS FROM 'THE GUARDIAN' ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Alfred J. Drake.  HTML version by Al Haines.
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H1 ALIGN="center">
+ESSAYS FROM 'THE GUARDIAN'
+</H1>
+
+<H2 ALIGN="center">
+By WALTER HORATIO PATER
+</H2>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<P CLASS="transnote">
+NOTES BY THE E-TEXT EDITOR:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+E-text Editor: Alfred J. Drake, Ph.D.  Electronic Version 1.0 / Date
+10-12-01
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="transnote">
+Reliability: Although I have done my best to ensure that the text you
+read is error-free in comparison with an exact reprint of the standard
+edition&mdash;Macmillan's 1910 Library Edition&mdash;please exercise scholarly
+caution in using it.  It is not intended as a substitute for the
+printed original but rather as a searchable supplement.  My e-texts may
+prove convenient substitutes for hard-to-get works in a course where
+both instructor and students accept the possibility of some
+imperfections in the text, but if you are writing a scholarly article,
+dissertation, or book, you should use the standard hard-copy editions
+of any works you cite.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="transnote">
+Pagination and Paragraphing: To avoid an unwieldy electronic copy, I
+have transferred original pagination to brackets.  A bracketed numeral
+such as [22] indicates that the material immediately following the
+number marks the beginning of the relevant page.  I have preserved
+paragraph structure except for first-line indentation.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="transnote">
+Hyphenation: I have not preserved original hyphenation since an e-text
+does not require line-end or page-end hyphenation.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="transnote">
+Greek typeface: For this full-text edition, I have transliterated
+Pater's Greek quotations.  If there is a need for the original Greek,
+it can be viewed at my site, http://www.ajdrake.com/etexts, a
+Victorianist archive that contains the complete works of Walter Pater
+and many other nineteenth-century texts, mostly in first editions.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H2 ALIGN="center">
+CONTENTS
+</H2>
+
+<H4>
+1. <A HREF="#chap01">English Literature</A>: 1-16
+<BR>
+2. <A HREF="#chap02">Amiel's "Journal Intime"</A>: 17-37
+<BR>
+3. <A HREF="#chap03">Browning</A>: 39-51
+<BR>
+4. <A HREF="#chap04">"Robert Elsmere"</A>: 53-70
+<BR>
+5. <A HREF="#chap05">Their Majesties' Servants</A>: 71-88
+<BR>
+6. <A HREF="#chap06">Wordsworth</A>: 89-104
+<BR>
+7. <A HREF="#chap07">Mr. Gosse's Poems</A>: 105-118
+<BR>
+8. <A HREF="#chap08">Ferdinand Fabre</A>: 119-134
+<BR>
+9. <A HREF="#chap09">The "Contes" of M. Augustin Filon</A>: 135-149
+</H4>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H1 ALIGN="center">
+ESSAYS FROM 'THE GUARDIAN'
+</H1>
+
+<H2 ALIGN="center">
+WALTER HORATIO PATER
+</H2>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+PATER'S NOTE: The nine papers contained in the following volume
+originally appeared anonymously in The Guardian newspaper.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="transnote">
+E-TEXT EDITOR'S NOTE: I have not preserved the title pages of this
+volume, but have instead moved dates to each essay's end and included
+any necessary title-page material in the heading area of the first
+substantive page.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap01"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+I.  ENGLISH LITERATURE
+</H3>
+
+<H4 CLASS="center">
+FOUR BOOKS FOR STUDENTS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE
+</H4>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+[3] THE making of an anthology of English prose is what must have
+occurred to many of its students, by way of pleasure to themselves, or
+of profit to other persons.  Such an anthology, the compass and variety
+of our prose literature being considered, might well follow exclusively
+some special line of interest in it; exhibiting, for instance, what is
+so obviously striking, its imaginative power, or its (legitimately)
+poetic beauty, or again, its philosophical capacity.  Mr. Saintsbury's
+well-considered Specimens of English Prose Style, from Malory to
+Macaulay (Kegan Paul), a volume, as we think, which bears fresh witness
+to the truth of the old remark that it takes a scholar indeed to make a
+[4] good literary selection, has its motive sufficiently indicated in
+the very original "introductory essay," which might well stand, along
+with the best of these extracts from a hundred or more deceased masters
+of English, as itself a document or standard, in the matter of prose
+style.  The essential difference between poetry and prose&mdash;"that other
+beauty of prose"&mdash;in the words of the motto he has chosen from Dryden,
+the first master of the sort of prose he prefers:&mdash;that is Mr.
+Saintsbury's burden.  It is a consideration, undoubtedly, of great
+importance both for the writer and the critic; in England especially,
+where, although (as Mr. Saintsbury rightly points out, in correction of
+an imperfectly informed French critic of our literature) the radical
+distinction between poetry and prose has ever been recognized by its
+students, yet the imaginative impulse, which is perhaps the richest of
+our purely intellectual gifts, has been apt to invade the province of
+that tact and good judgment, alike as to matter and manner, in which we
+are not richer than other people.  Great poetry and great prose, it
+might be found, have most of their qualities in common.  But [5] their
+indispensable qualities are different, or even opposed; and it is just
+the indispensable qualities of prose and poetry respectively, which it
+is so necessary for those who have to do with either to bear ever in
+mind.  Order, precision, directness, are the radical merits of prose
+thought; and it is more than merely legitimate that they should form
+the criterion of prose style, because within the scope of those
+qualities, according to Mr. Saintsbury, there is more than just the
+quiet, unpretending usefulness of the bare sermo pedestris. Acting on
+language, those qualities generate a specific and unique beauty&mdash;"that
+other beauty of prose"&mdash;fitly illustrated by these specimens, which the
+reader needs hardly be told, after what has been now said, are far from
+being a collection of "purple patches."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Whether or not he admits their practical cogency, an attentive reader
+will not fail to be interested in the attempt Mr. Saintsbury has made
+to give technical rules of metre for the production of the true prose
+rhythm.  Any one who cares to do so might test the validity of those
+rules in the nearest possible way, by applying them to the varied
+examples in this wide [6] survey of what has been actually well done in
+English prose, here exhibited on the side of their strictly prosaic
+merit&mdash;their conformity, before all other aims, to laws of a structure
+primarily reasonable.  Not that that reasonable prose structure, or
+architecture, as Mr. Saintsbury conceives it, has been always, or even
+generally, the ideal, even of those chosen writers here in evidence.
+Elizabethan prose, all too chaotic in the beauty and force which
+overflowed into it from Elizabethan poetry, and incorrect with an
+incorrectness which leaves it scarcely legitimate prose at all: then,
+in reaction against that, the correctness of Dryden, and his followers
+through the eighteenth century, determining the standard of a prose in
+the proper sense, not inferior to the prose of the Augustan age in
+Latin, or of the "great age in France": and, again in reaction against
+this, the wild mixture of poetry and prose, in our wild nineteenth
+century, under the influence of such writers as Dickens and Carlyle:
+such are the three periods into which the story of our prose literature
+divides itself.  And Mr. Saintsbury has his well-timed, practical
+suggestions, upon a survey of them.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+[7] If the invasion of the legitimate sphere of prose in England by the
+spirit of poetry, weaker or stronger, has been something far deeper
+than is indicated by that tendency to write unconscious blank verse,
+which has made it feasible to transcribe about one-half of Dickens's
+otherwise so admirable Barnaby Rudge in blank-verse lines, a tendency
+(outdoing our old friend M. Jourdain) commoner than Mr. Saintsbury
+admits, such lines being frequent in his favourite Dryden; yet, on the
+other hand, it might be maintained, and would be maintained by its
+French critics, that our English poetry has been too apt to dispense
+with those prose qualities, which, though not the indispensable
+qualities of poetry, go, nevertheless, to the making of all first-rate
+poetry&mdash;the  qualities, namely, of orderly structure, and such
+qualities generally as depend upon second thoughts.  A collection of
+specimens of English poetry, for the purpose of exhibiting the
+achievement of prose excellences by it (in their legitimate measure) is
+a desideratum we commend to Mr. Saintsbury. It is the assertion, the
+development, the product of those very different indispensable
+qualities of poetry, in the presence [8] of which the English is equal
+or superior to all other modern literature&mdash;the native, sublime, and
+beautiful, but often wild and irregular, imaginative power in English
+poetry from Chaucer to Shakespeare, with which Professor Minto deals,
+in his Characteristics of English Poets (Blackwood), lately reprinted.
+That his book should have found many readers we can well understand, in
+the light of the excellent qualities which, in high degree, have gone
+to the making of it: a tasteful learning, never deserted by that hold
+upon contemporary literature which is so animating an influence in the
+study of what belongs to the past.  Beginning with an elaborate notice
+of Chaucer, full of the minute scholarship of our day, he never forgets
+that his subject is, after all, poetry.  The followers of Chaucer, and
+the precursors of Shakespeare, are alike real persons to him&mdash;old
+Langland reminding him of Carlyle's "Gospel of Labour." The product of
+a large store of reading has been here secreted anew for the reader who
+desires to see, in bird's-eye view, the light and shade of a long and
+varied period of poetic literature, by way of preparation for
+Shakespeare, [9] (with a full essay upon whom the volume closes,)
+explaining Shakespeare, so far as he can be explained by literary
+antecedents.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That powerful poetry was twin-brother to a prose, of more varied, but
+certainly of wilder and more irregular power than the admirable, the
+typical, prose of Dryden.  In Dryden, and his followers through the
+eighteenth century, we see the reaction against the exuberance and
+irregularity of that prose, no longer justified by power, but
+cognizable rather as bad taste.  But such reaction was effective only
+because an age had come&mdash;the age of a negative, or agnostic
+philosophy&mdash;in which men's minds must needs be limited to the
+superficialities of things, with a kind of narrowness amounting to a
+positive gift.  What that mental attitude was capable of, in the way of
+an elegant, yet plain-spoken, and life-like delineation of men's moods
+and manners, as also in the way of determining those moods and manners
+themselves to all that was lively, unaffected, and harmonious, can be
+seen nowhere better than in Mr. Austin Dobson's Selections from Steele
+(Clarendon Press) prefaced by his careful "Life."  The well-known
+qualities of [10] Mr. Dobson's own original work are a sufficient
+guarantee of the taste and discrimination we may look for in a
+collection like this, in which the random lightnings of the first of
+the essayists are grouped under certain heads&mdash;"Character Sketches,"
+"Tales and Incidents," "Manners and Fashions," and the like&mdash;so as to
+diminish, for the general reader, the scattered effect of short essays
+on a hundred various subjects, and give a connected, book-like
+character to the specimens.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steele, for one, had certainly succeeded in putting himself, and his
+way of taking the world&mdash;for this pioneer of an everybody's literature
+had his subjectivities&mdash;into books.  What a survival of one long-past
+day, for instance, in "A Ramble from Richmond to London"!  What truth
+to the surface of common things, to their direct claim on our interest!
+yet with what originality of effect in that truthfulness, when he
+writes, for instance:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I went to my lodgings, led by a light, whom I put into the discourse
+of his private economy, and made him give me an account of the charge,
+hazard, profit, and loss of a family that depended upon a link."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+[11] It was one of his peculiarities, he tells us, to live by the eye
+far more than by any other sense (a peculiarity, perhaps, in an
+Englishman), and this is what he sees at the early daily service then
+common in some City churches.  Among those who were come only to see or
+be seen, "there were indeed a few in whose looks there appeared a
+heavenly joy and gladness upon the entrance of a new day, as if they
+had gone to sleep with expectation of it."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The industrious reader, indeed, might select out of these specimens
+from Steele, a picture, in minute detail, of the characteristic manners
+of that time.  Still, beside, or only a little way beneath, such a
+picture of passing fashion, what Steele and his fellows really deal
+with is the least transitory aspects of life, though still merely
+aspects&mdash;those points in which all human nature, great or little, finds
+what it has in common, and directly shows itself up. The natural
+strength of such literature will, of course, be in the line of its
+tendencies; in transparency, variety, and directness.  To the
+unembarrassing matter, the unembarrassed style!  Steele is, perhaps,
+the most impulsive writer of the school [12] to which he belongs; he
+abounds in felicities of impulse.  Yet who can help feeling that his
+style is regular because the matter he deals with is the somewhat
+uncontentious, even, limited soul, of an age not imaginative, and
+unambitious in its speculative flight?  Even in Steele himself we may
+observe with what sureness of instinct the men of that age turned aside
+at the contact of anything likely to make them, in any sense, forget
+themselves.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+No one indicates better than Charles Lamb, to whose memory Mr. Alfred
+Ainger has done such good service, the great and peculiar change which
+was begun at the end of the last century, and dominates our own; that
+sudden increase of the width, the depth, the complexity of intellectual
+interest, which has many times torn and distorted literary style, even
+with those best able to comprehend its laws.  In Mrs. Leicester's
+School, with other Writings in Prose and Verse (Macmillan), Mr. Ainger
+has collected and annotated certain remains of Charles and Mary Lamb,
+too good to lie unknown to the present generation, in forgotten
+periodicals or inaccessible reprints.  The story of the Odyssey,
+abbreviated [13] in very simple prose, for children&mdash;of all ages&mdash;will
+speak for itself.  But the garland of graceful stories which gives name
+to the volume, told by a party of girls on the evening of their
+assembling at school, are in the highest degree characteristic of the
+brother and sister who were ever so successful in imparting to others
+their own enjoyment of books and people.  The tragic circumstance which
+strengthened and consecrated their natural community of interest had,
+one might think, something to do with the far-reaching pensiveness even
+of their most humorous writing, touching often the deepest springs of
+pity and awe, as the way of the highest humour is&mdash;a way, however, very
+different from that of the humorists of the eighteenth century.  But
+one cannot forget also that Lamb was early an enthusiastic admirer of
+Wordsworth: of Wordsworth, the first characteristic power of the
+nineteenth century, his essay on whom, in the Quarterly Review, Mr.
+Ainger here reprints.  Would that he could have reprinted it as
+originally composed, and ungarbled by Gifford, the editor!  Lamb, like
+Wordsworth, still kept the charm of a serenity, [14] a precision,
+unsurpassed by the quietest essayist of the preceding age. But it might
+have been foreseen that the rising tide of thought and feeling, on the
+strength of which they too are borne upward, would sometimes overflow
+barriers.  And so it happens that these simple stories are touched,
+much as Wordsworth's verse-stories were, with tragic power.  Dealing
+with the beginnings of imagination in the minds of children, they
+record, with the reality which a very delicate touch preserves from
+anything lugubrious, not those merely preventible miseries of childhood
+over which some writers have been apt to gloat, but the contact of
+childhood with the great and inevitable sorrows of life, into which
+children can enter with depth, with dignity, and sometimes with a kind
+of simple, pathetic greatness, to the discipline of the heart.  Let the
+reader begin with the "Sea Voyage," which is by Charles Lamb; and, what
+Mr. Ainger especially recommends, the "Father's Wedding-Day," by his
+sister Mary.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The ever-increasing intellectual burden of our age is hardly likely to
+adapt itself to the exquisite, but perhaps too delicate and limited,
+[15] literary instruments of the age of Queen Anne.  Yet Mr. Saintsbury
+is certainly right in thinking that, as regards style, English
+literature has much to do.  Well, the good quality of an age, the
+defect of which lies in the direction of intellectual anarchy and
+confusion, may well be eclecticism: in style, as in other things, it is
+well always to aim at the combination of as many excellences as
+possible&mdash;opposite excellences, it may be&mdash;those other beauties of
+prose.  A busy age will hardly educate its writers in correctness. Let
+its writers make time to write English more as a learned language; and
+completing that correction of style which had only gone a certain way
+in the last century, raise the general level of language towards their
+own.  If there be a weakness in Mr. Saintsbury's view, it is perhaps in
+a tendency to regard style a little too independently of matter.  And
+there are still some who think that, after all, the style is the man;
+justified, in very great varieties, by the simple consideration of what
+he himself has to say, quite independently of any real or supposed
+connection with this or that literary age or school.  Let us close with
+the words of a most [16] versatile master of English&mdash;happily not yet
+included in Mr. Saintsbury's book&mdash;a writer who has dealt with all the
+perturbing influences of our century in a manner as classical, as
+idiomatic, as easy and elegant, as Steele's:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I wish you to observe," says Cardinal Newman, "that the mere dealer in
+words cares little or nothing for the subject which he is embellishing,
+but can paint and gild anything whatever to order; whereas the artist,
+whom I am acknowledging, has his great or rich visions before him, and
+his only aim is to bring out what he thinks or what he feels in a way
+adequate to the thing spoken of, and appropriate to the speaker."
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+17th February 1886
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap02"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+II.  AMIEL'S "JOURNAL INTIME"
+</H3>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Amiel's Journal.  The Journal Intime of Henri-Frédéric Amiel.
+Translated, with an Introduction and Notes, by Mrs. Humphry Ward. Two
+vols.  Macmillans.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+[19] CERTAIN influential expressions of opinion have attracted much
+curiosity to Amiel's Journal Intime, both in France, where the book has
+already made its mark, and in England, where Mrs. Humphry Ward's
+translation is likely to make it widely known among all serious lovers
+of good literature.  Easy, idiomatic, correct, this English version
+reads like an excellent original English work, and gives fresh proof
+that the work of translation, if it is to be done with effect, must be
+done by those who, possessing, like Mrs. Ward, original literary gifts,
+are willing to make a long act of self-denial or self-effacement [20]
+for the benefit of the public.  In this case, indeed, the work is not
+wholly one of self-effacement, for the accomplished translator has
+prefaced Amiel's Journal by an able and interesting essay of seventy
+pages on Amiel's life and intellectual position.  And certainly there
+is much in the book, thus effectively presented to the English reader,
+to attract those who interest themselves in the study of the finer
+types of human nature, of literary expression, of metaphysical and
+practical philosophy; to attract, above all, those interested in such
+philosophy, at points where it touches upon questions of religion, and
+especially at the present day.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Henri-Frédéric Amiel was born at Geneva in 1821.  Orphaned of both his
+parents at the age of twelve, his youth was necessarily "a little bare
+and forlorn," and a deep interest in religion became fixed in him
+early.  His student days coming to an end, the years which followed,
+from 1842 to 1848&mdash;Wanderjahre, in which he visited Holland, Italy,
+Sicily, and the principal towns of Germany&mdash;seem to have been the
+happiest of his life.  In 1849 he became a Professor at Geneva, and
+there is little more to tell of him in [21] the way of outward events.
+He published some volumes of verse; to the last apparently still only
+feeling after his true literary métier.  Those last seven years were a
+long struggle against the disease which ended his life, consumption, at
+the age of fifty-three.  The first entry in his Journal is in 1848.
+From that date to his death, a period of over twenty-five years, this
+Journal was the real object of all the energies of his richly-endowed
+nature: and from its voluminous sheets his literary executors have
+selected the deeply interesting volumes now presented in English.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+With all its gifts and opportunities it was a melancholy
+life&mdash;melancholy with something not altogether explained by the
+somewhat pessimistic philosophy exposed in the Journal, nor by the
+consumptive tendency of Amiel's physical constitution, causing him from
+a very early date to be much preoccupied with the effort to reconcile
+himself with the prospect of death, and reinforcing the far from
+sanguine temperament of one intellectually also a poitrinaire.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+You might think him at first sight only an admirable specimen of a
+thoroughly well-educated [22] man, full, of course, of the modern
+spirit; stimulated and formed by the influences of the varied
+intellectual world around him; and competing, in his turn, with many
+very various types of contemporary ability.  The use of his book to
+cultivated people might lie in its affording a kind of standard by
+which they might take measure of the maturity and producible quality of
+their own thoughts on a hundred important subjects.  He will write a
+page or two, giving evidence of that accumulated power and attainment
+which, with a more strenuous temperament, might have sufficed for an
+effective volume.  Continually, in the Journal, we pause over things
+that would rank for beauties among widely differing models of the best
+French prose.  He has said some things in Pascal's vein not unworthy of
+Pascal.  He had a right to compose "Thoughts": they have the force in
+them which makes up for their unavoidable want of continuity.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But if, as Amiel himself challenges us to do, we look below the surface
+of a very equable and even smoothly accomplished literary manner, we
+discover, in high degree of development, that perplexity or complexity
+of soul, the expression [23] of which, so it be with an adequate
+literary gift, has its legitimate, because inevitable, interest for the
+modern reader.  Senancour and Maurice de Guérin in one, seem to have
+been supplemented here by a larger experience, a far greater education,
+than either of them had attained to.  So multiplex is the result that
+minds of quite opposite type might well discover in these pages their
+own special thought or humour, happily expressed at last (they might
+think) in precisely that just shade of language themselves had searched
+for in vain.  And with a writer so vivid and impressive as Amiel, those
+varieties of tendency are apt to present themselves as so many
+contending persons.  The perplexed experience gets the apparent
+clearness, as it gets also the animation, of a long dialogue; only, the
+disputants never part company, and there is no real conclusion.  "This
+nature," he observes, of one of the many phases of character he has
+discovered in himself, "is, as it were, only one of the men which exist
+in me.  It is one of my departments.  It is not the whole of my
+territory, the whole of my inner kingdom"; and again, "there are ten
+men in me, according to time, place, surrounding, [24] and occasion;
+and, in my restless diversity, I am for ever escaping myself."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Yet, in truth, there are but two men in Amiel&mdash;two sufficiently opposed
+personalities, which the attentive reader may define for himself;
+compare with, and try by each other&mdash;as we think, correct also by each
+other.  There is the man, in him and in these pages, who would be "the
+man of disillusion," only that he has never really been "the man of
+desires"; and who seems, therefore, to have a double weariness about
+him.  He is akin, of course, to Obermann, to René, even to Werther,
+and, on our first introduction to him, we might think that we had to do
+only with one more of the vague "renunciants," who in real life
+followed those creations of fiction, and who, however delicate,
+interesting as a study, and as it were picturesque on the stage of
+life, are themselves, after all, essentially passive, uncreative, and
+therefore necessarily not of first-rate importance in literature.
+Taken for what it is worth, the expression of this mood&mdash;the culture of
+ennui for its own sake&mdash;is certainly carried to its ideal of negation
+by Amiel.  But the completer, the positive, soul, which will merely
+take [25] that mood into its service (its proper service, as we hold,
+is in counteraction to the vulgarity of purely positive natures) is
+also certainly in evidence in Amiel's "Thoughts"&mdash;that other, and far
+stronger person, in the long dialogue; the man, in short, possessed of
+gifts, not for the renunciation, but for the reception and use, of all
+that is puissant, goodly, and effective in life, and for the varied and
+adequate literary reproduction of it; who, under favourable
+circumstances, or even without them, will become critic, or poet, and
+in either case a creative force; and if he be religious (as Amiel was
+deeply religious) will make the most of "evidence," and almost
+certainly find a Church.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The sort of purely poetic tendency in his mind, which made Amiel known
+in his own lifetime chiefly as a writer of verse, seems to be
+represented in these volumes by certain passages of natural
+description, always sincere, and sometimes rising to real distinction.
+In Switzerland it is easy to be pleased with scenery. But the record of
+such pleasure becomes really worth while when, as happens with Amiel,
+we feel that there has been, and with success, an intellectual [26]
+effort to get at the secret, the precise motive, of the pleasure; to
+define feeling, in this matter.  Here is a good description of an
+effect of fog, which we commend to foreigners resident in London:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Fog has certainly a poetry of its own&mdash;a grace, a dreamy charm.  It
+does for the daylight what a lamp does for us at night; it turns the
+mind towards meditation; it throws the soul back on itself.  The sun,
+as it were, sheds us abroad in nature, scatters and disperses us; mist
+draws us together and concentrates us&mdash;it is cordial, homely, charged
+with feeling.  The poetry of the sun has something of the epic in it;
+that of fog and mist is elegiac and religious.  Pantheism is the child
+of light; mist engenders faith in near protectors.  When the great
+world is shut off from us, the house becomes itself a small universe.
+Shrouded in perpetual mist, men love each other better; for the only
+reality then is the family, and, within the family, the heart; and the
+greatest thoughts come from the heart&mdash;so says the moralist."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is of Swiss fog, however, that he is speaking, as, in what follows,
+of Swiss frost:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+[27] "Three snowstorms this afternoon.  Poor blossoming plum-trees and
+peach-trees!  What a difference from six years ago, when the
+cherry-trees, adorned in their green spring dress and laden with their
+bridal flowers, smiled at my departure along the Vaudois fields, and
+the lilacs of Burgundy threw great gusts of perfume into my face!"  The
+weather is seldom talked of with so much real sensitiveness to it as in
+this:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The weather is rainy, the whole atmosphere grey; it is a time
+favourable to thought and meditation.  I have a liking for such days as
+these; they revive one's converse with oneself and make it possible to
+live the inner life: they are quiet and peaceful, like a song in a
+minor key.  We are nothing but thought, but we feel our life to its
+very centre.  Our very sensations turn to reverie.  It is a strange
+state of mind; it is like those silences in worship which are not the
+empty moments of devotion, but the full moments, and which are so
+because at such times the soul, instead of being polarized, dispersed,
+localized, in a single impression or thought, feels her own totality
+and is conscious of herself."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+[28] "Every landscape," he writes, "is, as it were, a state of the
+soul": and again, "At bottom there is but one subject of study; the
+forms and metamorphoses of mind: all other subjects may be reduced to
+that; all other studies bring us back to this study."  And, in truth,
+if he was occupied with the aspects of nature to such an excellent
+literary result, still, it was with nature only as a phenomenon of the
+moral order.  His interest, after all, is, consistently, that of the
+moralist (in no narrow sense) who deals, from predilection, with the
+sort of literary work which stirs men&mdash;stirs their intellect&mdash;through
+feeling; and with that literature, especially, as looked at through the
+means by which it became capable of thus commanding men. The powers,
+the culture, of the literary producer: there, is the centre of Amiel's
+curiosity.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And if we take Amiel at his own word, we must suppose that but for
+causes, the chief of which were bad health and a not long life, he too
+would have produced monumental work, whose scope and character he would
+wish us to conjecture from his "Thoughts."  Such indications there
+certainly are in them.  He was [29] meant&mdash;we see it in the variety,
+the high level both of matter and style, the animation, the gravity, of
+one after another of these thoughts&mdash;on religion, on poetry, on
+politics in the highest sense; on their most abstract principles, and
+on the authors who have given them a personal colour; on the genius of
+those authors, as well as on their concrete works; on outlying isolated
+subjects, such as music, and special musical composers&mdash;he was meant,
+if people ever are meant for special lines of activity, for the best
+sort of criticism, the imaginative criticism; that criticism which is
+itself a kind of construction, or creation, as it penetrates, through
+the given literary or artistic product, into the mental and inner
+constitution of the producer, shaping his work.  Of such critical
+skill, cultivated with all the resources of Geneva in the nineteenth
+century, he has given in this Journal abundant proofs.  Corneille,
+Cherbuliez; Rousseau, Sismondi; Victor Hugo, and Joubert; Mozart and
+Wagner&mdash;all who are interested in these men will find a value in what
+Amiel has to say of them. Often, as for instance in his excellent
+criticism of Quinet, he has to make large exceptions [30]; limitations,
+skilfully effected by the way, in the course of a really appreciative
+estimate.  Still, through all, what we feel is that we have to do with
+one who criticises in this fearlessly equitable manner only because he
+is convinced that his subject is of a real literary importance.  A
+powerful, intellectual analysis of some well-marked subject, in such
+form as makes literature enduring, is indeed what the world might have
+looked for from him: those institutes of aesthetics, for instance,
+which might exist, after Lessing and Hegel, but which certainly do not
+exist yet.  "Construction," he says&mdash;artistic or literary
+construction&mdash;"rests upon feeling, instinct, and," alas! also, "upon
+will."  The instinct, at all events, was certainly his. And over and
+above that he had possessed himself of the art of expressing, in quite
+natural language, very difficult thoughts; those abstract and
+metaphysical conceptions especially, in which German mind has been
+rich, which are bad masters, but very useful ministers towards the
+understanding, towards an analytical survey, of all that the intellect
+has produced.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But something held him back: not so much [31] a reluctancy of
+temperament, or of physical constitution (common enough cause why men
+of undeniable gifts fail of commensurate production) but a cause purely
+intellectual&mdash;the presence in him, namely, of a certain vein of
+opinion; that other, constituent but contending, person, in his complex
+nature.  "The relation of thought to action," he writes, "filled my
+mind on waking, and I found myself carried towards a bizarre formula,
+which seems to have something of the night still clinging about it.
+Action is but coarsened thought."  That is but an ingenious
+metaphysical point, as he goes on to show.  But, including in "action"
+that literary production in which the line of his own proper activity
+lay, he followed&mdash;followed often&mdash;that fastidious utterance to a
+cynical and pessimistic conclusion.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Maia, as he calls it, the empty "Absolute" of the Buddhist, the
+"Infinite," the "All," of which those German metaphysicians he loved
+only too well have had so much to say: this was for ever to give the
+go-by to all positive, finite, limited interests whatever.  The vague
+pretensions of an abstract expression acted on him with all the force
+of a prejudice.  "The ideal," he admits, [32] "poisons for me all
+imperfect possession"; and again, "The Buddhist tendency in me blunts
+the faculty of free self-government, and weakens the power of action. I
+feel a terror of action and am only at ease in the impersonal,
+disinterested, and objective line of thought."  But then, again, with
+him "action" meant chiefly literary production.  He quotes with
+approval those admirable words from Goethe, "In der Beschrankung zeigt
+sich erst der Meister"; yet still always finds himself wavering between
+"frittering myself away on the infinitely little, and longing after
+what is unknown and distant."  There is, doubtless, over and above the
+physical consumptive tendency, an instinctive turn of sentiment in this
+touching confession.  Still, what strengthened both tendencies was that
+metaphysical prejudice for the "Absolute," the false intellectual
+conscience.  "I have always avoided what attracted me, and turned my
+back upon the point where secretly I desired to be"; and, of course,
+that is not the way to a free and generous productivity, in literature,
+or in anything else; though in literature, with Amiel at all events, it
+meant the fastidiousness which [33] is incompatible with any but the
+very best sort of production.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And as that abstract condition of Maia, to the kind and quantity of
+concrete literary production we hold to have been originally possible
+for him; so was the religion he actually attained, to what might have
+been the development of his profoundly religious spirit, had he been
+able to see that the old-fashioned Christianity is itself but the
+proper historic development of the true "essence" of the New Testament.
+There, again, is the constitutional shrinking, through a kind of
+metaphysical prejudice, from the concrete&mdash;that fear of the actual&mdash;in
+this case, of the Church of history; to which the admissions, which
+form so large a part of these volumes, naturally lead.  Assenting, on
+probable evidence, to so many of the judgments of the religious sense,
+he failed to see the equally probable evidence there is for the
+beliefs, the peculiar direction of men's hopes, which complete those
+judgments harmoniously, and bring them into connection with the facts,
+the venerable institutions of the past&mdash;with the lives of the saints.
+By failure, as we think, of that historic sense, of [34] which he could
+speak so well, he got no further in this direction than the glacial
+condition of rationalistic Geneva.  "Philosophy," he says, "can never
+replace religion."  Only, one cannot see why it might not replace a
+religion such as his: a religion, after all, much like Seneca's.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I miss something," he himself confesses, "common worship, a positive
+religion, shared with other people.  Ah!  when will the Church to which
+I belong in heart rise into being?"  To many at least of those who can
+detect the ideal through the disturbing circumstances which belong to
+all actual institutions in the world, it was already there. Pascal,
+from considerations to which Amiel was no stranger, came to the large
+hopes of the Catholic Church; Amiel stopped short at a faith almost
+hopeless; and by stopping short just there he really failed, as we
+think, of intellectual consistency, and missed that appeasing influence
+which his nature demanded as the condition of its full activity, as a
+force, an intellectual force, in the world&mdash;in the special business of
+his life.  "Welcome the unforeseen," he says again, by way of a counsel
+of perfection in the matter of culture, "but give to [35] your life
+unity, and bring the unforeseen within the lines of your plan."  Bring,
+we should add, the Great Possibility at least within the lines of your
+plan&mdash;your plan of action or production; of morality; especially of
+your conceptions of religion. And still, Amiel too, be it remembered
+(we are not afraid to repeat it), has said some things in Pascal's vein
+not unworthy of Pascal.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And so we get only the Journal.  Watching in it, in the way we have
+suggested, the contention of those two men, those two minds in him, and
+observing how the one might have ascertained and corrected the
+shortcomings of the other, we certainly understand, and can sympathize
+with Amiel's despondency in the retrospect of a life which seemed to
+have been but imperfectly occupied.  But, then, how excellent a
+literary product, after all, the Journal is.  And already we have found
+that it improves also on second reading.  A book of "thoughts" should
+be a book that may be fairly dipped into, and yield good quotable
+sayings.  Here are some of its random offerings:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Look twice, if what you want is a just [36] conception; look once, if
+what you want is a sense of beauty."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It is not history which teaches conscience to be honest; it is the
+conscience which educates history.  Fact is corrupting&mdash;it is we who
+correct it by the persistence of our ideal."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"To do easily what is difficult for others is the mark of talent.  To
+do what is impossible for talent is the mark of genius."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Duty has the virtue of making us feel the reality of a positive world,
+while at the same time detaching us from it."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"As it is impossible to be outside God, the best is consciously to
+dwell in Him."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He also (the Son of Man), He above all, is the great Misunderstood,
+the least comprehended."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The pensée writer is to the philosopher what the dilettante is to the
+artist."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There are some, we know, who hold that genius cannot, in the nature of
+things, be "sterile"; that there are no "mute" Miltons, or the like.
+Well! genius, or only a very distinguished talent, the gift which Amiel
+nursed so jealously did come into evidence.  And the [37] reader, we
+hope, sees also already how well his English translator has done her
+work.  She may justly feel, as part at least of the reward of a labour
+which must have occupied much time, so many of the freshest hours of
+mind and spirit, that she has done something to help her author in the
+achievement of his, however discouraged still irrepressible, desire, by
+giving additional currency to a book which the best sort of readers
+will recognize as an excellent and certainly very versatile companion,
+not to be forgotten.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+17th March 1886
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap03"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+III.  BROWNING
+</H3>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+An Introduction to the Study of Browning. By Arthur Symons.  Cassells.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+[41] WHETHER it be true or not that Mr. Browning is justly chargeable
+with "obscurity"&mdash;with a difficulty of manner, that is, beyond the
+intrinsic difficulty of his matter&mdash;it is very probable that an
+Introduction to the study of his works, such as this of Mr. Symons,
+will add to the number of his readers.  Mr. Symons's opening essay on
+the general characteristics of Mr. Browning is a just and acceptable
+appreciation of his poetry as a whole, well worth reading, even at this
+late day.  We find in Mr. Symons the thoughtful and practised yet
+enthusiastic student in literature&mdash;in intellectual problems; always
+quiet and sane, praising Mr. Browning with tact, with a real refinement
+and grace; saying well many [42] things which every competent reader of
+the great poet must feel to be true; devoting to the subject he loves a
+critical gift so considerable as to make us wish for work from his
+hands of larger scope than this small volume. His book is, according to
+his intention, before all things a useful one.  Appreciating Mr.
+Browning fairly, as we think, in all his various efforts, his aim is to
+point his readers to the best, the indisputable, rather than to the
+dubious portions of his author's work.  Not content with his own
+excellent general criticism of Mr. Browning, he guides the reader to
+his works, or division of work, seriatim, making of each a distinct and
+special study, and giving a great deal of welcome information about the
+poems, the circumstances of their composition, and the like, with
+delightful quotations. Incidentally, his Introduction has the interest
+of a brief but effective selection from Mr. Browning's poems; and he
+has added an excellent biography.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Certainly we shall not quarrel with Mr. Symons for reckoning Mr.
+Browning, among English poets, second to Shakespeare alone&mdash;"He comes
+very near the gigantic total of [43] Shakespeare."  The quantity of his
+work?  Yes! that too, in spite of a considerable unevenness, is a sign
+of genius.  "So large, indeed, appear to be his natural endowments that
+we cannot feel as if even thirty volumes would have come near to
+exhausting them."  Imaginatively, indeed, Mr. Browning has been a
+multitude of persons; only (as Shakespeare's only untried style was the
+simple one) almost never simple ones; and certainly he has controlled
+them all to profoundly interesting artistic ends by his own powerful
+personality.  The world and all its action, as a show of thought, that
+is the scope of his work.  It makes him pre-eminently a modern poet&mdash;a
+poet of the self-pondering, perfectly educated, modern world, which,
+having come to the end of all direct and purely external experiences,
+must necessarily turn for its entertainment to the world within:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The men and women who live and move in that new world of his creation
+are as varied as life itself; they are kings and beggars, saints and
+lovers, great captains, poets, painters, musicians, priests and Popes,
+Jews, gipsies and dervishes, street-girls, princesses, dancers with the
+wicked [44] witchery of the daughter of Herodias, wives with the
+devotion of the wife of Brutus, joyous girls and malevolent
+grey-beards, statesmen, cavaliers, soldiers of humanity, tyrants and
+bigots, ancient sages and modern spiritualists, heretics, scholars,
+scoundrels, devotees, rabbis, persons of quality and men of low
+estate&mdash;men and women as multiform as nature or society has made them."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The individual, the personal, the concrete, as distinguished from, yet
+revealing in its fulness, the general, the universal&mdash;that is Mr.
+Browning's chosen subject-matter: "Every man is for him an epitome of
+the universe, a centre of creation."  It is always the particular soul,
+and the particular act or episode, as the flower of the particular
+soul&mdash;the act or episode by which its quality comes to the test&mdash;in
+which he interests us.  With him it is always "a drama of the interior,
+a tragedy or comedy of the soul, to see thereby how each soul becomes
+conscious of itself."  In the Preface to the later edition of Sordello,
+Mr. Browning himself told us that to him little else seems worth study
+except the development of a soul, the incidents, the story, of that.
+And, [45] in fact, the intellectual public generally agrees with him.
+It is because he has ministered with such marvellous vigour, and
+variety, and fine skill to this interest, that he is the most modern,
+to modern people the most important, of poets.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+So much for Mr. Browning's matter; for his manner, we hold Mr. Symons
+right in thinking him a master of all the arts of poetry.  "These
+extraordinary little poems," says Mr. Symons of "Johannes Agricola" and
+"Porphyria's Lover"&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Reveal not only an imagination of intense fire and heat, but an almost
+finished art&mdash;a power of conceiving subtle mental complexities with
+clearness and of expressing them in a picturesque form and in perfect
+lyric language.  Each poem renders a single mood, and renders it
+completely."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Well, after all, that is true of a large portion of Mr. Browning's
+work.  A curious, an erudite artist, certainly, he is to some extent an
+experimenter in rhyme or metre, often hazardous.  But in spite of the
+dramatic rudeness which is sometimes of the idiosyncrasy, the true and
+native colour of his multitudinous dramatis personae, or monologists,
+Mr. Symons is right in [46] laying emphasis on the grace, the finished
+skill, the music, native and ever ready to the poet himself&mdash;tender,
+manly, humorous, awe-stricken&mdash;when speaking in his own proper person.
+Music herself, the analysis of the musical soul, in the characteristic
+episodes of its development is a wholly new range of poetic subject in
+which Mr. Browning is simply unique. Mr. Symons tells us:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"When Mr. Browning was a mere boy, it is recorded that he debated
+within himself whether he should not become a painter or a musician as
+well as a poet.  Finally, though not, I believe, for a good many years,
+he decided in the negative.  But the latent qualities of painter and
+musician had developed themselves in his poetry, and much of his finest
+and very much of his most original verse is that which speaks the
+language of painter and musician as it had never before been spoken.
+No English poet before him has ever excelled his utterances on music,
+none has so much as rivalled his utterances on art.  'Abt Vogler' is
+the richest, deepest, fullest poem on music in the language.  It is not
+the theories of the poet, but the instincts of the [47] musician, that
+it speaks.  'Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha,' another special poem on
+music, is unparalleled for ingenuity of technical interpretation: 'A
+Toccata of Galuppi's' is as rare a rendering as can anywhere be found
+of the impressions and sensations caused by a musical piece; but 'Abt
+Vogler' is a very glimpse into the heaven where music is born."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is true that "when the head has to be exercised before the heart
+there is chilling of sympathy."  Of course, so intellectual a poet (and
+only the intellectual poet, as we have pointed out, can be adequate to
+modern demands) will have his difficulties.  They were a part of the
+poet's choice of vocation, and he was fully aware of them:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Mr. Browning might say, as his wife said in an early preface, I never
+mistook pleasure for the final cause of poetry, nor leisure for the
+hour of the poet&mdash;as indeed he has himself said, to much the same
+effect, in a letter printed many years ago: I never pretended to offer
+such literature as should be a substitute for a cigar or a game at
+dominoes to an idle man."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Moreover, while a writer who deals with [48] easy themes has no excuse
+if he is not pellucid to a glance, one who employs his intellect and
+imagination on high and hard questions has a right to demand a
+corresponding closeness of attention, and a right to say with Bishop
+Butler, in answer to a similar complaint: 'It must be acknowledged that
+some of the following discourses are very abstruse and difficult, or,
+if you please, obscure; but I must take leave to add that those alone
+are judges whether or no, and how far this is a fault, who are judges
+whether or no, and how far it might have been avoided&mdash;those only who
+will be at the trouble to understand what is here said, and to see how
+far the things here insisted upon, and not other things, might have
+been put in a plainer manner.'"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In Mr. Symons's opinion Pippa Passes is Mr. Browning's most perfect
+piece of work, for pregnancy of intellect, combined with faultless
+expression in a perfectly novel yet symmetrical outline: and he is very
+likely right.  He is certainly right in thinking Mas they formerly
+stood, Mr. Browning's most delightful volumes.  It is only to be
+regretted [49] that in the later collected edition of the works those
+two magical old volumes are broken up and scattered under other
+headings.  We think also that Mr. Symons in his high praise does no
+more than justice to The Ring and the Book.  The Ring and the Book is
+at once the largest and the greatest of Mr. Browning's works, the
+culmination of his dramatic method, and the turning-point more
+decisively than Dramatis Personae of his style.  Yet just here he
+rightly marks a change in Mr. Browning's manner:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Not merely the manner of presentment, the substance, and also the
+style and versification have undergone a change.  I might point to the
+profound intellectual depth of certain pieces as its characteristic,
+or, equally, to the traces here and there of an apparent carelessness
+of workmanship; or, yet again, to the new and very marked partiality
+for scenes and situations of English and modern rather than mediæval
+and foreign life."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Noble as much of Mr. Browning's later work is, full of intellect, alive
+with excellent passages (in the first volume of the Dramatic Idyls [50]
+perhaps more powerful than in any earlier work); notwithstanding all
+that, we think the change here indicated matter of regret.  After all,
+we have to conjure up ideal poets for ourselves out of those who stand
+in or behind the range of volumes on our book-shelves; and our ideal
+Browning would have for his entire structural type those two volumes of
+Men and Women with Pippa Passes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Certainly, it is a delightful world to which Mr. Browning has given us
+the key, and those volumes a delightful gift to our age-record of so
+much that is richest in the world of things, and men, and their
+works&mdash;all so much the richer by the great intellect, the great
+imagination, which has made the record, transmuted them into
+imperishable things of art:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'With souls should souls have place'&mdash;this, with Mr. Browning, is
+something more than a mere poetical conceit.  It is the condensed
+expression of an experience, a philosophy, and an art.  Like the lovers
+of his lyric, Mr. Browning has renounced the selfish serenities of
+wild-wood and dream-palace; he has fared up and down among men,
+listening to the music of humanity, [51] observing the acts of men, and
+he has sung what he has heard, and he has painted what he has seen.
+Will the work live? we ask; and we can answer only in his own words&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+  It lives,<BR>
+  If precious be the soul of man to man."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+9th November 1887
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap04"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+IV.  "ROBERT ELSMERE"
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+[55] THOSE who, in this bustling age, turn to fiction not merely for a
+little passing amusement, but for profit, for the higher sort of
+pleasure, will do well, we think (after a conscientious perusal on our
+own part) to bestow careful reading on Robert Elsmere.  A chef d'oeuvre
+of that kind of quiet evolution of character through circumstance,
+introduced into English literature by Miss Austen, and carried to
+perfection in France by George Sand (who is more to the point, because,
+like Mrs. Ward, she was not afraid to challenge novel-readers to an
+interest in religious questions), it abounds in sympathy with people as
+we find them, in aspiration towards something better&mdash;towards a certain
+ideal&mdash;in a refreshing sense of second thoughts everywhere.  The author
+clearly has developed a remarkable natural aptitude for literature by
+liberal reading and most patient care [56] in composition&mdash;composition
+in that narrower sense which is concerned with the building of a good
+sentence; as also in that wider sense, which ensures, in a work like
+this, with so many joints, so many currents of interest, a final unity
+of impression an the part of the reader, and easy transition by him
+from one to the other.  Well-used to works of fiction which tell all
+they have to tell in one thin volume, we have read Mrs. Ward's three
+volumes with unflagging readiness.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+For, in truth, that quiet method of evolution, which she pursues
+undismayed to the end, requires a certain lengthiness; and the reader's
+reward will be in a secure sense that he has been in intercourse with
+no mere flighty remnants, but with typical forms, of character, firmly
+and fully conceived.  We are persuaded that the author might have
+written a novel which should have been all shrewd impressions of
+society, or all humorous impressions of country life, or all quiet fun
+and genial caricature.  Actually she has chosen to combine something of
+each of these with a very sincerely felt religious interest; and who
+will deny that to trace the influence of religion upon human character
+is one of the [57] legitimate functions of the novel?  In truth, the
+modern "novel of character" needs some such interest, to lift it
+sufficiently above the humdrum of life; as men's horizons are enlarged
+by religion, of whatever type it may be&mdash;and we may say at once that
+the religious type which is dear to Mrs. Ward, though avowedly "broad,"
+is not really the broadest.  Having conceived her work thus, she has
+brought a rare instinct for probability and nature to the difficult
+task of combining this religious motive and all the learned thought it
+involves, with a very genuine interest in many  varieties of average
+mundane life.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We should say that the author's special ethical gift lay in a
+delicately intuitive sympathy, not, perhaps, with all phases of
+character, but certainly with the very varied class of persons
+represented in these volumes.  It may be congruous with this, perhaps,
+that her success should be more assured in dealing with the characters
+of women than with those of men.  The men who pass before us in her
+pages, though real and tangible and effective enough, seem,
+nevertheless, from time to time to reveal their joinings.  They are
+composite of many different men we seem to have [58] known, and fancy
+we could detach again from the ensemble and from each other.  And their
+goodness, when they are good, is&mdash;well! a little conventional; the kind
+of goodness that men themselves discount rather largely in their
+estimates of each other.  Robert himself is certainly worth knowing&mdash;a
+really attractive union of manliness and saintliness, of shrewd sense
+and unworldly aims, and withal with that kindness and pity the absence
+of which so often abates the actual value of those other gifts.  Mrs.
+Ward's literary power is sometimes seen at its best (it is a proof of
+her high cultivation of this power that so it should be) in the
+analysis of minor characters, both male and female. Richard Leyburn,
+deceased before the story begins, but warm in the memory of the few who
+had known him, above all of his great-souled daughter Catherine,
+strikes us, with his religious mysticism, as being in this way one of
+the best things in the book:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Poor Richard Leyburn!  Yet where had the defeat lain?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'Was he happy in his school life?' Robert asked gently.  'Was teaching
+what he liked?'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+[59] "'Oh! yes, only&mdash;' and then added hurriedly, as though drawn on in
+spite of herself by the grave sympathy of his look, 'I never knew
+anybody so good who thought himself of so little account.  He always
+believed that he had missed everything, wasted everything, and that
+anybody else would have made infinitely more out of his life.  He vas
+always blaming, scourging himself.  And all the time he was the
+noblest, purest, most devoted&mdash;'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"She stopped.  Her voice had passed beyond her control.  Elsmere was
+startled by the feeling she showed.  Evidently he had touched one of
+the few sore places in this pure heart.  It was as though her memory of
+her father had in it elements of almost intolerable pathos, as though
+the child's brooding love and loyalty were in perpetual protest even
+now after this lapse of years against the verdict which an
+over-scrupulous, despondent soul had pronounced upon itself.  Did she
+feel that he had gone uncomforted out of life&mdash;even by her&mdash;even by
+religion?  Was that the sting?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A little later she gives the record of his last hours:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P>
+[60] "'Catherine!  Life is harder, the narrower way narrower than ever.
+I die&mdash;and memory caught still the piteous long-drawn breath by which
+the voice was broken&mdash;'in much&mdash;much perplexity about many things.  You
+have a clear soul, an iron will.  Strengthen the others. Bring them
+safe to the day of account.'"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And then the smaller&mdash;some of them, ethically, very small&mdash;women; Lady
+Wynnstay, Mrs. Fleming, Mrs. Thornburgh; above all, Robert's delightful
+Irish mother, and Mrs. Darcy; how excellent they are! Mrs. Darcy we
+seem to have known, yet cannot have enough of, rejoiced to catch sight
+of her capital letter on the page, as we read on.  In truth, if a high
+and ideal purpose, really learned in the school of Wordsworth and among
+the Westmorland hills which Mrs. Ward describes so sympathetically,
+with fitting dignity and truth of style, has accompanied the author
+throughout; no less plain, perhaps more pleasing to some readers, is
+the quiet humour which never fails her, and tests, while it relieves,
+the sincerity of her more serious thinking:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"At last Mrs. Darcy fluttered off, only, however, to come hurrying back
+with little, short, [61] scudding steps, to implore them all to come to
+tea with her as soon as possible in the garden that was her special
+hobby, and in her last new summer-house.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'I build two or three every summer,' she said; 'now there are
+twenty-one!  Roger laughs at me,' and there was a momentary bitterness
+in the little eerie face; 'but how can one live without hobbies?
+That's one&mdash;then I've two more.  My album&mdash;oh, you will all write in my
+album, won't you?  When I was young&mdash;when I was Maid of Honour'&mdash;and
+she drew herself up slightly&mdash;'everybody had albums. Even the dear
+Queen herself!  I remember how she made M. Guizot write in it;
+something quite stupid, after all.  Those hobbies&mdash;the garden and the
+album&mdash;are quite harmless, aren't they?  They hurt nobody, do they?'
+Her voice dropped a little, with a pathetic expostulating intonation in
+it, as of one accustomed to be rebuked."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Mrs. Ward's women, as we have said, are more organic, sympathetic, and
+really creative, than her men, and make their vitality evident by
+becoming, quite naturally, the centres of very [62] life-like and
+dramatic groups of people, family or social; while her men are the very
+genii of isolation and division.  It is depressing to see so really
+noble a character as Catherine soured, as we feel, and lowered, as time
+goes on, from the happy resignation of the first volume (in which
+solemn, beautiful, and entire, and so very real, she is like a poem of
+Wordsworth) down to the mere passivity of the third volume, and the
+closing scene of Robert Elsmere's days, very exquisitely as this
+episode of unbelieving yet saintly biography has been conceived and
+executed.  Catherine certainly, for one, has no profit in the
+development of Robert's improved gospel.  The "stray sheep," we think,
+has by no means always the best of the argument, and her story is
+really a sadder, more testing one than his.  Though both alike, we
+admit it cordially, have a genuine sense of the eternal moral charm of
+"renunciation," something even of the thirst for martyrdom, for those
+wonderful, inaccessible, cold heights of the Imitation, eternal also in
+their aesthetic charm.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+These characters and situations, pleasant or profoundly interesting,
+which it is good to have [63] come across, are worked out, not in rapid
+sketches, nor by hazardous epigram, but more securely by patient
+analysis; and though we have said that Mrs. Ward is most successful in
+female portraiture, her own mind and culture have an unmistakable
+virility and grasp and scientific firmness.  This indispensable
+intellectual process, which will be relished by admirers of George
+Eliot, is relieved constantly by the sense of a charming landscape
+background, for the most part English.  Mrs. Ward has been a true
+disciple in the school of Wordsworth, and really undergone its
+influence.  Her Westmorland scenery is more than a mere background; its
+spiritual and, as it were, personal hold on persons, as understood by
+the great poet of the Lakes, is seen actually at work, in the
+formation, in the refining, of character.  It has been a stormy day:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Before him the great hollow of High Fell was just coming out from the
+white mists surging round it.  A shaft of sunlight lay across its upper
+end, and he caught a marvellous apparition of a sunlit valley hung in
+air, a pale strip of blue above it, a white thread of stream wavering
+[64] through it, and all around it and below it the rolling
+rain-clouds."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There is surely something of "natural magic" in that!  The wilder
+capacity of the mountains is brought out especially in a weird story of
+a haunted girl, an episode well illustrating the writer's more
+imaginative psychological power; for, in spite of its quiet general
+tenour, the book has its adroitly managed elements of
+sensation&mdash;witness the ghost, in which the average human susceptibility
+to supernatural terrors takes revenge on the sceptical Mr. Wendover,
+and the love-scene with Madame de Netteville, which, like those other
+exciting passages, really furthers the development of the proper
+ethical interests of the book.  The Oxford episodes strike us as being
+not the author's strongest work, as being comparatively conventional,
+coming, as they do, in a book whose predominant note is reality.  Yet
+her sympathetic command over, her power of evoking, the genius of
+places, is clearly shown in the touches by which she brings out the so
+well-known grey and green of college and garden&mdash;touches which bring
+the real Oxford to the mind's eye better than any elaborate description
+[65] &mdash;for the beauty of the place itself resides also in delicate
+touches.  The book passes indeed, successively, through distinct,
+broadly conceived phases of scenery, which, becoming veritable parts of
+its texture, take hold on the reader, as if in an actual sojourn in the
+places described.  Surrey&mdash;its genuine though almost suburban wildness,
+with the vicarage and the wonderful abode, above all, the ancient
+library of Mr. Wendover, all is admirably done, the landscape naturally
+counting for a good deal in the development of the profoundly
+meditative, country-loving souls of Mrs. Ward's favourite characters.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Well!  Mrs. Ward has chosen to use all these varied gifts and
+accomplishments for a certain purpose.  Briefly, Robert Elsmere, a
+priest of the Anglican Church, marries a very religious woman; there is
+the perfection of "mutual love"; at length he has doubts about
+"historic Christianity"; he gives up his orders; carries his learning,
+his fine intellect, his goodness, nay, his saintliness, into a kind of
+Unitarianism; the wife becomes more intolerant than ever; there is a
+long and faithful effort on both sides, eventually successful, on the
+part of these mentally [66] divided people, to hold together; ending
+with the hero's death, the genuine piety and resignation of which is
+the crowning touch in the author's able, learned, and thoroughly
+sincere apology for Robert Elsmere's position.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+For good or evil, the sort of doubts which troubled Robert Elsmere are
+no novelty in literature, and we think the main issue of the "religious
+question" is not precisely where Mrs. Ward supposes&mdash;that it has
+advanced, in more senses than one, beyond the point raised by Renan's
+Vie de Jésus.  Of course, a man such as Robert Elsmere came to be ought
+not to be a clergyman of the Anglican Church.  The priest is still, and
+will, we think, remain, one of the necessary types of humanity; and he
+is untrue to his type, unless, with whatever inevitable doubts in this
+doubting age, he feels, on the whole, the preponderance in it of those
+influences which make for faith.  It is his triumph to achieve as much
+faith as possible in an age of negation.  Doubtless, it is part of the
+ideal of the Anglican Church that, under certain safeguards, it should
+find room for latitudinarians even among its clergy.  Still, with
+these, as [67] with all other genuine priests, it is the positive not
+the negative result that justifies the position.  We have little
+patience with those liberal clergy who dwell on nothing else than the
+difficulties of faith and the propriety of concession to the opposite
+force.  Yes! Robert Elsmere was certainly right in ceasing to be a
+clergyman.  But it strikes us as a blot on his philosophical
+pretensions that he should have been both so late in perceiving the
+difficulty, and then so sudden and trenchant in dealing with so great
+and complex a question.  Had he possessed a perfectly philosophic or
+scientific temper he would have hesitated.  This is not the place to
+discuss in detail the theological position very ably and seriously
+argued by Mrs. Ward.  All we can say is that, one by one, Elsmere's
+objections may be met by considerations of the same genus, and not less
+equal weight, relatively to a world so obscure, in its origin and
+issues, as that in which we live.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Robert Elsmere was a type of a large class of minds which cannot be
+sure that the sacred story is true.  It is philosophical, doubtless,
+and a duty to the intellect to recognize our doubts, [68] to locate
+them, perhaps to give them practical effect.  It may be also a moral
+duty to do this.  But then there is also a large class of minds which
+cannot be sure it is false&mdash;minds of very various degrees of
+conscientiousness and intellectual power, up to the highest.  They will
+think those who are quite sure it is false unphilosophical through lack
+of doubt.  For their part, they make allowance in their scheme of life
+for a great possibility, and with some of them that bare concession of
+possibility (the subject of it being what it is) becomes the most
+important fact in the world.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The recognition of it straightway opens wide the door to hope and love;
+and such persons are, as we fancy they always will be, the nucleus of a
+Church.  Their particular phase of doubt, of philosophic uncertainty,
+has been the secret of millions of good Christians, multitudes of
+worthy priests.  They knit themselves to believers, in various degrees,
+of all ages.  As against the purely negative action of the scientific
+spirit, the high-pitched Grey, the theistic Elsmere, the "ritualistic
+priest," the quaint Methodist Fleming, both so admirably sketched,
+present [69] perhaps no unconquerable differences.  The question of the
+day is not between one and another of these, but in another sort of
+opposition, well defined by Mrs. Ward herself, between&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Two estimates of life&mdash;the estimate which is the offspring of the
+scientific spirit, and which is for ever making the visible world
+fairer and more desirable in mortal eyes; and the estimate of Saint
+Augustine."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+To us, the belief in God, in goodness at all, in the story of
+Bethlehem, does not rest on evidence so diverse in character and force
+as Mrs. Ward supposes.  At his death Elsmere has started what to us
+would be a most unattractive place of worship, where he preaches an
+admirable sermon on the purely human aspect of the life of Christ.  But
+we think there would be very few such sermons in the new church or
+chapel, for the interest of that life could hardly be very varied, when
+all such sayings as that "though He was rich, for our sakes He became
+poor" have ceased to be applicable to it.  It is the infinite nature of
+Christ which has led to such diversities of genius in preaching as St.
+Francis, and Taylor, and Wesley.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+[70] And after all we fear we have been unjust to Mrs. Ward's work. If
+so, we should read once more, and advise our readers to read, the
+profoundly thought and delicately felt chapter&mdash;chapter forty-three in
+her third volume&mdash;in which she describes the final spiritual reunion,
+on a basis of honestly diverse opinion, of the husband and wife.  Her
+view, we think, could hardly have been presented more attractively.
+For ourselves we can only thank her for pleasure and profit in the
+reading of her book, which has refreshed actually the first and deepest
+springs of feeling, while it has charmed the literary sense.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+28th March 1888
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap05"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+V.  THEIR MAJESTIES' SERVANTS
+</H3>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Annals of the English Stage, from Thomas Betterton to Edmund Kean. By
+Dr. Doran, F.S.A.  Edited and revised by Robert W. Lowe.  John C. Nimmo.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+[73] THOSE who care for the history of the drama as a branch of
+literature, or for the history of that general development of human
+manners of which the stage has been always an element and a very lively
+measure or index, will be grateful to Mr. Lowe for this revised and
+charmingly illustrated edition of Dr. Doran's pleasant old book.  Three
+hundred years and more of a singularly varied and vivacious sort of
+history!&mdash;it was a bold thing to undertake; and Dr. Doran did his work
+well&mdash;did it with adequate "love."  These Annals of the English Stage,
+from Thomas Betterton to Edmund [74] Kean, are full of the colours of
+life in their most emphatic and motley contrasts, as is natural in
+proportion as the stage itself concentrates and artificially
+intensifies the character and conditions of ordinary life.  The long
+story of "Their Majesties' Servants," treated thus, becomes from age to
+age an agreeable addition to those personal memoirs&mdash;Evelyn's, and the
+like&mdash;which bring the influence and charm of a visible countenance to
+the dry tenour of ordinary history, and the critic's work upon it
+naturally becomes, in the first place, a mere gathering of some of the
+flowers which lie so abundantly scattered here and there.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A history of the English stage must necessarily be in part a history of
+one of the most delightful of subjects&mdash;old London, of which from time
+to time we catch extraordinary glimpses in Dr. Doran's pages. From 1682
+to 1695, as if the Restoration had not come, there was but one theatre
+in London.  In Charles I.'s time Shoreditch was the dramatic quarter of
+London par excellence.&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The popular taste was not only there directed towards the stage, but
+it was a district [75] wherein many actors dwelt, and consequently
+died.  The baptismal register of St.  Leonard's, Shoreditch, contains
+Christian names which appear to have been chosen with reference to the
+heroines of Shakespeare; and the record of burials bears the name of
+many an old actor of mark whose remains now lie within the churchyard."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Earlier and later, the Surrey side of the Thames was the favourite
+locality for play-houses.  The Globe was there, and the Bear-garden,
+represented in Mr. Lowe's luxurious new edition by delightful woodcuts.
+For this new edition adds to the original merits of the work the very
+substantial charm of abundant illustrations, first-rate in subject and
+execution, and of three kinds&mdash;copper-plate likenesses of actors and
+other personages connected with theatrical history; a series of
+delicate, picturesque, highly detailed woodcuts of theatrical
+topography, chiefly the little old theatres; and, by way of tail-pieces
+to the chapters, a second series of woodcuts of a vigour and reality of
+information, within very limited compass, which make one think of
+Callot and the German [76] "little masters," depicting Garrick and
+other famous actors in their favourite scenes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the vignettes of the Bear-garden and the Swan Theatre, for instance,
+the artist has managed to throw over his minute plate a wonderful air
+of pleasantness, a light which, though very delicate, is very
+theatrical.  The river and its tiny craft, the little gabled houses of
+the neighbourhood, with a garden or two dropped in, tell delightfully
+in the general effect.  They are worthy to rank with Cruikshank's
+illustrations of Jack Sheppard and The Tower of London, as mementoes of
+the little old smokeless London before the century of Johnson, though
+that, too, as Dr. Doran bears witness, knew what fogs could be.  Then
+there is the Fortune Theatre near Cripplegate, and, most charming of
+all, two views&mdash;street and river fronts&mdash;the Duke's Theatre, Dorset
+Garden, in Fleet Street, designed by Wren, decorated by
+Gibbons&mdash;graceful, naïve, dainty, like the work of a very refined
+Palladio, working minutely, perhaps more delicately than at Vicenza, in
+the already crowded city on the Thames side.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+[77] The portraits of actors and other theatrical celebrities range
+from Elizabeth, from the melodramatic costumes and faces of the
+contemporaries of Shakespeare, to the conventional costumes, the rotund
+expression, of the age of the Georges, masking a power of imaginative
+impersonation probably unknown in Shakespeare's day. Edward Burbage,
+like Shakespeare's own portrait, is, we venture to think, a trifle
+stolid.  Field&mdash;Nathaniel Field, author of The Fatal Dowry, and an
+actor of reputation&mdash;in his singular costume, and with a face of
+perhaps not quite reassuring subtlety, might pass for the original of
+those Italian, or Italianized, voluptuaries in sin which pleased the
+fancy of Shakespeare's age.  Mixed up with many striking, thoroughly
+dramatic physiognomies, it must be confessed that some of these
+portraits scarcely help at all to explain the power of the players to
+whom they belonged.  That, perhaps, is what we might naturally expect;
+the more, in proportion as the dramatic art is a matter in which many
+very subtle and indirect channels to men's sympathy are called into
+play.  Edward Alleyn, from the portrait preserved at [78] his noble
+foundation at Dulwich, like a fine Holbein, figures, in blent strength
+and delicacy, as a genial, or perhaps jovial, soul, finding time for
+sentiment,&mdash;Prynne (included, we suppose, in this company, like the
+skull at the feast) as a likable if somewhat melancholic young man;
+while Garrick and his wife playing cards, after Zoffany, present a pair
+of just very nice young people.  On the other hand, the tail-pieces,
+chiefly devoted to Garrick, prove what a wonderful natural variety
+there was in Garrick's soul, and are well worth comparative study.
+Noticeable again, among the whole-plate portraits, is the thoroughly
+reassuring countenance of Steele, the singularly fine heads of John,
+Charles, and Fanny Kemble, while the certainly plain, pinched
+countenance of William Davenant reminds one of Charles Kean, and might
+well have lighted up, as did his, when the soul came into it, into
+power and charm, as the speaking eyes assure us even in its repose.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Renaissance inherited the old foolish prejudice of Roman times,
+when, although the writers of plays were the intimate friends of
+emperors, the actors were thought infamous. [79] Still, on the whole,
+actors fared better in England than in Romanist France, where Molière
+was buried with less ceremony than a favourite dog.  Very different was
+the treatment of the eminent Mrs. Oldfield, who died in 1730:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Poor 'Narcissa' after death (says Walpole) was attired in a Holland
+nightdress, with tucker and double ruffles of Brunswick lace, of which
+latter material she also wore a headdress, and a pair of new kid
+gloves.  In this dress the deceased actress received such honour as
+actress never received before, nor has ever received since.  The lady
+lay in state in the Jerusalem Chamber.  Had she been really a queen the
+public could not have thronged more eagerly to the spectacle; and after
+the lying in state there was a funeral of as much ceremony as has been
+observed at the obsequies of many a queen. There were anthems and
+prayers and a sermon; and Dr. Parker, who officiated, remarked, when
+all was over, to a few particular friends, and with some equivocation,
+as it seems to me, that he  'buried her very willingly, and with much
+satisfaction.'"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Yet even in England players had need of [80] powerful protectors.
+"Wit," said Chesterfield, opposing an unjust licensing Act, "Wit, my
+lords! is the property of those who have it, and too often the only
+property they have to depend on."  Wit, indeed, with the other gifts
+that make good company, has largely gone with theatrical talents, too
+often little to the benefit of the gifted persons.  Theatrical society,
+rather than the theatre, has made the lives of actors as we see them in
+these volumes, in many cases so tragic, even sordidly tragic.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+If misery and madness abound in stage life, so also does an indomitable
+cheerfulness, always at least a cheerful countenance. Dr. Doran's book
+abounds, as might be expected, with admirable impromptus and the like;
+one might collect a large posy of them. Foote, seeing a sweep on a
+blood-horse, remarked, "There goes Warburton on Shakespeare!"  When he
+heard that the Rockingham Cabinet was fatigued to death and at its
+wits' end, he exclaimed that it could not have been the length of the
+journey which had tired it. Again, when Lord Carmarthen, at a party,
+told him his handkerchief was hanging from his pocket, Foote replaced
+[81] it with a "Thank you, my lord; you know the company better than
+I."  Jevon, a century earlier, was in the habit of taking great
+liberties with authors and audience.  He made Settle half mad and the
+house ecstatic when having, as Lycurgus, Prince of China, to "fall on
+his sword," he placed it flat on the stage, and, falling over it,
+"died," according to the direction of the acting copy.  Quaint enough,
+but certainly no instance of anybody's wit, is the account of how a
+French translation of a play of Vanbrugh&mdash;not architect of Blenheim
+only, but accomplished in many other ways&mdash;appeared at the Odéon, in
+1862, with all fitting raptures, as a posthumous work of Voltaire
+recently discovered.  The Voltairean wit vas found as "delightful in
+this as in the last century."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Of Shakespeare on the stage Dr. Doran has a hundred curious things to
+note:&mdash;that Richard the Third, for instance, who has retained a so
+unflattering possession of the stage, was its "first practically useful
+patron."  We see Queen Elizabeth full of misgiving at a difficult time
+at the popularity of Richard the Second:&mdash;"The deposition and death of
+King Richard the [82] Second."  "Tongues whisper to the Queen that this
+play is part of a great plot to teach her subjects how to murder
+kings."  It is perhaps not generally known that Charles Shakespeare,
+William's brother, survived till the Restoration.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Oldys says, à propos of the restoration of the stage at that time:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The actors were greedily inquisitive into every little circumstance,
+more especially in Shakespeare's dramatic character, which his brother
+could relate of him.  But he, it seems, was so stricken in years, and
+possibly his memory so weakened by infirmities, that he could give them
+but little light into their inquiries; and all that could be
+recollected from him of his brother Will in that station was the faint,
+general, and almost lost ideas he had of having once seen him act a
+part in one of his own comedies, wherein being present to personate a
+decrepit old man, he wore a long beard, and appeared so weak and
+drooping and unable to walk, that he was forced to be supported and
+carried by another person to a table, at which he was seated among some
+company who were eating, and one of them sang a song."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+[83] This description applies to old Adam in As You Like It.  Many are
+the evidences that Shakespeare's reputation had from time to time a
+struggle to maintain itself.  James Howard, in Pepys's day&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Belonged to the faction which affected to believe that there was no
+popular love for Shakespeare, to render whom palatable he arranged
+Romeo and Juliet for the stage, with a double dénouement&mdash;one serious,
+the other hilarious.  If your heart were too sensitive to bear the
+deaths of the loving pair, you had only to go on the succeeding
+afternoon to see them wedded, and set upon the way of a well-assured
+domestic felicity."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In 1678 Rymer asserted (was it undesignedly a true testimony to the
+acting of his time?) that Shakespeare had depicted Brutus and Cassius
+as "Jack Puddins."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Here, as in many another detail, we are reminded, of course, of the
+difference between our own and past times in mimic as in real life. For
+Prynne one of the great horrors of the stage was the introduction of
+actresses from France by Henrietta Maria, to take the place of young
+[84] male actors of whom Dr. Doran has some interesting notices.  Who
+the lady was who first trod the stage as a professional actress is not
+known, but her part was Desdemona.  And yet it was long after that&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Edward Kynaston died (in 1712).  He lies buried in the churchyard of
+St. Paul's, Covent Garden.  If not the greatest actor of his day,
+Kynaston was the greatest of the 'boy-actresses.'  So exalted was his
+reputation 'that,' says Downes, 'it has since been disputable among the
+judicious, whether any woman that succeeded him so sensibly touched the
+audience as he.'"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In Charles II.'s time it was a custom to return the price of admission
+to all persons who left the theatre before the close of the first act.
+Consequently, many shabby persons were wont to force their way in
+without paying, on the plea that they did not intend to remain beyond
+the time limited.  Hence much noisy contention, to the great discomfort
+even of Royalty.  The brawling, drinking habits of the time were even
+more discomforting.  An angry word, passed one April evening of 1682
+between the son of Sir Edward Dering and a hot-blooded young [85]
+Welshman, led to recrimination and sword-drawing. The two young fellows
+not having elbow-room in the pit, clambered on to the stage, and fought
+there, to the greater comfort of the audience, and with a more excited
+fury on the part of the combatants. The mingling of the public with the
+players was a practice which so annoyed the haughty French actor,
+Baron, that to suggest to the audience the absurdity of it, he would
+turn his back on them for a whole act, and play to the audience on the
+stage.  Sometimes the noise was so loud that an actor's voice would
+scarcely be heard.  It was about 1710 that the word encore was
+introduced at the operatic performances in the Haymarket, and very much
+objected to by plain-going Englishmen.  It was also the custom of some
+who desired the repetition of a song to cry Altra volta!  Altra volta!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Even indirectly the history of the stage illustrates life, and affords
+many unexpected lights on historical characters.  Oliver Cromwell,
+though he despised the stage, could condescend to laugh at, and with,
+men of less dignity than actors.  Buffoonery was not entirely expelled
+[86] from his otherwise grave court.  Oxford and Drury Lane itself
+dispute the dignity of giving birth to Nell Gwynne with Hereford, where
+a mean house is still pointed out as the first home of this mother of a
+line of dukes, whose great-grandson was to occupy the neighbouring
+palace as Bishop of Hereford for forty years. At her burial in St.
+Martin's-in-the-Fields, Archbishop Tenison preached the sermon.  When
+this was subsequently made the ground of exposing him to the reproof of
+Queen Mary, she remarked that the good doctor, no doubt, had said
+nothing but what the facts authorized.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Who should act genteel comedy perfectly," asks Walpole, "but people of
+fashion, that have sense?"  And, in truth, the seventeenth century gave
+many ladies to the stage, Mrs. Barry being the most famous of them.
+Like many eminent actors, she was famous for the way in which she would
+utter one single expression in a play.  Dr. Doran gives some curious
+instances from later actors.  "What mean my grieving subjects?" uttered
+in the character of Queen Elizabeth, was invested by her with such
+emphatic grace and dignity as to call up murmurs of approbation [87]
+which swelled into thunders of applause.  Her noble head is here
+engraved after Kneller, like the head of a magnificent visionary man.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Should we really care for the greatest actors of the past could we have
+them before us?  Should we find them too different from our accent of
+thought, of feeling, of speech, in a thousand minute particulars which
+are of the essence of all three?  Dr. Doran's long and interesting
+records of the triumphs of Garrick, and other less familiar, but in
+their day hardly less astonishing, players, do not relieve one of the
+doubt.  Garrick himself, as sometimes happens with people who have been
+the subject of much anecdote and other conversation, here as elsewhere,
+bears no very distinct figure.  One hardly sees the wood for the trees.
+On the other hand, the account of Betterton, "perhaps the greatest of
+English actors," is delightfully fresh.  That intimate friend of
+Dryden, Tillatson, Pope, who executed a copy of the actor's portrait by
+Kneller which is still extant, was worthy of their friendship; his
+career brings out the best elements in stage life.  The stage in these
+volumes presents itself indeed not merely [88] as a mirror of life, but
+as an illustration of the utmost intensity of life, in the fortunes and
+characters of the players.  Ups and downs, generosity, dark fates, the
+most delicate goodness, have nowhere been more prominent than in the
+private existence of those devoted to the public mimicry of men and
+women.  Contact with the stage, almost throughout its history, presents
+itself as a kind of touchstone, to bring out the bizarrerie, the
+theatrical tricks and contrasts, of the actual world.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+27th June 1888
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap06"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+VI.  WORDSWORTH
+</H3>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth.  With an
+Introduction by John Morley.  Macmillans.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+The Recluse.  By William Wordsworth.  Macmillans.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Selections from Wordsworth.  By William Knight and other Members of the
+Wordsworth Society.  With Preface and Notes.  Kegan Paul.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+[91] THE appearance, so close to each other, of Professor Knight's
+careful and elaborately annotated Selections from William Wordsworth,
+of Messrs. Macmillan's collected edition of the poet's works, with the
+first book of The Recluse, now published for the first time, and of an
+excellent introductory essay by Mr. John Morley, forms a welcome proof
+that the study of the [92] most philosophic of English poets is
+increasing among us.  Surely nothing could be better, hardly anything
+more directly fitted than careful reading of Wordsworth, to counter the
+faults and offences of our busy generation, in regard both to thought
+and taste, and to remind people, amid the enormous expansion, at the
+present time, of all that is material and mechanical in life, of the
+essential value, the permanent ends, of life itself.  In the collected
+edition the poems are printed with the dates, so far as can be
+ascertained, in the order of their composition&mdash;an arrangement which
+has indisputable recommendations for the student of Wordsworth's
+genius; though the former method of distributing his work into large
+groups of subject had its value, as throwing light upon his poetic
+motives, and more especially as coming from himself.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In his introductory essay Mr. Morley has dwelt strongly on the
+circumstance of Wordsworth's remarkable personal happiness, as having
+had much to do with the physiognomy of his poetic creation&mdash;a calm,
+irresistible, well-being&mdash;almost mystic in character, and yet doubtless
+[93] connected with physical conditions.  Long ago De Quincey noted it
+as a strongly determinant fact in Wordsworth's literary career,
+pointing, at the same time, to his remarkable good luck also, on the
+material side of life.  The poet's own flawless temperament, his fine
+mountain atmosphere of mind (so to express it), had no doubt a good
+deal to do with that.  What a store of good fortune, what a goodly
+contribution to happiness, in the very best sense of that term, is
+really involved in a cheerful, grateful, physical temperament;
+especially, in the case of a poet&mdash;a great poet&mdash;who will, of course,
+have to face the appropriate trials of a great poet.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Coleridge and other English critics at the beginning of the present
+century had a great deal to say concerning a psychological distinction
+of much importance (as it appeared to them) between the fancy and the
+imagination.  Stripped of a great deal of somewhat obscure metaphysical
+theory, this distinction reduced itself to the certainly vital one,
+with which all true criticism more or less directly has to do, between
+the lower and higher degrees of intensity in the [94] poet's conception
+of his subject, and his concentration of himself upon his work.  It was
+Wordsworth who made most of this distinction, assuming it as the basis
+for the final classification (abandoned, as we said, in the new
+edition) of his poetical writings. And nowhere is the distinction more
+realizable than in Wordsworth's own work.  For though what may be
+called professed Wordsworthians, including Matthew Arnold, found a
+value in all that remains of him&mdash;could read anything he wrote, "even
+the 'Thanksgiving Ode,'&mdash;everything, I think, except 'Vaudracour and
+Julia,'"&mdash;yet still the decisiveness of such selections as those made
+by Arnold himself, and now by Professor Knight, hint at a certain very
+obvious difference of level in his poetic work.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This perpetual suggestion of an absolute duality between his lower and
+higher moods, and the poetic work produced in them, stimulating the
+reader to look below the immediate surface of his poetry, makes the
+study of Wordsworth an excellent exercise for the training of those
+mental powers in us, which partake both of thought and imagination.  It
+begets in those [95] who fall in with him at the right moment of their
+spiritual development, a habit of reading between the lines, a faith in
+the effect of concentration and collectedness of mind on the right
+appreciation of poetry, the expectation that what is really worth
+having in the poetic order will involve, on their part, a certain
+discipline of the temper not less than of the intellect.  Wordsworth
+meets them with the assurance that he has much to give them, and of a
+very peculiar kind, if they will follow a certain difficult way, and
+seems to possess the secret of some special mental illumination.  To
+follow that way is an initiation, by which they will become able to
+distinguish, in art, speech, feeling, manners, in men and life
+generally, what is genuine, animated, and expressive from what is only
+conventional and derivative, and therefore inexpressive.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A very intimate sense of the expressiveness of outward things, which
+ponders, listens, penetrates, where the earlier, less developed
+consciousness passed lightly by, is an important element in the general
+temper of our modern poetry.  Critics of literary history have again
+[96] and again remarked upon it; it is a characteristic which reveals
+itself in many different forms, but is strongest and most sympathetic
+in what is strongest and most serious in modern literature; it is
+exemplified by writers as unlike Wordsworth as the French romanticist
+poets.  As a curious chapter in the history of the human mind, its
+growth might be traced from Rousseau and St. Pierre to Chateaubriand,
+from Chateaubriand to Victor Hugo; it has no doubt some obscure
+relationship to those pantheistic theories which have greatly occupied
+people's minds in many modern readings of philosophy; it makes as much
+difference between the modern and the earlier landscape art as there is
+between the roughly outlined masks of a Byzantine mosaic and a portrait
+by Reynolds or Romney.  Of this new landscape sense the poetry of
+Wordsworth is the elementary and central exposition; he is more
+exclusively occupied with its development than any other poet.
+Wordsworth's own character, as we have already observed, was dominated
+by a certain contentment, a sort of naturally religious placidity, not
+often found in union with a poetic sensibility so [97] active as his;
+and this gentle sense of well-being was favourable to the quiet,
+habitual observation of the inanimate, or imperfectly animate, world.
+His life of eighty placid years was almost without what, with most
+human beings, count for incidents.  His flight from the active world,
+so genially celebrated in this newly published poem of The Recluse; his
+flight to the Vale of Grasmere, like that of some pious youth to the
+Chartreuse, is the most marked event of his existence.  His life's
+changes are almost entirely inward ones; it falls into broad,
+untroubled, perhaps somewhat monotonous, spaces; his biographers have
+very little to tell.  What it really most resembles, different as its
+superficies may look, is the career of those early mediaeval religious
+artists, who, precisely because their souls swarmed with heavenly
+visions, passed their fifty or sixty years in tranquil, systematic
+industry, seemingly with no thoughts beyond it.  This placid life
+developed in Wordsworth, to an extraordinary degree, an innate
+sensibility to natural sights and sounds&mdash;the flower and its shadow on
+the stone, the cuckoo and its echo.  The poem of [98] "Resolution and
+Independence" is a storehouse of such records; for its fulness of
+lovely imagery it may be compared to Keats's "Saint Agnes' Eve."  To
+read one of his greater pastoral poems for the first time is like a day
+spent in a new country; the memory is crowded for a while with its
+precise and vivid incidents:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+  The pliant harebell swinging in the breeze,<BR>
+  On some grey rock:<BR>
+  The single sheep, and the one blasted tree,<BR>
+  And the bleak music from that old stone wall:&mdash;<BR>
+  In the meadows and the lower ground,<BR>
+  Was all the sweetness of a common dawn:&mdash;<BR>
+  And that green corn all day is rustling in thine ears!<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Clear and delicate at once as he is in the outlining of visible
+imagery, he is more finely scrupulous still in the noting of sounds; he
+conceives of noble sound as even moulding the human countenance to
+nobler types, and as something actually "profaned" by visible form or
+colour.  He has a power likewise of realizing and conveying to the
+consciousness of his reader abstract and elementary impressions,
+silence, darkness, absolute motionlessness, or, again, the whole
+complex sentiment of a particular place, the abstract expression of
+desolation in the long [99] white road, of peacefulness in a particular
+folding of the hills.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That sense of a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but a
+rhetorical artifice, was, then, in Wordsworth the assertion of what was
+for him almost literal fact.  To him every natural object seemed to
+possess something of moral or spiritual life, to be really capable of a
+companionship with man, full of fine intimacies.  An emanation, a
+particular spirit, belonged not to the moving leaves or water only, but
+to the distant peak arising suddenly, by some change of perspective,
+above the nearer horizon of the hills, to the passing space of light
+across the plain, to the lichened Druidic stone even, for a certain
+weird fellowship in it with the moods of men.  That he awakened "a sort
+of thought in sense" is Shelley's just estimate of this element in
+Wordsworth's poetry.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was through nature, ennobled in this way by the semblance of passion
+and thought, that the poet approached the spectacle of human life.  For
+him, indeed, human life is, in the first instance, only an additional,
+and as it were incidental grace, upon this expressive landscape.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+[100] When he thought of men and women, it was of men and women as in
+the presence and under the influence of those effective natural
+objects, and linked to them by many associations.  Such influences have
+sometimes seemed to belittle those who are the subject of them, at the
+least to be likely to narrow the range of their sympathies. To
+Wordsworth, on the contrary, they seemed directly to dignify human
+nature, as tending to tranquillize it.  He raises physical nature to
+the level of human thought, giving it thereby a mystic power and
+expression; he subdues man to the level of nature, but gives him
+therewith a certain breadth and vastness and solemnity.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Religious sentiment, consecrating the natural affections and rights of
+the human heart, above all that pitiful care and awe for the perishing
+human clay of which relic-worship is but the corruption, has always had
+much to do with localities, with the thoughts which attach themselves
+to definite scenes and places.  And what is true of it everywhere is
+truest in those secluded valleys, where one generation after another
+maintains the same abiding-place; and [101] it was on this side that
+Wordsworth apprehended religion most strongly.  Having so much to do
+with the recognition of local sanctities, the habit of connecting the
+very trees and stones of a particular spot of earth with the great
+events of life, till the low walls, the green mounds, the
+half-obliterated epitaphs, seemed full of oracular voices, even the
+religion of those people of the dales appeared but as another link
+between them and the solemn imageries of the natural world.  And,
+again, this too tranquillized them, by bringing them under the rule of
+traditional, narrowly localized observances.  "Grave livers," they
+seemed to him under this aspect, of stately speech, and something of
+that natural dignity of manners which underlies the highest courtesy.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And, seeing man thus as a part of nature, elevated and solemnized in
+proportion as his daily life and occupations brought him into
+companionship with permanent natural objects, he was able to appreciate
+passion in the lowly.  He chooses to depict people from humble life,
+because, being nearer to nature than others, they are on the whole more
+impassioned, certainly [102] more direct in their expression of
+passion, than other men; it is for this direct expression of passion
+that he values their humble words.  In much that he said in exaltation
+of rural life he was but pleading indirectly for that sincerity, that
+perfect fidelity to one's own inward presentations, to the precise
+features of the picture within, without which any profound poetry is
+impossible.  It was not for their tameness, but for their impassioned
+sincerity, that he chose incidents and situations from common life,
+"related in a selection of language really used by men."  He constantly
+endeavours to bring his language nearer to the real language of men;
+but it is to the real language of men, not on the dead level of their
+ordinary intercourse, but in certain select moments of vivid sensation,
+when this language is winnowed and ennobled by sentiment.  There are
+poets who have chosen rural life for their subject for the sake of its
+passionless repose; and there are times when Wordsworth himself extols
+the mere calm and dispassionate survey of things as the highest aim of
+poetical culture.  But it was not for such passionless calm that he
+preferred the scenes of [103] pastoral life; and the meditative poet,
+sheltering himself from the agitations of the outward world, is in
+reality only clearing the scene for the exhibition of great emotions,
+and what he values most is the almost elementary expression of
+elementary feelings.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In Wordsworth's prefatory advertisement to the first edition of The
+Prelude, published in 1850, it is stated that that work was intended to
+be introductory to The Recluse: and that The Recluse, if completed,
+would have consisted of three parts.  The second part is The Excursion.
+The third part was only planned; but the first book of the first part
+was left in manuscript by Wordsworth&mdash;though in manuscript, it is said,
+in no great condition of forwardness for the printers.  This book, now
+for the first time printed in extenso (a very noble passage from it
+found place in that prose advertisement to The Excursion), is the great
+novelty of this latest edition of Wordsworth's poetic works.  It was
+well worth adding to the poet's great bequest to English literature.
+The true student of his work, who has formulated for himself what he
+supposes to be the leading characteristics [104] of Wordsworth's
+genius, will feel, we think, a lively interest in putting them to test
+by the many and various striking passages in what is there presented
+for the first time.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+17th February 1889
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap07"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+VII.  MR. GOSSE'S POEMS
+</H3>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+On Viol and Flute.  By Edmund Gosse.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+[107] PERHAPS no age of literature, certainly no age of literature in
+England, has been so rich as ours in excellent secondary poetry; and it
+is with our poetry (in a measure) as with our architecture, constrained
+by the nature of the case to be imitative.  Our generation, quite
+reasonably, is not very proud of its architectural creations; confesses
+that it knows too much&mdash;knows, but cannot do. And yet we could name
+certain modern churches in London, for instance, to which posterity may
+well look back puzzled.&mdash;Could these exquisitely pondered buildings
+have been indeed works of the nineteenth century?  Were they not the
+subtlest creations of the age in which Gothic art was spontaneous?  In
+truth, we have had instances of workmen, who, through long, large,
+[108] devoted study of the handiwork of the past, have done the thing
+better, with a more fully enlightened consciousness, with full
+intelligence of what those early workmen only guessed at.  And
+something like this is true of some of our best secondary poetry.  It
+is the least that is true&mdash;the least that can fairly be said in praise
+of the poetic work of Mr. Edmund Gosse.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Of course there can be no exact parallel between arts so different as
+architecture and poetic composition: But certainly in the poetry of our
+day also, though it has been in some instances powerfully initiative
+and original, there is great scholarship, a large comparative
+acquaintance with the poetic methods of earlier workmen, and a very
+subtle intelligence of their charm.  Of that fine scholarship in this
+matter there is no truer example than Mr. Gosse. It is manifested
+especially in the even finish of his varied work, in the equality of
+his level&mdash;a high level&mdash;in species of composition so varied as the
+three specimens which follow.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Far away, in late spring, "by the sea in the south," the swallows are
+still lingering around "white Algiers."  In Mr. Gosse's "Return of
+[109] the Swallows," the northern birds&mdash;lark and thrush&mdash;have long
+been calling to them:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+  And something awoke in the slumbering heart<BR>
+  Of the alien birds in their African air,<BR>
+  And they paused, and alighted, and twittered apart,<BR>
+  And met in the broad white dreamy square,<BR>
+  And the sad slave woman, who lifted up<BR>
+  From the fountain her broad-lipped earthen cup,<BR>
+  Said to herself, with a weary sigh,<BR>
+  "To-morrow the swallows will northward fly."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Compare the following stanzas, from a kind of palinode, "1870-1871,"
+years of the Franco-German war and the Parisian Commune:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+  The men who sang that pain was sweet<BR>
+  Shuddered to see the mask of death<BR>
+  Storm by with myriad thundering feet;<BR>
+  The sudden truth caught up our breath<BR>
+  Our throats like pulses beat.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+  The songs of pale emaciate hours,<BR>
+  The fungus-growth of years of peace,<BR>
+  Withered before us like mown flowers;<BR>
+  We found no pleasure more in these<BR>
+  When bullets fell in showers.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+  For men whose robes are dashed with blood,<BR>
+  What joy to dream of gorgeous stairs,<BR>
+  Stained with the torturing interlude<BR>
+  That soothed a Sultan's midday prayers,<BR>
+  In old days harsh and rude?<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P>
+[110]
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+  For men whose lips are blanched and white,<BR>
+  With aching wounds and torturing thirst,<BR>
+  What charm in canvas shot with light,<BR>
+  And pale with faces cleft and curst,<BR>
+  Past life and life's delight?<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And then Mr. Gosse's purely descriptive power, his aptitude for
+still-life and landscape, is unmistakably vivid and sound.  Take, for
+an instance, this description of high-northern summer:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+  The ice-white mountains clustered all around us,<BR>
+  But arctic summer blossomed at our feet;<BR>
+  The perfume of the creeping sallows found us,<BR>
+  The cranberry-flowers were sweet.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+  Below us through the valley crept a river,<BR>
+  Cleft round an island where the Lap-men lay;<BR>
+  Its sluggish water dragged with slow endeavour<BR>
+  The mountain snows away.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+  There is no night-time in the northern summer,<BR>
+  But golden shimmer fills the hours of sleep,<BR>
+  And sunset fades not, till the bright new-comer,<BR>
+  Red sunrise, smites the deep.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+  But when the blue snow-shadows grew intenser<BR>
+  Across the peaks against the golden sky,<BR>
+  And on the hills the knots of deer grew denser,<BR>
+  And raised their tender cry,<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P>
+[111]
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+  And wandered downward to the Lap-men's dwelling,<BR>
+  We knew our long sweet day was nearly spent,<BR>
+  And slowly, with our hearts within us swelling,<BR>
+  Our homeward steps we bent.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Sunshine before Sunrise!"  There's a novelty in that, for poetic use
+at least, so far as we know, though we remember one fine paragraph
+about it in Sartor Resartus.  The grim poetic sage of Chelsea, however,
+had never seen what he describes: not so Mr. Gosse, whose acquaintance
+with northern lands and northern literature is special. We have indeed
+picked out those stanzas from a quiet personal record of certain
+amorous hours of early youth in that quaint arctic land, Mr. Gosse's
+description of which, like his pretty poem on Lübeck, made one think
+that what the accomplished group of poets to which he belongs requires
+is, above all, novelty of motive, of subject.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He takes, indeed, the old themes, and manages them better than their
+old masters, with more delicate cadences, more delicate transitions of
+thought, through long dwelling on earlier practice.  He seems to
+possess complete command of the technique of poetry&mdash;every form of what
+may be called skill of hand in it; and what marks in [112] him the
+final achievement of poetic scholarship is the perfect balance his work
+presents of so many and varied effects, as regards both matter and
+form.  The memories of a large range of poetic reading are blent into
+one methodical music so perfectly that at times the notes seem almost
+simple.  Sounding almost all the harmonies of the modern lyre, he has,
+perhaps as a matter of course, some of the faults also, the "spasmodic"
+and other lapses, which from age to age, in successive changes of
+taste, have been the "defects" of excellent good "qualities."  He is
+certainly not the&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+  Pathetic singer, with no strength to sing,<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P>
+as he says of the white-throat on the tulip-tree,
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+  Whose leaves unfinished ape her faulty song.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In effect, a large compass of beautiful thought and expression, from
+poetry old and new, have become to him matter malleable anew for a
+further and finer reach of literary art.  And with the perfect grace of
+an intaglio, he shows, as in truth the minute intaglio may do, the
+faculty of structure, the logic of poetry.  "The New Endymion" is a
+good instance of such sustained [113] power.  Poetic scholar!&mdash;If we
+must reserve the sacred name of "poet" to a very small number, that
+humbler but perhaps still rarer title is due indisputably to Mr. Gosse.
+His work is like exquisite modern Latin verse, into the academic shape
+of which, discreet and coy, comes a sincere, deeply felt consciousness
+of modern life, of the modern world as it is.  His poetry, according
+with the best intellectual instincts of our critical age, is as pointed
+out recently by a clever writer in the Nineteenth Century, itself a
+kind of exquisite, finally revised criticism.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Not that he fails in originality; only, the graces, inborn certainly,
+but so carefully educated, strike one more.  The sense of his
+originality comes to one as but an after-thought; and certainly one
+sign of his vocation is that he has made no conscious effort to be
+original.  In his beautiful opening poem of the "White-throat," giving
+his book its key-note, he seems, indeed, to accept that position,
+reasons on and justifies it.  Yet there is a clear note of originality
+(so it seems to us) in the peculiar charm of his strictly personal
+compositions; and, generally, in such touches as he gives us of the
+soul, the life, of the [114] nineteenth century.  Far greater, we
+think, than the charm of poems strictly classic in interest, such as
+the "Praise of Dionysus," exquisite as that is, is the charm of those
+pieces in which, so to speak, he transforms, by a kind of
+colour-change, classic forms and associations into those&mdash;say! of
+Thames-side&mdash;pieces which, though in manner or subject promising a
+classic entertainment, almost unaware bring you home.&mdash;No! after all,
+it is not imagined Greece, dreamy, antique Sicily, but the present
+world about us, though mistakable for a moment, delightfully, for the
+land, the age, of Sappho, of Theocritus:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+  There is no amaranth, no pomegranate here,<BR>
+  But can your heart forget the Christmas rose,<BR>
+  The crocuses and snowdrops once so dear?<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Quite congruously with the placid, erudite, quality of his culture,
+although, like other poets, he sings much of youth, he is often most
+successful in the forecast, the expression, of the humours, the
+considerations, that in truth are more proper to old age:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+  When age comes by and lays his frosty hands<BR>
+  So lightly on mine eyes, that, scarce aware<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P>
+[115]
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+  Of what an endless weight of gloom they bear,<BR>
+  I pause, unstirred, and wait for his commands.<BR>
+  When time has bound these limbs of mine with bands,<BR>
+  And hushed mine ears, and silvered all my hair,<BR>
+  May sorrow come not, nor a vain despair<BR>
+  Trouble my soul that meekly girdled stands.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+  As silent rivers into silent lakes,<BR>
+  Through hush of reeds that not a murmur breaks,<BR>
+  Wind, mindful of the poppies whence they came,<BR>
+  So may my life, and calmly burn away,<BR>
+  As ceases in a lamp at break of day<BR>
+  The flagrant remnant of memorial flame.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Euthanasia!&mdash;Yet Mr. Gosse, with all his accomplishment, is still a
+young man.  His youthful confidence in the perpetuity of poetry, of the
+poetical interests in life, creed-less as he may otherwise seem to be,
+is, we think, a token, though certainly an unconscious token, of the
+spontaneous originality of his muse.  For a writer of his peculiar
+philosophic tenets, at all events, the world itself, in truth, must
+seem irretrievably old or even decadent.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Old, decadent, indeed, it would seem with Mr. Gosse to be also
+returning to the thoughts, the fears, the consolations, of its youth in
+Greece, in Italy:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P>
+[116]
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+  Nor seems it strange indeed<BR>
+  To hold the happy creed<BR>
+  That all fair things that bloom and die<BR>
+  Have conscious life as well as I.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+  Then let me joy to be<BR>
+  Alive with bird and tree,<BR>
+  And have no haughtier aim than this,<BR>
+  To be a partner in their bliss.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Convinced, eloquent,&mdash;again and again the notes of Epicurean philosophy
+fall almost unconsciously from his lips.  With poetry at hand, he
+appears to feel no misgivings.  A large faith he might seem to have in
+what is called "natural optimism," the beauty and benignity of nature,
+if let alone, in her mechanical round of changes with man and beast and
+flower.  Her method, however, certainly involves forgetfulness for the
+individual; and to this, to the prospect of oblivion, poetry, too, may
+help to brace us, if, unlike so genial and cheerful a poet as Mr.
+Gosse, we need bracing thereto:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+  Now, giant-like, the tall young ploughmen go<BR>
+  Between me and the sunset, footing slow;<BR>
+  My spirit, as an uninvited guest,<BR>
+  Goes with them, wondering what desire, what aim,<BR>
+  May stir their hearts and mine with common flame,<BR>
+  Or, thoughtless, do their hands suffice their soul?<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P>
+[117]
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+  I know not, care not, for I deem no shame<BR>
+  To hold men, flowers, and trees and stars the same,<BR>
+  Myself, as these, one atom in the whole.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That is from one of those half-Greek, half-English idylls, reminding
+one of Frederick Walker's "Ploughman," of Mason's "Evening Hymn," in
+which Mr. Gosse is at his best.  A favourite motive, he has treated it
+even more melodiously in "Lying in the Grass":&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+  I do not hunger for a well-stored mind,<BR>
+  I only wish to live my life, and find<BR>
+  My heart in unison with all mankind.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+  My life is like the single dewy star<BR>
+  That trembles on the horizon's primrose-bar,&mdash;<BR>
+  A microcosm where all things living are.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+  And if, among the noiseless grasses, Death<BR>
+  Should come behind and take away my breath,<BR>
+  I should not rise as one who sorroweth;<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+  For I should pass, but all the world would be<BR>
+  Full of desire and young delight and glee,<BR>
+  And why should men be sad through loss of me?<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+  The light is flying; in the silver-blue<BR>
+  The young moon shines from her bright window through:<BR>
+  The mowers are all gone, and I go too.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A vein of thought as modern as it is old!  More not less depressing,
+certainly, to our over-meditative [118], susceptible, nervous, modern
+age, than to that antiquity which was indeed the genial youth of the
+world, but, sweetly attuned by his skill of touch, it is the sum of
+what Mr. Gosse has to tell us of the experience of life.  Or is it,
+after all, to quote him once more, that beyond those ever-recurring
+pagan misgivings, those pale pagan consolations, our generation feels
+yet cannot adequately express&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+  The passion and the stress<BR>
+  Of thoughts too tender and too sad to be<BR>
+  Enshrined in any melody she knows?<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+29th October 1890
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap08"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+VIII.  FERDINAND FABRE
+</H3>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+[NORINE]: AN IDYLL OF THE CEVENNES
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+[121] A FRENCH novelist who, with much of Zola's undoubted power,
+writes always in the interest of that high type of Catholicism which
+still prevails in the remote provinces of France, of that high type of
+morality of which the French clergy have nobly maintained the ideal, is
+worth recommending to the more serious class of English readers.
+Something of the gift of François Millet, whose peasants are veritable
+priests, of those older religious painters who could portray saintly
+heads so sweetly and their merely human protégés so truly, seems indeed
+to have descended to M. Ferdinand Fabre.  In the Abbé Tigrane, in
+Lucifer, and elsewhere, he has delineated, with wonderful power and
+patience, a strictly ecclesiastical portraiture&mdash; [122] shrewd,
+passionate, somewhat melancholy heads, which, though they are often of
+peasant origin, are never by any chance undignified.  The passions he
+treats of in priests are, indeed, strictly clerical, most often their
+ambitions&mdash;not the errant humours of the mere man in the priest, but
+movements of spirit properly incidental to the clerical type itself.
+Turning to the secular brothers and sisters of these peasant
+ecclesiastics, at first sight so strongly contrasted with them, M.
+Fabre shows a great acquaintance with the sources, the effects, of
+average human feeling; but still in contact&mdash;in contact, as its
+conscience, its better mind, its ideal&mdash;with the institutions of
+religion.  What constitutes his distinguishing note as a writer is the
+recognition of the religious, the Catholic, ideal, intervening
+masterfully throughout the picture he presents of life, as the only
+mode of poetry realizable by the poor; and although, of course, it does
+a great deal more beside, certainly doing the high work of poetry
+effectively.  For his background he has chosen, has made his own and
+conveys very vividly to his readers, a district of France, gloomy, in
+spite of its almonds, its [123] oil and wine, but certainly grandiose.
+The large towns, the sparse hamlets, the wide landscape of the
+Cevennes, are for his books what the Rhineland is to those delightful
+authors, Messrs. Erckmann-Chatrian.  In Les Courbezon, the French Vicar
+of Wakefield, as Sainte-Beuve declared, with this imposing background,
+the Church and the world, as they shape themselves in the Cevennes, the
+priest and the peasant, occupy about an equal share of interest.
+Sometimes, as in the charming little book we wish now to introduce,
+unclerical human nature occupies the foreground almost exclusively;
+though priestly faces will still be found gazing upon us from time to
+time.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In form, the book is a bundle of letters from a Parisian littérateur to
+the friend of his boyhood, now the curé of one of those mountain
+villages.  He is refreshing himself, in the midst of dusty,
+sophisticated Paris, with memories of their old, delightful
+existence&mdash;vagabonde, libre, agreste, pastorale&mdash;in their upland
+valley.  He can appeal safely to the aged curé's friendly justice, even
+in exposing delicacies of sentiment which most men conceal:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P>
+[124] "As for you, frank, certain of your own mind, joyous of heart,
+methinks scarce understanding those whose religion makes their souls
+tremble instead of fortifying them&mdash;you, I am sure, take things by the
+large and kindly side of human life."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The story our Parisian has to tell is simple enough, and we have no
+intention of betraying it, but only to note some of the faces, the
+scenes, that peep out in the course of it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The gloom of the Cevennes is the impression M. Fabre most commonly
+conveys.  In this book it is rather the cheerful aspect of summer,
+those upland valleys of the Cevennes presenting then a symphony in red,
+so to call it&mdash;as in a land of cherries and goldfinches; and he has a
+genial power certainly of making you really feel the sun on the backs
+of the two boys out early for a long ramble, of old peasants resting
+themselves a little, with spare enjoyment, ere the end:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"As we turned a sharp elbow of the stream the aspect of the country
+changed.  It seemed to me entirely red.  Cherries in enormous bunches
+were hanging everywhere over our heads....
+</P>
+
+<P>
+[125] "It was a hut, rather low, rather dark.  A log of chestnut was
+smouldering in a heap of ashes.  Every object was in its place: the
+table, the chairs, the plates ranged on the dresser.  A fairy, in
+truth, reigned there, and, by the touch of her wand, brought
+cleanliness and order on every side.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'Is it you, Norine?' asked a voice from a dark corner, three steps
+from the fireplace.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'Yes, mon grand, it is I!  The heat was growing greater every moment,
+and I have taken in the goats.'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Norine unclosed the window.  A broad light spread over the floor of
+beaten earth, like a white cloth.  The cottage was illuminated.  I saw
+an old man seated on a wooden stool in a recess, where an ample serge
+curtain concealed a bed.  He held himself slightly bent, the two hands
+held forth, one over the other, on the knob of a knotty staff, highly
+polished.  In spite of eighty years, Norine's grandfather&mdash;le grand, as
+they say up there&mdash;had not lost a hair: beautiful white locks fell over
+his shoulders&mdash;crisp, thick, outspread.  I thought of those fine wigs
+of tow or hemp with which the distaff of [126] our Prudence was always
+entangled.  He was close shaved, after the manner of our peasants; and
+the entire mask was to be seen disengaged, all its admirable lines
+free, commanded by a full-sized nose, below which the good, thick lips
+were smiling, full of kindness.  The eyes, however, though still clear
+and soft in expression, had a certain fixity which startled me.  He
+raised himself.  His stature seemed to me beyond proportion.  He was
+really beautiful, with the contentment of his face, straight as the
+trunk of a chestnut, his old velvet coat thrown back, his shirt of
+coarse cloth open at the breast, so that one saw the play of the ribs.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'Monsieur le neveu!' he cried; 'where are you? Come to me!  I am
+blind.'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I approached.  He felt me, with ten fingers, laying aside his staff.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'And you would not take offence if a poor peasant like me embraced
+you?'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'Quick, Jalaguier!'  I cried, throwing myself into his arms. 'Quick!'
+He pressed me till the joints started.  Leaned upon his broad chest, I
+heard the beating of his heart.  It beat under my ears with a burden
+like our bell at [126] Camplong.  What powerful vitality in Norine's
+grand!  'It does an old man good:&mdash;a good hug!' he said, letting me go."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The boyish visitors are quite ready to sit down there to dinner:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"With the peasant of the Cevennes (M. Fabre tells us) the meal is what
+nature meant it to be&mdash;a few moments for self-recovery after fatigue, a
+short space of silence of a quite elevated character, almost sacred.
+The poor human creature has given the sweat of his brow to extort from
+an ungrateful soil his daily bread; and now he eats that well-savoured
+bread in silent self-respect.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'It is a weary thing to be thinking always of one's work (says the
+grand to the somewhat sparing Norine).  We must also think of our
+sustenance.  You are too enduring, my child! it is a mistake to demand
+so much of your arms.  In truth, le bon Dieu has cut you out after the
+pattern of your dead father.  Every morning, in my prayers, I put in my
+complaint thereanent.  My poor boy died from going too fast.  He could
+never sit still when it was a question of gathering a few sous from the
+[128] fields; and those fields took and consumed him.'"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The boy fancies that the blind eyes are turned towards a particular
+spot in the landscape, as if they saw:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'I often turn my eyes in that direction (the old man explains) from
+habit.  One might suppose that a peasant had the scent of the earth on
+which he has laboured.  I have given so much of the sweat of my
+brow&mdash;there&mdash;towards Rocaillet!  Angélique, my dead wife, was of
+Rocaillet; and when she married me, brought a few morsels of land in
+her apron.  What a state they're in now!&mdash;those poor morsels of land we
+used to weed and rake and hoe, my boy and I!  What superb crops of
+vetches we mowed then, for feeding, in due time, our lambs, our calves!
+All is gone to ruin since my blindness, and especially since Angélique
+left me for the churchyard, never to come back.'  He paused to my great
+relief.  For every one of those phrases he modulated under the
+fig-trees more sadly than the Lamentations of Jeremiah on Jeudi Saint
+overset me&mdash;was like death."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+[129] That is good drawing, in its simple and quiet way!  The actual
+scene, however, is cheerful enough on this early summer day&mdash;a
+symphony, as we said, in cherries and goldfinches, in which the higher
+valleys of the Cevennes abound.  In fact, the boys witness the
+accordailles, the engagement, of Norine and Justin Lebasset.  The
+latter is calling the birds to sing good luck to the event:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He had a long steady look towards the fruit-trees, and then whistled,
+on a note at once extremely clear and extremely soft.  He paused,
+watched awhile, recommenced.  The note became more rapid, more
+sonorous.  What an astounding man he was, this Justin Lebasset!
+Upright, his red beard forward, his forehead thrown back, his eyes on
+the thick foliage of the cherry-trees, his hands on his haunches, in an
+attitude of repose, easy, superb, he was like some youthful pagan god,
+gilded with red gold, on his way across the country&mdash;like Pan, if he
+chose to amuse himself by charming birds.  You should have seen the
+enthusiastic glances with which Norine watched him.  Upright&mdash;she too,
+slim, at full height, inclining from [130] time to time towards Justin
+with a movement of irresistible fascination, she followed the notes of
+her mate; and sometimes, her, lips half opening, added thereto a
+sigh&mdash;something of a sigh, an aspiration, a prayer, towards the
+goldfinch, withdrawn into the shadows.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The leaves were shaken in the clear, burning green; and, on a sudden,
+a multitude of goldfinches, the heads red in the wind, the wings half
+spread, were fluttering from branch to branch.  I could have fancied,
+amid the quivering of the great bunches of fruit, that they were
+cherries on the wing.  Justin suffered his pipe to die away: the birds
+were come at his invitation, and performed their prelude."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is forty years afterwards that the narrator, now a man of letters in
+Paris, writes to his old friend, with tidings of Justin and Norine:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"In 1842 (he observes) you were close on fifteen; I scarcely twelve. In
+my eyes your age made you my superior.  And then, you were so strong,
+so tender, so amiteux, to use a word from up there&mdash;a charming word.
+And so God, Who had His designs for you, whereas I, in spite of my
+pious childhood, wandered on [131] my way as chance bade me, led you by
+the hand, attached, ended by keeping you for Himself.  He did well
+truly when He chose you and rejected me!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+His finding the pair in the wilds of Paris is an adventure, in which,
+in fact, a goldfinch again takes an important part&mdash;a goldfinch who is
+found to understand the Cevenol dialect:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The goldfinch (escaped from its cage somewhere, into the dreary court
+of the Institute) has seen me: is looking at me.  If he chose to make
+his way into my apartment, he would be very welcome.  I feel a strong
+impulse to try him with that unique patois word, which, whistled after
+a peculiar manner, when I was a boy never failed to succeed in the
+mountains of Orb&mdash;Béni!  Béni!  Viens!  Viens!  I dare not!  He might
+take fright and fly away altogether."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In effect, the Cevenol bird, true to call, introduces Norine, his
+rightful owner, whose husband Justin is slowly dying.  Towards the end
+of a hard life, faithful to their mountain ideal, they have not lost
+their dignity, though in a comparatively sordid medium: [132]
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"As for me, my dear Arribas, I remained in deep agitation, an attentive
+spectator of the scene; and while Justin and Norine, set both alike in
+the winepress of sorrow, le pressoir de la douleur, as your good books
+express it, murmured to each other their broken consoling words, I saw
+them again, in thought, young, handsome, in the full flower of life,
+under the cherry-trees, the swarming goldfinches, of blind Barthélemy
+Jalaguier.  Ah me!  It was thus that, five-and-forty years after, in
+this dark street of Paris, that festive day was finishing, blessed, in
+the plenitude of nature, by that august old man, celebrated by the
+alternate song of all the birds of Rocaillet."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Justin's one remaining hope is to go home to those native mountains, if
+it may be, with the dead body of his boy, dead "the very morning on
+which he should have received the tonsure from the hands of Mgr.
+l'Archevêque," and buried now temporarily at the cemetery of
+Montparnasse:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Theodore calls me.  I saw him distinctly to-night.  He gave me a sign.
+After all said, life is heavy, sans le fillot, and but [133] for you it
+were well to be released from it....'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I have seen Justin Lebasset die, dear Arribas, and was touched,
+edified, to the bottom of my soul.  God grant, when my hour comes, I
+may find that calm, that force, in the last struggle with life.  Not a
+complaint!  not a sigh!  Once only he gave Norine a sorrowful,
+heartrending look; then, from lips already cold, breathed that one
+word, 'Theodore!'  Marcus Aurelius used to say: 'A man should leave the
+world as a ripe olive falls from the tree that bore it, and with a kiss
+for the earth that nourished it.'  Well! the peasant of Rocaillet had
+the beautiful, noble, simple death of the fruit of the earth, going to
+the common receptacle of all mortal beings, with no sense that he was
+torn away.  Pardon, I pray, my quotation from Marcus Aurelius, who
+persecuted the Christians.  I give it with the same respect with which
+you would quote some holy writer.  Ah! my dear Arribas! not all the
+saints have received canonization."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is to the priestly character, in truth, that M. Fabre always comes
+back for tranquillizing [134] effect; and if his peasants have
+something akin to Wordsworth's, his priests may remind one of those
+solemn ecclesiastical heads familiar in the paintings and etchings of
+M. Alphonse Legros.  The reader travelling in Italy, or Belgium
+perhaps, has doubtless visited one or more of those spacious
+sacristies, introduced to which for the inspection of some more than
+usually recherché work of art, one is presently dominated by their
+reverend quiet: simple people coming and going there, devout, or at
+least on devout business, with half-pitched voices, not without touches
+of kindly humour, in what seems to express like a picture the most
+genial side, midway between the altar and the home, of the
+ecclesiastical life.  Just such interiors we seem to visit under the
+magic of M. Fabre's well-trained pen.  He has a real power of taking
+one from Paris, or from London, to places and people certainly very
+different from either, to the satisfaction of those who seek in fiction
+an escape.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+12th June 1889
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap09"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+IX.  THE "CONTES" OF M. AUGUSTIN FILON
+</H3>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+TALES OF A HUNDRED YEARS SINCE ["CONTES DU CENTENAIRE."  PAR AUGUSTIN
+FILON.  PARIS: HACHETTE ET CIE. ]
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+[137] IT was a happy thought of M. Filon to put into the mouth of an
+imaginary centenarian a series of delightfully picturesque studies
+which aim at the minute presentment of life in France under the old
+régime, and end for the most part with the Revolution.  A genial
+centenarian, whose years have told happily on him, he appreciates not
+only those humanities of feeling and habit which were peculiar to the
+last century and passed away with it, but also that permanent humanity
+which has but undergone a change of surface in the new world of our
+own, wholly different though it may look.  With a sympathetic sense of
+life as it is always, [138] M. Filon has transplanted the creations of
+his fancy into an age certainly at a greater distance from ourselves
+than can be estimated by mere lapse of time, and where a fully detailed
+antiquarian knowledge, used with admirable tact and economy, is indeed
+serviceable in giving reality of effect to scene and character.  In
+truth, M. Filon's very lively antiquarianism carries with it a genuine
+air of personal memory.  With him, as happens so rarely, an intimate
+knowledge of historic detail is the secret of life, of the impression
+of life; puts his own imagination on the wing; secures the imaginative
+cooperation of the reader.  A stately age&mdash;to us, perhaps, in the
+company of the historic muse, seeming even more stately than it
+actually was&mdash;it is pleasant to find it, as we do now and again on
+these pages, in graceful déshabille.  With perfect lightness of touch,
+M. Filon seems to have a complete command of all the physiognomic
+details of old France, of old Paris and its people&mdash;how they made a
+holiday; how they got at the news; the fashions.  Did the English
+reader ever hear before of the beautifully dressed doll which came once
+a month [139] from Paris to Soho to teach an expectant world of fashion
+how to dress itself? Old Paris!  For young lovers at their windows; for
+every one fortunate enough to have seen it: "Qu'il est joli ce paysage
+du Paris nocturne d'il y a cent ans!"  We think we shall best do
+justice to an unusually pretty book by taking one of M. Filon's stories
+(not because we are quite sure it is the cleverest of them) with a view
+to the more definite illustration of his method, therein.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Christopher Marteau was a warden of the corporation of Luthiers.  He
+dealt in musical instruments, as his father and grandfather had done
+before him, at the sign of Saint Cecilia.  With his wife, his only
+child Phlipote, and Claude his apprentice, who was to marry Phlipote,
+he occupied a good house of his own.  Of course the disposition of the
+young people, bred together from their childhood, does not at first
+entirely concur with the parental arrangements.  But the story tells,
+reassuringly, how&mdash;to some extent how sadly&mdash;they came heartily to do
+so.  M. Marteau was no ordinary shopkeeper.  The various distinguished
+people who had fingered his clavecins, and turned over the [140] folios
+of music, for half a century past, had left their memories behind them;
+M. de Voltaire, for instance, who had caressed the head of Phlipote
+with an aged, skeleton hand, leaving, apparently, no very agreeable
+impression on the child, though her father delighted to recall the
+incident, being himself a demi-philosophe.  He went to church, that is
+to say, only twice a year, on the Feast of St. Cecilia and on the
+Sunday when the Luthiers offered the pain bénit.  It was his opinion
+that everything in the State needed reform except the Corporations.
+The relations of the husband to his affectionate, satiric,
+pleasure-seeking wife, who knew so well all the eighteen theatres which
+then existed in Paris, are treated with much quiet humour.  On Sundays
+the four set forth together for a country holiday.  At such times
+Phlipote would walk half-a-dozen paces in advance of her father and
+mother, side by side with her intended.  But they never talked to each
+other: the hands, the eyes, never met.  Of what was Phlipote dreaming?
+and what was in the thoughts of Claude?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It happened one day that, like sister and brother, the lovers exchanged
+confidences.  "It [141] is not always," observes Phlipote, whom every
+one excepting Claude on those occasions sought with admiring eyes&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'It is not always one loves those one is told to love.'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'What, have you, too, a secret, my little Phlipote?'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'I too, Claude!  Then what may be yours?'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'Listen, Phlipote!' he answered.  'We don't wish to be husband and
+wife, but we can be friends&mdash;good and faithful friends, helping each
+other to change the decision of our parents.'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'Were I but sure you would not betray me&mdash;'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'Would you like me to confess first?  The woman I love&mdash;Ah! but you
+will laugh at my folly!'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'No, Claude!  I shall not laugh.  I know too well what one suffers.'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'Especially when love is hopeless.'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'Hopeless?'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'Alas!  I have never spoken to her.  Perhaps never shall!'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+[142] "'Well! as for me, I don't even know the name of him to whom my
+heart is given!'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'Ah! poor Phlipote!'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'Poor Claude!'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"They had approached each other.  The young man took the tiny hand of
+his friend, pressing it in his own.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'The woman I adore is Mademoiselle Guimard!'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'What!  Guimard of the Opera?&mdash;the fiancée of Despréaux?'"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Claude still held the hands of Phlipote, who was trembling now, and
+almost on fire at the story of this ambitious love.  In return she
+reveals her own.  It was Good Friday.  She had come with her mother to
+the Sainte Chapelle to hear Mademoiselle Coupain play the organ and
+witness the extraordinary spectacle of the convulsionnaires, brought
+thither to be touched by the relic of the True Cross.  In the press of
+the crowd at this exciting scene Phlipote faints, or nearly faints,
+when a young man comes kindly to their aid.  "She is so young!" he
+explains to the mother, "she seems so delicate!"  "He looked at me,"
+she tells Claude&mdash;"he looked at [143] me, through his half-closed
+eyelids; and his words were like a caress."&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'And have you seen him no More?' asks Claude, full of sympathy.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'Yes! once again.  He pretended to be looking at the window of the
+Little Dunkirk, over the way, but with cautious glances towards our
+house.  Only, as he did not know what storey we live on, he failed to
+discover me behind my curtain, where I was but half visible.'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'You should have shown yourself.'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'Oh, Claude!' she cried, with a delicious gesture of timidity, of
+shame.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"So they prattled for a long time; he talking of the great Guimard, she
+of her unknown lover, scarce listening to, but completely understanding
+each other.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'Holloa!'cries the loud voice of Christopher Marteau.  'What are you
+doing out there?'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The young people arose.  Phlipote linked her arm gaily in that of
+Claude.  'How contented I feel!' she says; 'how good it is to have a
+friend&mdash;to have you whom I used to detest, because I thought you were
+in love with me.  Now, when I know you can't bear me, I [144] shall be
+nicely in love with you.'  The soft warmth of her arm seemed to pass
+through Claude, and gave him strange sensations.  He resumed naïvely,
+'Yes! and how odd it is after all that I am not in love with you.  You
+are so pretty!'  Phlipote raised her finger coquettishly, 'No
+compliments, monsieur.  Since we are not to marry each other, it is
+forbidden to pay court to me!'"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+From that day a close intimacy established itself between the formerly
+affianced pair, now become accomplices in defeating the good intentions
+of their elders.  In long conversations, they talked in turn, or both
+together, of their respective loves.  Phlipote allows Claude entrance
+to her chamber, full of admiration for its graceful arrangements, its
+virgin cleanliness.  He inspects slowly all the familiar objects daily
+touched by her, her books, her girlish ornaments.  One day she cried
+with an air of mischief, "If she were here in my place, what would you
+do?" and no sooner were the words uttered than his arms were round her
+neck.  "'Tis but to teach you what I would do were she here."  They
+were a little troubled by this adventure.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+[145] And the next day was a memorable one.  By the kind contrivance of
+Phlipote herself, Claude gains the much-desired access to the object of
+his affections, but to his immense disillusion.  If he could but speak
+to her, he fancies he should find the courage, the skill, to bend her.
+Breathless, Phlipote comes in secret with the good news.  The great
+actress desires some one to tune her clavecin:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'Papa would have gone; but I begged him so earnestly to take me to the
+Théâtre Français that he could not refuse; and it is yourself will go
+this evening to tune the clavecin of your beloved.'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'Phlipote, you've a better heart than I!  This morning I saw a
+gentleman, who resembled point by point your description of the unknown
+at the Sainte Chapelle, prowling about our shop.'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'And you didn't tell me!'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Claude hung his head.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'But why not?' the young girl asks imperiously.  'Why not?'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'In truth I could hardly say, hardly understand, myself.  Do you
+forgive me, Phlipote?'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'I suppose I must.  So make yourself as smart as you can, to please
+your goddess.'"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+[146] Next day she hears the story of Claude's grievous disappointment
+on seeing the great actress at home&mdash;plain, five-and-forty,
+ill-tempered.  He had tuned the clavecin and taken flight.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And now for Phlipote's idol!  It was agreed that Whitsunday should be
+spent at Versailles.  On that day the royal apartments were open to the
+public, and at the hour of High Mass the crowd flowed back towards the
+vestibule of the chapel to witness what was called the procession of
+the Cordons Bleus.  The "Blue Ribbons" were the knights of the Order Du
+Saint-Esprit in their robes of ceremony, who came to range themselves
+in the choir according to the date of their creation.  The press was so
+great that the parents were separated from the young people.  Claude,
+however, at the side of Phlipote, realized the ideal of a faithful and
+jealous guardian.  The hallebardes of the Suisses rang on the marble
+pavement of the gallery.  Royalty, now unconsciously presenting its
+ceremonies for the last time, advanced through a cloud of splendour;
+but before the Queen appeared it was necessary that all the knights of
+the order down to the youngest should pass by, slow, solemn, majestic.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+[147] They wore, besides their ribbons of blue moiré, the silver dove
+on the shoulder, and the long mantle of sombre blue velvet lined with
+yellow satin.  Phlipote watched mechanically the double file of haughty
+figures passing before them: then, on a sudden, with a feeble cry,
+falls fainting into the arms of Claude.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Recovered after a while, under shelter of the great staircase, she wept
+as those weep whose heart is broken by a great blow.  Claude, without a
+word, sustained, soothed her.  A sentiment of gratitude mingled itself
+with her distress.  "How good he is!" she thought.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It was a pity," says her mother a little later "a pity you did not see
+the Cordons Bleus.  Fancy!  You will laugh at me!  But in one of the
+handsomest of the Chevaliers I felt sure I recognized the stranger who
+helped us at the Sainte Chapelle, and was so gallant with you."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Phlipote did not laugh.  "You are deceived, mother!" she said in a
+faint voice.  "Pardi!" cries the father.  "'Tis what I always say. Your
+stranger was some young fellow from a shop."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Two months later the young people receive [148] the nuptial
+benediction, and continue the musical business when the elders retire
+to the country.  At first a passionate lover, Claude was afterwards a
+good and devoted husband.  Phlipote never again opened her lips
+regarding the vague love which for a moment had flowered in her heart:
+only sometimes, a cloud of reverie veiled her eyes, which seemed to
+seek sadly, beyond the circle of her slow, calm life, a brilliant but
+chimeric image visible for her alone.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And once again she saw him.  It was in the terrible year 1794.  She
+knew the hour at which the tumbril with those condemned to die passed
+the windows; and at the first signal would close them and draw the
+curtain.  But on this day some invincible fascination nailed her to her
+place.  There were ten faces; but she had eyes for one alone. She had
+not forgotten, could not mistake, him&mdash;that pale head, so proud and
+fine, but now thin with suffering; the beautiful mobile eyes, now
+encircled with the signs of sorrow and watching.  The convict's shirt,
+open in large, broad folds, left bare the neck, delicate as a woman's,
+and made for that youthful face an aureole, of innocence, of martyrdom.
+His looks [149] met hers.  Did he recognize her?  She could not have
+said.  She remained there, paralyzed with emotion, till the moment when
+the vision disappeared.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Then she flung herself into her chamber, fell on her knees, lost
+herself in prayer.  There was a distant roll of drums.  The man to whom
+she had given her maiden soul was gone.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Cursed be their anger, for it was cruel!" says the reader.  But
+Monsieur Filon's stories sometimes end as merrily as they begin; and
+always he is all delicacy&mdash;a delicacy which keeps his large yet minute
+antiquarian knowledge of that vanished time ever in service to a direct
+interest in humanity as it is permanently, alike before and after '93.
+His book is certainly one well worth possessing.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<P CLASS="finis">
+THE END
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+16th July 1890
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR><BR>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Essays from 'The Guardian', by Walter Horatio Pater
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+</BODY>
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diff --git a/4036.txt b/4036.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1acc6c4
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+++ b/4036.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,2953 @@
+Project Gutenberg's Essays from 'The Guardian', by Walter Horatio Pater
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Essays from 'The Guardian'
+
+Author: Walter Horatio Pater
+
+Posting Date: June 7, 2009 [EBook #4036]
+Release Date: May, 2003
+First Posted: October 19, 2001
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ESSAYS FROM 'THE GUARDIAN' ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Alfred J. Drake.  HTML version by Al Haines.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ESSAYS FROM 'THE GUARDIAN'
+
+By WALTER HORATIO PATER
+
+
+
+
+NOTES BY THE E-TEXT EDITOR:
+
+Reliability: Although I have done my best to ensure that the text you
+read is error-free in comparison with an exact reprint of the standard
+edition--Macmillan's 1910 Library Edition--please exercise scholarly
+caution in using it.  It is not intended as a substitute for the
+printed original but rather as a searchable supplement.  My e-texts may
+prove convenient substitutes for hard-to-get works in a course where
+both instructor and students accept the possibility of some
+imperfections in the text, but if you are writing a scholarly article,
+dissertation, or book, you should use the standard hard-copy editions
+of any works you cite.
+
+
+Pagination and Paragraphing: To avoid an unwieldy electronic copy, I
+have transferred original pagination to brackets.  A bracketed numeral
+such as [22] indicates that the material immediately following the
+number marks the beginning of the relevant page.  I have preserved
+paragraph structure except for first-line indentation.
+
+Hyphenation: I have not preserved original hyphenation since an e-text
+does not require line-end or page-end hyphenation.
+
+Greek typeface: For this full-text edition, I have transliterated
+Pater's Greek quotations.  If there is a need for the original Greek,
+it can be viewed at my site, http://www.ajdrake.com/etexts, a
+Victorianist archive that contains the complete works of Walter Pater
+and many other nineteenth-century texts, mostly in first editions.
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+
+
+1. English Literature: 1-16
+
+2. Amiel's "Journal Intime": 17-37
+
+3. Browning: 39-51
+
+4. "Robert Elsmere": 53-70
+
+5. Their Majesties' Servants: 71-88
+
+6. Wordsworth: 89-104
+
+7. Mr. Gosse's Poems: 105-118
+
+8. Ferdinand Fabre: 119-134
+
+9. The "Contes" of M. Augustin Filon: 135-149
+
+
+
+
+
+ESSAYS FROM 'THE GUARDIAN'
+
+WALTER HORATIO PATER
+
+
+E-text Editor: Alfred J. Drake, Ph.D. Electronic Version 1.0 / Date
+10-12-01
+
+
+
+
+PATER'S NOTE: The nine papers contained in the following volume
+originally appeared anonymously in The Guardian newspaper.
+
+
+
+
+E-TEXT EDITOR'S NOTE: I have not preserved the title pages of this
+volume, but have instead moved dates to each essay's end and included
+any necessary title-page material in the heading area of the first
+substantive page.
+
+
+
+
+
+I.  ENGLISH LITERATURE
+
+
+
+
+FOUR BOOKS FOR STUDENTS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE
+
+
+[3] THE making of an anthology of English prose is what must have
+occurred to many of its students, by way of pleasure to themselves, or
+of profit to other persons.  Such an anthology, the compass and variety
+of our prose literature being considered, might well follow exclusively
+some special line of interest in it; exhibiting, for instance, what is
+so obviously striking, its imaginative power, or its (legitimately)
+poetic beauty, or again, its philosophical capacity.  Mr. Saintsbury's
+well-considered Specimens of English Prose Style, from Malory to
+Macaulay (Kegan Paul), a volume, as we think, which bears fresh witness
+to the truth of the old remark that it takes a scholar indeed to make a
+[4] good literary selection, has its motive sufficiently indicated in
+the very original "introductory essay," which might well stand, along
+with the best of these extracts from a hundred or more deceased masters
+of English, as itself a document or standard, in the matter of prose
+style.  The essential difference between poetry and prose--"that other
+beauty of prose"--in the words of the motto he has chosen from Dryden,
+the first master of the sort of prose he prefers:--that is Mr.
+Saintsbury's burden.  It is a consideration, undoubtedly, of great
+importance both for the writer and the critic; in England especially,
+where, although (as Mr. Saintsbury rightly points out, in correction of
+an imperfectly informed French critic of our literature) the radical
+distinction between poetry and prose has ever been recognized by its
+students, yet the imaginative impulse, which is perhaps the richest of
+our purely intellectual gifts, has been apt to invade the province of
+that tact and good judgment, alike as to matter and manner, in which we
+are not richer than other people.  Great poetry and great prose, it
+might be found, have most of their qualities in common.  But [5] their
+indispensable qualities are different, or even opposed; and it is just
+the indispensable qualities of prose and poetry respectively, which it
+is so necessary for those who have to do with either to bear ever in
+mind.  Order, precision, directness, are the radical merits of prose
+thought; and it is more than merely legitimate that they should form
+the criterion of prose style, because within the scope of those
+qualities, according to Mr. Saintsbury, there is more than just the
+quiet, unpretending usefulness of the bare sermo pedestris. Acting on
+language, those qualities generate a specific and unique beauty--"that
+other beauty of prose"--fitly illustrated by these specimens, which the
+reader needs hardly be told, after what has been now said, are far from
+being a collection of "purple patches."
+
+Whether or not he admits their practical cogency, an attentive reader
+will not fail to be interested in the attempt Mr. Saintsbury has made
+to give technical rules of metre for the production of the true prose
+rhythm.  Any one who cares to do so might test the validity of those
+rules in the nearest possible way, by applying them to the varied
+examples in this wide [6] survey of what has been actually well done in
+English prose, here exhibited on the side of their strictly prosaic
+merit--their conformity, before all other aims, to laws of a structure
+primarily reasonable.  Not that that reasonable prose structure, or
+architecture, as Mr. Saintsbury conceives it, has been always, or even
+generally, the ideal, even of those chosen writers here in evidence.
+Elizabethan prose, all too chaotic in the beauty and force which
+overflowed into it from Elizabethan poetry, and incorrect with an
+incorrectness which leaves it scarcely legitimate prose at all: then,
+in reaction against that, the correctness of Dryden, and his followers
+through the eighteenth century, determining the standard of a prose in
+the proper sense, not inferior to the prose of the Augustan age in
+Latin, or of the "great age in France": and, again in reaction against
+this, the wild mixture of poetry and prose, in our wild nineteenth
+century, under the influence of such writers as Dickens and Carlyle:
+such are the three periods into which the story of our prose literature
+divides itself.  And Mr. Saintsbury has his well-timed, practical
+suggestions, upon a survey of them.
+
+[7] If the invasion of the legitimate sphere of prose in England by the
+spirit of poetry, weaker or stronger, has been something far deeper
+than is indicated by that tendency to write unconscious blank verse,
+which has made it feasible to transcribe about one-half of Dickens's
+otherwise so admirable Barnaby Rudge in blank-verse lines, a tendency
+(outdoing our old friend M. Jourdain) commoner than Mr. Saintsbury
+admits, such lines being frequent in his favourite Dryden; yet, on the
+other hand, it might be maintained, and would be maintained by its
+French critics, that our English poetry has been too apt to dispense
+with those prose qualities, which, though not the indispensable
+qualities of poetry, go, nevertheless, to the making of all first-rate
+poetry--the  qualities, namely, of orderly structure, and such
+qualities generally as depend upon second thoughts.  A collection of
+specimens of English poetry, for the purpose of exhibiting the
+achievement of prose excellences by it (in their legitimate measure) is
+a desideratum we commend to Mr. Saintsbury. It is the assertion, the
+development, the product of those very different indispensable
+qualities of poetry, in the presence [8] of which the English is equal
+or superior to all other modern literature--the native, sublime, and
+beautiful, but often wild and irregular, imaginative power in English
+poetry from Chaucer to Shakespeare, with which Professor Minto deals,
+in his Characteristics of English Poets (Blackwood), lately reprinted.
+That his book should have found many readers we can well understand, in
+the light of the excellent qualities which, in high degree, have gone
+to the making of it: a tasteful learning, never deserted by that hold
+upon contemporary literature which is so animating an influence in the
+study of what belongs to the past.  Beginning with an elaborate notice
+of Chaucer, full of the minute scholarship of our day, he never forgets
+that his subject is, after all, poetry.  The followers of Chaucer, and
+the precursors of Shakespeare, are alike real persons to him--old
+Langland reminding him of Carlyle's "Gospel of Labour." The product of
+a large store of reading has been here secreted anew for the reader who
+desires to see, in bird's-eye view, the light and shade of a long and
+varied period of poetic literature, by way of preparation for
+Shakespeare, [9] (with a full essay upon whom the volume closes,)
+explaining Shakespeare, so far as he can be explained by literary
+antecedents.
+
+That powerful poetry was twin-brother to a prose, of more varied, but
+certainly of wilder and more irregular power than the admirable, the
+typical, prose of Dryden.  In Dryden, and his followers through the
+eighteenth century, we see the reaction against the exuberance and
+irregularity of that prose, no longer justified by power, but
+cognizable rather as bad taste.  But such reaction was effective only
+because an age had come--the age of a negative, or agnostic
+philosophy--in which men's minds must needs be limited to the
+superficialities of things, with a kind of narrowness amounting to a
+positive gift.  What that mental attitude was capable of, in the way of
+an elegant, yet plain-spoken, and life-like delineation of men's moods
+and manners, as also in the way of determining those moods and manners
+themselves to all that was lively, unaffected, and harmonious, can be
+seen nowhere better than in Mr. Austin Dobson's Selections from Steele
+(Clarendon Press) prefaced by his careful "Life."  The well-known
+qualities of [10] Mr. Dobson's own original work are a sufficient
+guarantee of the taste and discrimination we may look for in a
+collection like this, in which the random lightnings of the first of
+the essayists are grouped under certain heads--"Character Sketches,"
+"Tales and Incidents," "Manners and Fashions," and the like--so as to
+diminish, for the general reader, the scattered effect of short essays
+on a hundred various subjects, and give a connected, book-like
+character to the specimens.
+
+Steele, for one, had certainly succeeded in putting himself, and his
+way of taking the world--for this pioneer of an everybody's literature
+had his subjectivities--into books.  What a survival of one long-past
+day, for instance, in "A Ramble from Richmond to London"!  What truth
+to the surface of common things, to their direct claim on our interest!
+yet with what originality of effect in that truthfulness, when he
+writes, for instance:
+
+"I went to my lodgings, led by a light, whom I put into the discourse
+of his private economy, and made him give me an account of the charge,
+hazard, profit, and loss of a family that depended upon a link."
+
+[11] It was one of his peculiarities, he tells us, to live by the eye
+far more than by any other sense (a peculiarity, perhaps, in an
+Englishman), and this is what he sees at the early daily service then
+common in some City churches.  Among those who were come only to see or
+be seen, "there were indeed a few in whose looks there appeared a
+heavenly joy and gladness upon the entrance of a new day, as if they
+had gone to sleep with expectation of it."
+
+The industrious reader, indeed, might select out of these specimens
+from Steele, a picture, in minute detail, of the characteristic manners
+of that time.  Still, beside, or only a little way beneath, such a
+picture of passing fashion, what Steele and his fellows really deal
+with is the least transitory aspects of life, though still merely
+aspects--those points in which all human nature, great or little, finds
+what it has in common, and directly shows itself up. The natural
+strength of such literature will, of course, be in the line of its
+tendencies; in transparency, variety, and directness.  To the
+unembarrassing matter, the unembarrassed style!  Steele is, perhaps,
+the most impulsive writer of the school [12] to which he belongs; he
+abounds in felicities of impulse.  Yet who can help feeling that his
+style is regular because the matter he deals with is the somewhat
+uncontentious, even, limited soul, of an age not imaginative, and
+unambitious in its speculative flight?  Even in Steele himself we may
+observe with what sureness of instinct the men of that age turned aside
+at the contact of anything likely to make them, in any sense, forget
+themselves.
+
+No one indicates better than Charles Lamb, to whose memory Mr. Alfred
+Ainger has done such good service, the great and peculiar change which
+was begun at the end of the last century, and dominates our own; that
+sudden increase of the width, the depth, the complexity of intellectual
+interest, which has many times torn and distorted literary style, even
+with those best able to comprehend its laws.  In Mrs. Leicester's
+School, with other Writings in Prose and Verse (Macmillan), Mr. Ainger
+has collected and annotated certain remains of Charles and Mary Lamb,
+too good to lie unknown to the present generation, in forgotten
+periodicals or inaccessible reprints.  The story of the Odyssey,
+abbreviated [13] in very simple prose, for children--of all ages--will
+speak for itself.  But the garland of graceful stories which gives name
+to the volume, told by a party of girls on the evening of their
+assembling at school, are in the highest degree characteristic of the
+brother and sister who were ever so successful in imparting to others
+their own enjoyment of books and people.  The tragic circumstance which
+strengthened and consecrated their natural community of interest had,
+one might think, something to do with the far-reaching pensiveness even
+of their most humorous writing, touching often the deepest springs of
+pity and awe, as the way of the highest humour is--a way, however, very
+different from that of the humorists of the eighteenth century.  But
+one cannot forget also that Lamb was early an enthusiastic admirer of
+Wordsworth: of Wordsworth, the first characteristic power of the
+nineteenth century, his essay on whom, in the Quarterly Review, Mr.
+Ainger here reprints.  Would that he could have reprinted it as
+originally composed, and ungarbled by Gifford, the editor!  Lamb, like
+Wordsworth, still kept the charm of a serenity, [14] a precision,
+unsurpassed by the quietest essayist of the preceding age. But it might
+have been foreseen that the rising tide of thought and feeling, on the
+strength of which they too are borne upward, would sometimes overflow
+barriers.  And so it happens that these simple stories are touched,
+much as Wordsworth's verse-stories were, with tragic power.  Dealing
+with the beginnings of imagination in the minds of children, they
+record, with the reality which a very delicate touch preserves from
+anything lugubrious, not those merely preventible miseries of childhood
+over which some writers have been apt to gloat, but the contact of
+childhood with the great and inevitable sorrows of life, into which
+children can enter with depth, with dignity, and sometimes with a kind
+of simple, pathetic greatness, to the discipline of the heart.  Let the
+reader begin with the "Sea Voyage," which is by Charles Lamb; and, what
+Mr. Ainger especially recommends, the "Father's Wedding-Day," by his
+sister Mary.
+
+The ever-increasing intellectual burden of our age is hardly likely to
+adapt itself to the exquisite, but perhaps too delicate and limited,
+[15] literary instruments of the age of Queen Anne.  Yet Mr. Saintsbury
+is certainly right in thinking that, as regards style, English
+literature has much to do.  Well, the good quality of an age, the
+defect of which lies in the direction of intellectual anarchy and
+confusion, may well be eclecticism: in style, as in other things, it is
+well always to aim at the combination of as many excellences as
+possible--opposite excellences, it may be--those other beauties of
+prose.  A busy age will hardly educate its writers in correctness. Let
+its writers make time to write English more as a learned language; and
+completing that correction of style which had only gone a certain way
+in the last century, raise the general level of language towards their
+own.  If there be a weakness in Mr. Saintsbury's view, it is perhaps in
+a tendency to regard style a little too independently of matter.  And
+there are still some who think that, after all, the style is the man;
+justified, in very great varieties, by the simple consideration of what
+he himself has to say, quite independently of any real or supposed
+connection with this or that literary age or school.  Let us close with
+the words of a most [16] versatile master of English--happily not yet
+included in Mr. Saintsbury's book--a writer who has dealt with all the
+perturbing influences of our century in a manner as classical, as
+idiomatic, as easy and elegant, as Steele's:
+
+"I wish you to observe," says Cardinal Newman, "that the mere dealer in
+words cares little or nothing for the subject which he is embellishing,
+but can paint and gild anything whatever to order; whereas the artist,
+whom I am acknowledging, has his great or rich visions before him, and
+his only aim is to bring out what he thinks or what he feels in a way
+adequate to the thing spoken of, and appropriate to the speaker."
+
+17th February 1886
+
+
+
+
+II.  AMIEL'S "JOURNAL INTIME"
+
+
+Amiel's Journal.  The Journal Intime of Henri-Frederic Amiel.
+Translated, with an Introduction and Notes, by Mrs. Humphry Ward. Two
+vols.  Macmillans.
+
+[19] CERTAIN influential expressions of opinion have attracted much
+curiosity to Amiel's Journal Intime, both in France, where the book has
+already made its mark, and in England, where Mrs. Humphry Ward's
+translation is likely to make it widely known among all serious lovers
+of good literature.  Easy, idiomatic, correct, this English version
+reads like an excellent original English work, and gives fresh proof
+that the work of translation, if it is to be done with effect, must be
+done by those who, possessing, like Mrs. Ward, original literary gifts,
+are willing to make a long act of self-denial or self-effacement [20]
+for the benefit of the public.  In this case, indeed, the work is not
+wholly one of self-effacement, for the accomplished translator has
+prefaced Amiel's Journal by an able and interesting essay of seventy
+pages on Amiel's life and intellectual position.  And certainly there
+is much in the book, thus effectively presented to the English reader,
+to attract those who interest themselves in the study of the finer
+types of human nature, of literary expression, of metaphysical and
+practical philosophy; to attract, above all, those interested in such
+philosophy, at points where it touches upon questions of religion, and
+especially at the present day.
+
+Henri-Frederic Amiel was born at Geneva in 1821.  Orphaned of both his
+parents at the age of twelve, his youth was necessarily "a little bare
+and forlorn," and a deep interest in religion became fixed in him
+early.  His student days coming to an end, the years which followed,
+from 1842 to 1848--Wanderjahre, in which he visited Holland, Italy,
+Sicily, and the principal towns of Germany--seem to have been the
+happiest of his life.  In 1849 he became a Professor at Geneva, and
+there is little more to tell of him in [21] the way of outward events.
+He published some volumes of verse; to the last apparently still only
+feeling after his true literary metier.  Those last seven years were a
+long struggle against the disease which ended his life, consumption, at
+the age of fifty-three.  The first entry in his Journal is in 1848.
+From that date to his death, a period of over twenty-five years, this
+Journal was the real object of all the energies of his richly-endowed
+nature: and from its voluminous sheets his literary executors have
+selected the deeply interesting volumes now presented in English.
+
+With all its gifts and opportunities it was a melancholy
+life--melancholy with something not altogether explained by the
+somewhat pessimistic philosophy exposed in the Journal, nor by the
+consumptive tendency of Amiel's physical constitution, causing him from
+a very early date to be much preoccupied with the effort to reconcile
+himself with the prospect of death, and reinforcing the far from
+sanguine temperament of one intellectually also a poitrinaire.
+
+You might think him at first sight only an admirable specimen of a
+thoroughly well-educated [22] man, full, of course, of the modern
+spirit; stimulated and formed by the influences of the varied
+intellectual world around him; and competing, in his turn, with many
+very various types of contemporary ability.  The use of his book to
+cultivated people might lie in its affording a kind of standard by
+which they might take measure of the maturity and producible quality of
+their own thoughts on a hundred important subjects.  He will write a
+page or two, giving evidence of that accumulated power and attainment
+which, with a more strenuous temperament, might have sufficed for an
+effective volume.  Continually, in the Journal, we pause over things
+that would rank for beauties among widely differing models of the best
+French prose.  He has said some things in Pascal's vein not unworthy of
+Pascal.  He had a right to compose "Thoughts": they have the force in
+them which makes up for their unavoidable want of continuity.
+
+But if, as Amiel himself challenges us to do, we look below the surface
+of a very equable and even smoothly accomplished literary manner, we
+discover, in high degree of development, that perplexity or complexity
+of soul, the expression [23] of which, so it be with an adequate
+literary gift, has its legitimate, because inevitable, interest for the
+modern reader.  Senancour and Maurice de Guerin in one, seem to have
+been supplemented here by a larger experience, a far greater education,
+than either of them had attained to.  So multiplex is the result that
+minds of quite opposite type might well discover in these pages their
+own special thought or humour, happily expressed at last (they might
+think) in precisely that just shade of language themselves had searched
+for in vain.  And with a writer so vivid and impressive as Amiel, those
+varieties of tendency are apt to present themselves as so many
+contending persons.  The perplexed experience gets the apparent
+clearness, as it gets also the animation, of a long dialogue; only, the
+disputants never part company, and there is no real conclusion.  "This
+nature," he observes, of one of the many phases of character he has
+discovered in himself, "is, as it were, only one of the men which exist
+in me.  It is one of my departments.  It is not the whole of my
+territory, the whole of my inner kingdom"; and again, "there are ten
+men in me, according to time, place, surrounding, [24] and occasion;
+and, in my restless diversity, I am for ever escaping myself."
+
+Yet, in truth, there are but two men in Amiel--two sufficiently opposed
+personalities, which the attentive reader may define for himself;
+compare with, and try by each other--as we think, correct also by each
+other.  There is the man, in him and in these pages, who would be "the
+man of disillusion," only that he has never really been "the man of
+desires"; and who seems, therefore, to have a double weariness about
+him.  He is akin, of course, to Obermann, to Rene, even to Werther,
+and, on our first introduction to him, we might think that we had to do
+only with one more of the vague "renunciants," who in real life
+followed those creations of fiction, and who, however delicate,
+interesting as a study, and as it were picturesque on the stage of
+life, are themselves, after all, essentially passive, uncreative, and
+therefore necessarily not of first-rate importance in literature.
+Taken for what it is worth, the expression of this mood--the culture of
+ennui for its own sake--is certainly carried to its ideal of negation
+by Amiel.  But the completer, the positive, soul, which will merely
+take [25] that mood into its service (its proper service, as we hold,
+is in counteraction to the vulgarity of purely positive natures) is
+also certainly in evidence in Amiel's "Thoughts"--that other, and far
+stronger person, in the long dialogue; the man, in short, possessed of
+gifts, not for the renunciation, but for the reception and use, of all
+that is puissant, goodly, and effective in life, and for the varied and
+adequate literary reproduction of it; who, under favourable
+circumstances, or even without them, will become critic, or poet, and
+in either case a creative force; and if he be religious (as Amiel was
+deeply religious) will make the most of "evidence," and almost
+certainly find a Church.
+
+The sort of purely poetic tendency in his mind, which made Amiel known
+in his own lifetime chiefly as a writer of verse, seems to be
+represented in these volumes by certain passages of natural
+description, always sincere, and sometimes rising to real distinction.
+In Switzerland it is easy to be pleased with scenery. But the record of
+such pleasure becomes really worth while when, as happens with Amiel,
+we feel that there has been, and with success, an intellectual [26]
+effort to get at the secret, the precise motive, of the pleasure; to
+define feeling, in this matter.  Here is a good description of an
+effect of fog, which we commend to foreigners resident in London:
+
+"Fog has certainly a poetry of its own--a grace, a dreamy charm.  It
+does for the daylight what a lamp does for us at night; it turns the
+mind towards meditation; it throws the soul back on itself.  The sun,
+as it were, sheds us abroad in nature, scatters and disperses us; mist
+draws us together and concentrates us--it is cordial, homely, charged
+with feeling.  The poetry of the sun has something of the epic in it;
+that of fog and mist is elegiac and religious.  Pantheism is the child
+of light; mist engenders faith in near protectors.  When the great
+world is shut off from us, the house becomes itself a small universe.
+Shrouded in perpetual mist, men love each other better; for the only
+reality then is the family, and, within the family, the heart; and the
+greatest thoughts come from the heart--so says the moralist."
+
+It is of Swiss fog, however, that he is speaking, as, in what follows,
+of Swiss frost:
+
+[27] "Three snowstorms this afternoon.  Poor blossoming plum-trees and
+peach-trees!  What a difference from six years ago, when the
+cherry-trees, adorned in their green spring dress and laden with their
+bridal flowers, smiled at my departure along the Vaudois fields, and
+the lilacs of Burgundy threw great gusts of perfume into my face!"  The
+weather is seldom talked of with so much real sensitiveness to it as in
+this:
+
+"The weather is rainy, the whole atmosphere grey; it is a time
+favourable to thought and meditation.  I have a liking for such days as
+these; they revive one's converse with oneself and make it possible to
+live the inner life: they are quiet and peaceful, like a song in a
+minor key.  We are nothing but thought, but we feel our life to its
+very centre.  Our very sensations turn to reverie.  It is a strange
+state of mind; it is like those silences in worship which are not the
+empty moments of devotion, but the full moments, and which are so
+because at such times the soul, instead of being polarized, dispersed,
+localized, in a single impression or thought, feels her own totality
+and is conscious of herself."
+
+[28] "Every landscape," he writes, "is, as it were, a state of the
+soul": and again, "At bottom there is but one subject of study; the
+forms and metamorphoses of mind: all other subjects may be reduced to
+that; all other studies bring us back to this study."  And, in truth,
+if he was occupied with the aspects of nature to such an excellent
+literary result, still, it was with nature only as a phenomenon of the
+moral order.  His interest, after all, is, consistently, that of the
+moralist (in no narrow sense) who deals, from predilection, with the
+sort of literary work which stirs men--stirs their intellect--through
+feeling; and with that literature, especially, as looked at through the
+means by which it became capable of thus commanding men. The powers,
+the culture, of the literary producer: there, is the centre of Amiel's
+curiosity.
+
+And if we take Amiel at his own word, we must suppose that but for
+causes, the chief of which were bad health and a not long life, he too
+would have produced monumental work, whose scope and character he would
+wish us to conjecture from his "Thoughts."  Such indications there
+certainly are in them.  He was [29] meant--we see it in the variety,
+the high level both of matter and style, the animation, the gravity, of
+one after another of these thoughts--on religion, on poetry, on
+politics in the highest sense; on their most abstract principles, and
+on the authors who have given them a personal colour; on the genius of
+those authors, as well as on their concrete works; on outlying isolated
+subjects, such as music, and special musical composers--he was meant,
+if people ever are meant for special lines of activity, for the best
+sort of criticism, the imaginative criticism; that criticism which is
+itself a kind of construction, or creation, as it penetrates, through
+the given literary or artistic product, into the mental and inner
+constitution of the producer, shaping his work.  Of such critical
+skill, cultivated with all the resources of Geneva in the nineteenth
+century, he has given in this Journal abundant proofs.  Corneille,
+Cherbuliez; Rousseau, Sismondi; Victor Hugo, and Joubert; Mozart and
+Wagner--all who are interested in these men will find a value in what
+Amiel has to say of them. Often, as for instance in his excellent
+criticism of Quinet, he has to make large exceptions [30]; limitations,
+skilfully effected by the way, in the course of a really appreciative
+estimate.  Still, through all, what we feel is that we have to do with
+one who criticises in this fearlessly equitable manner only because he
+is convinced that his subject is of a real literary importance.  A
+powerful, intellectual analysis of some well-marked subject, in such
+form as makes literature enduring, is indeed what the world might have
+looked for from him: those institutes of aesthetics, for instance,
+which might exist, after Lessing and Hegel, but which certainly do not
+exist yet.  "Construction," he says--artistic or literary
+construction--"rests upon feeling, instinct, and," alas! also, "upon
+will."  The instinct, at all events, was certainly his. And over and
+above that he had possessed himself of the art of expressing, in quite
+natural language, very difficult thoughts; those abstract and
+metaphysical conceptions especially, in which German mind has been
+rich, which are bad masters, but very useful ministers towards the
+understanding, towards an analytical survey, of all that the intellect
+has produced.
+
+But something held him back: not so much [31] a reluctancy of
+temperament, or of physical constitution (common enough cause why men
+of undeniable gifts fail of commensurate production) but a cause purely
+intellectual--the presence in him, namely, of a certain vein of
+opinion; that other, constituent but contending, person, in his complex
+nature.  "The relation of thought to action," he writes, "filled my
+mind on waking, and I found myself carried towards a bizarre formula,
+which seems to have something of the night still clinging about it.
+Action is but coarsened thought."  That is but an ingenious
+metaphysical point, as he goes on to show.  But, including in "action"
+that literary production in which the line of his own proper activity
+lay, he followed--followed often--that fastidious utterance to a
+cynical and pessimistic conclusion.
+
+Maia, as he calls it, the empty "Absolute" of the Buddhist, the
+"Infinite," the "All," of which those German metaphysicians he loved
+only too well have had so much to say: this was for ever to give the
+go-by to all positive, finite, limited interests whatever.  The vague
+pretensions of an abstract expression acted on him with all the force
+of a prejudice.  "The ideal," he admits, [32] "poisons for me all
+imperfect possession"; and again, "The Buddhist tendency in me blunts
+the faculty of free self-government, and weakens the power of action. I
+feel a terror of action and am only at ease in the impersonal,
+disinterested, and objective line of thought."  But then, again, with
+him "action" meant chiefly literary production.  He quotes with
+approval those admirable words from Goethe, "In der Beschrankung zeigt
+sich erst der Meister"; yet still always finds himself wavering between
+"frittering myself away on the infinitely little, and longing after
+what is unknown and distant."  There is, doubtless, over and above the
+physical consumptive tendency, an instinctive turn of sentiment in this
+touching confession.  Still, what strengthened both tendencies was that
+metaphysical prejudice for the "Absolute," the false intellectual
+conscience.  "I have always avoided what attracted me, and turned my
+back upon the point where secretly I desired to be"; and, of course,
+that is not the way to a free and generous productivity, in literature,
+or in anything else; though in literature, with Amiel at all events, it
+meant the fastidiousness which [33] is incompatible with any but the
+very best sort of production.
+
+And as that abstract condition of Maia, to the kind and quantity of
+concrete literary production we hold to have been originally possible
+for him; so was the religion he actually attained, to what might have
+been the development of his profoundly religious spirit, had he been
+able to see that the old-fashioned Christianity is itself but the
+proper historic development of the true "essence" of the New Testament.
+There, again, is the constitutional shrinking, through a kind of
+metaphysical prejudice, from the concrete--that fear of the actual--in
+this case, of the Church of history; to which the admissions, which
+form so large a part of these volumes, naturally lead.  Assenting, on
+probable evidence, to so many of the judgments of the religious sense,
+he failed to see the equally probable evidence there is for the
+beliefs, the peculiar direction of men's hopes, which complete those
+judgments harmoniously, and bring them into connection with the facts,
+the venerable institutions of the past--with the lives of the saints.
+By failure, as we think, of that historic sense, of [34] which he could
+speak so well, he got no further in this direction than the glacial
+condition of rationalistic Geneva.  "Philosophy," he says, "can never
+replace religion."  Only, one cannot see why it might not replace a
+religion such as his: a religion, after all, much like Seneca's.
+
+"I miss something," he himself confesses, "common worship, a positive
+religion, shared with other people.  Ah!  when will the Church to which
+I belong in heart rise into being?"  To many at least of those who can
+detect the ideal through the disturbing circumstances which belong to
+all actual institutions in the world, it was already there. Pascal,
+from considerations to which Amiel was no stranger, came to the large
+hopes of the Catholic Church; Amiel stopped short at a faith almost
+hopeless; and by stopping short just there he really failed, as we
+think, of intellectual consistency, and missed that appeasing influence
+which his nature demanded as the condition of its full activity, as a
+force, an intellectual force, in the world--in the special business of
+his life.  "Welcome the unforeseen," he says again, by way of a counsel
+of perfection in the matter of culture, "but give to [35] your life
+unity, and bring the unforeseen within the lines of your plan."  Bring,
+we should add, the Great Possibility at least within the lines of your
+plan--your plan of action or production; of morality; especially of
+your conceptions of religion. And still, Amiel too, be it remembered
+(we are not afraid to repeat it), has said some things in Pascal's vein
+not unworthy of Pascal.
+
+And so we get only the Journal.  Watching in it, in the way we have
+suggested, the contention of those two men, those two minds in him, and
+observing how the one might have ascertained and corrected the
+shortcomings of the other, we certainly understand, and can sympathize
+with Amiel's despondency in the retrospect of a life which seemed to
+have been but imperfectly occupied.  But, then, how excellent a
+literary product, after all, the Journal is.  And already we have found
+that it improves also on second reading.  A book of "thoughts" should
+be a book that may be fairly dipped into, and yield good quotable
+sayings.  Here are some of its random offerings:
+
+"Look twice, if what you want is a just [36] conception; look once, if
+what you want is a sense of beauty."
+
+"It is not history which teaches conscience to be honest; it is the
+conscience which educates history.  Fact is corrupting--it is we who
+correct it by the persistence of our ideal."
+
+"To do easily what is difficult for others is the mark of talent.  To
+do what is impossible for talent is the mark of genius."
+
+"Duty has the virtue of making us feel the reality of a positive world,
+while at the same time detaching us from it."
+
+"As it is impossible to be outside God, the best is consciously to
+dwell in Him."
+
+"He also (the Son of Man), He above all, is the great Misunderstood,
+the least comprehended."
+
+"The pensee writer is to the philosopher what the dilettante is to the
+artist."
+
+There are some, we know, who hold that genius cannot, in the nature of
+things, be "sterile"; that there are no "mute" Miltons, or the like.
+Well! genius, or only a very distinguished talent, the gift which Amiel
+nursed so jealously did come into evidence.  And the [37] reader, we
+hope, sees also already how well his English translator has done her
+work.  She may justly feel, as part at least of the reward of a labour
+which must have occupied much time, so many of the freshest hours of
+mind and spirit, that she has done something to help her author in the
+achievement of his, however discouraged still irrepressible, desire, by
+giving additional currency to a book which the best sort of readers
+will recognize as an excellent and certainly very versatile companion,
+not to be forgotten.
+
+17th March 1886
+
+
+
+
+III.  BROWNING
+
+
+An Introduction to the Study of Browning. By Arthur Symons.  Cassells.
+
+
+[41] WHETHER it be true or not that Mr. Browning is justly chargeable
+with "obscurity"--with a difficulty of manner, that is, beyond the
+intrinsic difficulty of his matter--it is very probable that an
+Introduction to the study of his works, such as this of Mr. Symons,
+will add to the number of his readers.  Mr. Symons's opening essay on
+the general characteristics of Mr. Browning is a just and acceptable
+appreciation of his poetry as a whole, well worth reading, even at this
+late day.  We find in Mr. Symons the thoughtful and practised yet
+enthusiastic student in literature--in intellectual problems; always
+quiet and sane, praising Mr. Browning with tact, with a real refinement
+and grace; saying well many [42] things which every competent reader of
+the great poet must feel to be true; devoting to the subject he loves a
+critical gift so considerable as to make us wish for work from his
+hands of larger scope than this small volume. His book is, according to
+his intention, before all things a useful one.  Appreciating Mr.
+Browning fairly, as we think, in all his various efforts, his aim is to
+point his readers to the best, the indisputable, rather than to the
+dubious portions of his author's work.  Not content with his own
+excellent general criticism of Mr. Browning, he guides the reader to
+his works, or division of work, seriatim, making of each a distinct and
+special study, and giving a great deal of welcome information about the
+poems, the circumstances of their composition, and the like, with
+delightful quotations. Incidentally, his Introduction has the interest
+of a brief but effective selection from Mr. Browning's poems; and he
+has added an excellent biography.
+
+Certainly we shall not quarrel with Mr. Symons for reckoning Mr.
+Browning, among English poets, second to Shakespeare alone--"He comes
+very near the gigantic total of [43] Shakespeare."  The quantity of his
+work?  Yes! that too, in spite of a considerable unevenness, is a sign
+of genius.  "So large, indeed, appear to be his natural endowments that
+we cannot feel as if even thirty volumes would have come near to
+exhausting them."  Imaginatively, indeed, Mr. Browning has been a
+multitude of persons; only (as Shakespeare's only untried style was the
+simple one) almost never simple ones; and certainly he has controlled
+them all to profoundly interesting artistic ends by his own powerful
+personality.  The world and all its action, as a show of thought, that
+is the scope of his work.  It makes him pre-eminently a modern poet--a
+poet of the self-pondering, perfectly educated, modern world, which,
+having come to the end of all direct and purely external experiences,
+must necessarily turn for its entertainment to the world within:--
+
+"The men and women who live and move in that new world of his creation
+are as varied as life itself; they are kings and beggars, saints and
+lovers, great captains, poets, painters, musicians, priests and Popes,
+Jews, gipsies and dervishes, street-girls, princesses, dancers with the
+wicked [44] witchery of the daughter of Herodias, wives with the
+devotion of the wife of Brutus, joyous girls and malevolent
+grey-beards, statesmen, cavaliers, soldiers of humanity, tyrants and
+bigots, ancient sages and modern spiritualists, heretics, scholars,
+scoundrels, devotees, rabbis, persons of quality and men of low
+estate--men and women as multiform as nature or society has made them."
+
+The individual, the personal, the concrete, as distinguished from, yet
+revealing in its fulness, the general, the universal--that is Mr.
+Browning's chosen subject-matter: "Every man is for him an epitome of
+the universe, a centre of creation."  It is always the particular soul,
+and the particular act or episode, as the flower of the particular
+soul--the act or episode by which its quality comes to the test--in
+which he interests us.  With him it is always "a drama of the interior,
+a tragedy or comedy of the soul, to see thereby how each soul becomes
+conscious of itself."  In the Preface to the later edition of Sordello,
+Mr. Browning himself told us that to him little else seems worth study
+except the development of a soul, the incidents, the story, of that.
+And, [45] in fact, the intellectual public generally agrees with him.
+It is because he has ministered with such marvellous vigour, and
+variety, and fine skill to this interest, that he is the most modern,
+to modern people the most important, of poets.
+
+So much for Mr. Browning's matter; for his manner, we hold Mr. Symons
+right in thinking him a master of all the arts of poetry.  "These
+extraordinary little poems," says Mr. Symons of "Johannes Agricola" and
+"Porphyria's Lover"--
+
+"Reveal not only an imagination of intense fire and heat, but an almost
+finished art--a power of conceiving subtle mental complexities with
+clearness and of expressing them in a picturesque form and in perfect
+lyric language.  Each poem renders a single mood, and renders it
+completely."
+
+Well, after all, that is true of a large portion of Mr. Browning's
+work.  A curious, an erudite artist, certainly, he is to some extent an
+experimenter in rhyme or metre, often hazardous.  But in spite of the
+dramatic rudeness which is sometimes of the idiosyncrasy, the true and
+native colour of his multitudinous dramatis personae, or monologists,
+Mr. Symons is right in [46] laying emphasis on the grace, the finished
+skill, the music, native and ever ready to the poet himself--tender,
+manly, humorous, awe-stricken--when speaking in his own proper person.
+Music herself, the analysis of the musical soul, in the characteristic
+episodes of its development is a wholly new range of poetic subject in
+which Mr. Browning is simply unique. Mr. Symons tells us:--
+
+"When Mr. Browning was a mere boy, it is recorded that he debated
+within himself whether he should not become a painter or a musician as
+well as a poet.  Finally, though not, I believe, for a good many years,
+he decided in the negative.  But the latent qualities of painter and
+musician had developed themselves in his poetry, and much of his finest
+and very much of his most original verse is that which speaks the
+language of painter and musician as it had never before been spoken.
+No English poet before him has ever excelled his utterances on music,
+none has so much as rivalled his utterances on art.  'Abt Vogler' is
+the richest, deepest, fullest poem on music in the language.  It is not
+the theories of the poet, but the instincts of the [47] musician, that
+it speaks.  'Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha,' another special poem on
+music, is unparalleled for ingenuity of technical interpretation: 'A
+Toccata of Galuppi's' is as rare a rendering as can anywhere be found
+of the impressions and sensations caused by a musical piece; but 'Abt
+Vogler' is a very glimpse into the heaven where music is born."
+
+It is true that "when the head has to be exercised before the heart
+there is chilling of sympathy."  Of course, so intellectual a poet (and
+only the intellectual poet, as we have pointed out, can be adequate to
+modern demands) will have his difficulties.  They were a part of the
+poet's choice of vocation, and he was fully aware of them:--
+
+"Mr. Browning might say, as his wife said in an early preface, I never
+mistook pleasure for the final cause of poetry, nor leisure for the
+hour of the poet--as indeed he has himself said, to much the same
+effect, in a letter printed many years ago: I never pretended to offer
+such literature as should be a substitute for a cigar or a game at
+dominoes to an idle man."
+
+"Moreover, while a writer who deals with [48] easy themes has no excuse
+if he is not pellucid to a glance, one who employs his intellect and
+imagination on high and hard questions has a right to demand a
+corresponding closeness of attention, and a right to say with Bishop
+Butler, in answer to a similar complaint: 'It must be acknowledged that
+some of the following discourses are very abstruse and difficult, or,
+if you please, obscure; but I must take leave to add that those alone
+are judges whether or no, and how far this is a fault, who are judges
+whether or no, and how far it might have been avoided--those only who
+will be at the trouble to understand what is here said, and to see how
+far the things here insisted upon, and not other things, might have
+been put in a plainer manner.'"
+
+In Mr. Symons's opinion Pippa Passes is Mr. Browning's most perfect
+piece of work, for pregnancy of intellect, combined with faultless
+expression in a perfectly novel yet symmetrical outline: and he is very
+likely right.  He is certainly right in thinking Mas they formerly
+stood, Mr. Browning's most delightful volumes.  It is only to be
+regretted [49] that in the later collected edition of the works those
+two magical old volumes are broken up and scattered under other
+headings.  We think also that Mr. Symons in his high praise does no
+more than justice to The Ring and the Book.  The Ring and the Book is
+at once the largest and the greatest of Mr. Browning's works, the
+culmination of his dramatic method, and the turning-point more
+decisively than Dramatis Personae of his style.  Yet just here he
+rightly marks a change in Mr. Browning's manner:--
+
+"Not merely the manner of presentment, the substance, and also the
+style and versification have undergone a change.  I might point to the
+profound intellectual depth of certain pieces as its characteristic,
+or, equally, to the traces here and there of an apparent carelessness
+of workmanship; or, yet again, to the new and very marked partiality
+for scenes and situations of English and modern rather than mediaeval
+and foreign life."
+
+Noble as much of Mr. Browning's later work is, full of intellect, alive
+with excellent passages (in the first volume of the Dramatic Idyls [50]
+perhaps more powerful than in any earlier work); notwithstanding all
+that, we think the change here indicated matter of regret.  After all,
+we have to conjure up ideal poets for ourselves out of those who stand
+in or behind the range of volumes on our book-shelves; and our ideal
+Browning would have for his entire structural type those two volumes of
+Men and Women with Pippa Passes.
+
+Certainly, it is a delightful world to which Mr. Browning has given us
+the key, and those volumes a delightful gift to our age-record of so
+much that is richest in the world of things, and men, and their
+works--all so much the richer by the great intellect, the great
+imagination, which has made the record, transmuted them into
+imperishable things of art:--
+
+"'With souls should souls have place'--this, with Mr. Browning, is
+something more than a mere poetical conceit.  It is the condensed
+expression of an experience, a philosophy, and an art.  Like the lovers
+of his lyric, Mr. Browning has renounced the selfish serenities of
+wild-wood and dream-palace; he has fared up and down among men,
+listening to the music of humanity, [51] observing the acts of men, and
+he has sung what he has heard, and he has painted what he has seen.
+Will the work live? we ask; and we can answer only in his own words--
+
+  It lives,
+  If precious be the soul of man to man."
+
+9th November 1887
+
+
+
+
+IV.  "ROBERT ELSMERE"
+
+
+[55] THOSE who, in this bustling age, turn to fiction not merely for a
+little passing amusement, but for profit, for the higher sort of
+pleasure, will do well, we think (after a conscientious perusal on our
+own part) to bestow careful reading on Robert Elsmere.  A chef d'oeuvre
+of that kind of quiet evolution of character through circumstance,
+introduced into English literature by Miss Austen, and carried to
+perfection in France by George Sand (who is more to the point, because,
+like Mrs. Ward, she was not afraid to challenge novel-readers to an
+interest in religious questions), it abounds in sympathy with people as
+we find them, in aspiration towards something better--towards a certain
+ideal--in a refreshing sense of second thoughts everywhere.  The author
+clearly has developed a remarkable natural aptitude for literature by
+liberal reading and most patient care [56] in composition--composition
+in that narrower sense which is concerned with the building of a good
+sentence; as also in that wider sense, which ensures, in a work like
+this, with so many joints, so many currents of interest, a final unity
+of impression an the part of the reader, and easy transition by him
+from one to the other.  Well-used to works of fiction which tell all
+they have to tell in one thin volume, we have read Mrs. Ward's three
+volumes with unflagging readiness.
+
+For, in truth, that quiet method of evolution, which she pursues
+undismayed to the end, requires a certain lengthiness; and the reader's
+reward will be in a secure sense that he has been in intercourse with
+no mere flighty remnants, but with typical forms, of character, firmly
+and fully conceived.  We are persuaded that the author might have
+written a novel which should have been all shrewd impressions of
+society, or all humorous impressions of country life, or all quiet fun
+and genial caricature.  Actually she has chosen to combine something of
+each of these with a very sincerely felt religious interest; and who
+will deny that to trace the influence of religion upon human character
+is one of the [57] legitimate functions of the novel?  In truth, the
+modern "novel of character" needs some such interest, to lift it
+sufficiently above the humdrum of life; as men's horizons are enlarged
+by religion, of whatever type it may be--and we may say at once that
+the religious type which is dear to Mrs. Ward, though avowedly "broad,"
+is not really the broadest.  Having conceived her work thus, she has
+brought a rare instinct for probability and nature to the difficult
+task of combining this religious motive and all the learned thought it
+involves, with a very genuine interest in many  varieties of average
+mundane life.
+
+We should say that the author's special ethical gift lay in a
+delicately intuitive sympathy, not, perhaps, with all phases of
+character, but certainly with the very varied class of persons
+represented in these volumes.  It may be congruous with this, perhaps,
+that her success should be more assured in dealing with the characters
+of women than with those of men.  The men who pass before us in her
+pages, though real and tangible and effective enough, seem,
+nevertheless, from time to time to reveal their joinings.  They are
+composite of many different men we seem to have [58] known, and fancy
+we could detach again from the ensemble and from each other.  And their
+goodness, when they are good, is--well! a little conventional; the kind
+of goodness that men themselves discount rather largely in their
+estimates of each other.  Robert himself is certainly worth knowing--a
+really attractive union of manliness and saintliness, of shrewd sense
+and unworldly aims, and withal with that kindness and pity the absence
+of which so often abates the actual value of those other gifts.  Mrs.
+Ward's literary power is sometimes seen at its best (it is a proof of
+her high cultivation of this power that so it should be) in the
+analysis of minor characters, both male and female. Richard Leyburn,
+deceased before the story begins, but warm in the memory of the few who
+had known him, above all of his great-souled daughter Catherine,
+strikes us, with his religious mysticism, as being in this way one of
+the best things in the book:--
+
+"Poor Richard Leyburn!  Yet where had the defeat lain?
+
+"'Was he happy in his school life?' Robert asked gently.  'Was teaching
+what he liked?'
+
+[59] "'Oh! yes, only--' and then added hurriedly, as though drawn on in
+spite of herself by the grave sympathy of his look, 'I never knew
+anybody so good who thought himself of so little account.  He always
+believed that he had missed everything, wasted everything, and that
+anybody else would have made infinitely more out of his life.  He vas
+always blaming, scourging himself.  And all the time he was the
+noblest, purest, most devoted--'
+
+"She stopped.  Her voice had passed beyond her control.  Elsmere was
+startled by the feeling she showed.  Evidently he had touched one of
+the few sore places in this pure heart.  It was as though her memory of
+her father had in it elements of almost intolerable pathos, as though
+the child's brooding love and loyalty were in perpetual protest even
+now after this lapse of years against the verdict which an
+over-scrupulous, despondent soul had pronounced upon itself.  Did she
+feel that he had gone uncomforted out of life--even by her--even by
+religion?  Was that the sting?"
+
+A little later she gives the record of his last hours:--
+
+[60] "'Catherine!  Life is harder, the narrower way narrower than ever.
+I die--and memory caught still the piteous long-drawn breath by which
+the voice was broken--'in much--much perplexity about many things.  You
+have a clear soul, an iron will.  Strengthen the others. Bring them
+safe to the day of account.'"
+
+And then the smaller--some of them, ethically, very small--women; Lady
+Wynnstay, Mrs. Fleming, Mrs. Thornburgh; above all, Robert's delightful
+Irish mother, and Mrs. Darcy; how excellent they are! Mrs. Darcy we
+seem to have known, yet cannot have enough of, rejoiced to catch sight
+of her capital letter on the page, as we read on.  In truth, if a high
+and ideal purpose, really learned in the school of Wordsworth and among
+the Westmorland hills which Mrs. Ward describes so sympathetically,
+with fitting dignity and truth of style, has accompanied the author
+throughout; no less plain, perhaps more pleasing to some readers, is
+the quiet humour which never fails her, and tests, while it relieves,
+the sincerity of her more serious thinking:--
+
+"At last Mrs. Darcy fluttered off, only, however, to come hurrying back
+with little, short, [61] scudding steps, to implore them all to come to
+tea with her as soon as possible in the garden that was her special
+hobby, and in her last new summer-house.
+
+"'I build two or three every summer,' she said; 'now there are
+twenty-one!  Roger laughs at me,' and there was a momentary bitterness
+in the little eerie face; 'but how can one live without hobbies?
+That's one--then I've two more.  My album--oh, you will all write in my
+album, won't you?  When I was young--when I was Maid of Honour'--and
+she drew herself up slightly--'everybody had albums. Even the dear
+Queen herself!  I remember how she made M. Guizot write in it;
+something quite stupid, after all.  Those hobbies--the garden and the
+album--are quite harmless, aren't they?  They hurt nobody, do they?'
+Her voice dropped a little, with a pathetic expostulating intonation in
+it, as of one accustomed to be rebuked."
+
+Mrs. Ward's women, as we have said, are more organic, sympathetic, and
+really creative, than her men, and make their vitality evident by
+becoming, quite naturally, the centres of very [62] life-like and
+dramatic groups of people, family or social; while her men are the very
+genii of isolation and division.  It is depressing to see so really
+noble a character as Catherine soured, as we feel, and lowered, as time
+goes on, from the happy resignation of the first volume (in which
+solemn, beautiful, and entire, and so very real, she is like a poem of
+Wordsworth) down to the mere passivity of the third volume, and the
+closing scene of Robert Elsmere's days, very exquisitely as this
+episode of unbelieving yet saintly biography has been conceived and
+executed.  Catherine certainly, for one, has no profit in the
+development of Robert's improved gospel.  The "stray sheep," we think,
+has by no means always the best of the argument, and her story is
+really a sadder, more testing one than his.  Though both alike, we
+admit it cordially, have a genuine sense of the eternal moral charm of
+"renunciation," something even of the thirst for martyrdom, for those
+wonderful, inaccessible, cold heights of the Imitation, eternal also in
+their aesthetic charm.
+
+These characters and situations, pleasant or profoundly interesting,
+which it is good to have [63] come across, are worked out, not in rapid
+sketches, nor by hazardous epigram, but more securely by patient
+analysis; and though we have said that Mrs. Ward is most successful in
+female portraiture, her own mind and culture have an unmistakable
+virility and grasp and scientific firmness.  This indispensable
+intellectual process, which will be relished by admirers of George
+Eliot, is relieved constantly by the sense of a charming landscape
+background, for the most part English.  Mrs. Ward has been a true
+disciple in the school of Wordsworth, and really undergone its
+influence.  Her Westmorland scenery is more than a mere background; its
+spiritual and, as it were, personal hold on persons, as understood by
+the great poet of the Lakes, is seen actually at work, in the
+formation, in the refining, of character.  It has been a stormy day:--
+
+"Before him the great hollow of High Fell was just coming out from the
+white mists surging round it.  A shaft of sunlight lay across its upper
+end, and he caught a marvellous apparition of a sunlit valley hung in
+air, a pale strip of blue above it, a white thread of stream wavering
+[64] through it, and all around it and below it the rolling
+rain-clouds."
+
+There is surely something of "natural magic" in that!  The wilder
+capacity of the mountains is brought out especially in a weird story of
+a haunted girl, an episode well illustrating the writer's more
+imaginative psychological power; for, in spite of its quiet general
+tenour, the book has its adroitly managed elements of
+sensation--witness the ghost, in which the average human susceptibility
+to supernatural terrors takes revenge on the sceptical Mr. Wendover,
+and the love-scene with Madame de Netteville, which, like those other
+exciting passages, really furthers the development of the proper
+ethical interests of the book.  The Oxford episodes strike us as being
+not the author's strongest work, as being comparatively conventional,
+coming, as they do, in a book whose predominant note is reality.  Yet
+her sympathetic command over, her power of evoking, the genius of
+places, is clearly shown in the touches by which she brings out the so
+well-known grey and green of college and garden--touches which bring
+the real Oxford to the mind's eye better than any elaborate description
+[65] --for the beauty of the place itself resides also in delicate
+touches.  The book passes indeed, successively, through distinct,
+broadly conceived phases of scenery, which, becoming veritable parts of
+its texture, take hold on the reader, as if in an actual sojourn in the
+places described.  Surrey--its genuine though almost suburban wildness,
+with the vicarage and the wonderful abode, above all, the ancient
+library of Mr. Wendover, all is admirably done, the landscape naturally
+counting for a good deal in the development of the profoundly
+meditative, country-loving souls of Mrs. Ward's favourite characters.
+
+Well!  Mrs. Ward has chosen to use all these varied gifts and
+accomplishments for a certain purpose.  Briefly, Robert Elsmere, a
+priest of the Anglican Church, marries a very religious woman; there is
+the perfection of "mutual love"; at length he has doubts about
+"historic Christianity"; he gives up his orders; carries his learning,
+his fine intellect, his goodness, nay, his saintliness, into a kind of
+Unitarianism; the wife becomes more intolerant than ever; there is a
+long and faithful effort on both sides, eventually successful, on the
+part of these mentally [66] divided people, to hold together; ending
+with the hero's death, the genuine piety and resignation of which is
+the crowning touch in the author's able, learned, and thoroughly
+sincere apology for Robert Elsmere's position.
+
+For good or evil, the sort of doubts which troubled Robert Elsmere are
+no novelty in literature, and we think the main issue of the "religious
+question" is not precisely where Mrs. Ward supposes--that it has
+advanced, in more senses than one, beyond the point raised by Renan's
+Vie de Jesus.  Of course, a man such as Robert Elsmere came to be ought
+not to be a clergyman of the Anglican Church.  The priest is still, and
+will, we think, remain, one of the necessary types of humanity; and he
+is untrue to his type, unless, with whatever inevitable doubts in this
+doubting age, he feels, on the whole, the preponderance in it of those
+influences which make for faith.  It is his triumph to achieve as much
+faith as possible in an age of negation.  Doubtless, it is part of the
+ideal of the Anglican Church that, under certain safeguards, it should
+find room for latitudinarians even among its clergy.  Still, with
+these, as [67] with all other genuine priests, it is the positive not
+the negative result that justifies the position.  We have little
+patience with those liberal clergy who dwell on nothing else than the
+difficulties of faith and the propriety of concession to the opposite
+force.  Yes! Robert Elsmere was certainly right in ceasing to be a
+clergyman.  But it strikes us as a blot on his philosophical
+pretensions that he should have been both so late in perceiving the
+difficulty, and then so sudden and trenchant in dealing with so great
+and complex a question.  Had he possessed a perfectly philosophic or
+scientific temper he would have hesitated.  This is not the place to
+discuss in detail the theological position very ably and seriously
+argued by Mrs. Ward.  All we can say is that, one by one, Elsmere's
+objections may be met by considerations of the same genus, and not less
+equal weight, relatively to a world so obscure, in its origin and
+issues, as that in which we live.
+
+Robert Elsmere was a type of a large class of minds which cannot be
+sure that the sacred story is true.  It is philosophical, doubtless,
+and a duty to the intellect to recognize our doubts, [68] to locate
+them, perhaps to give them practical effect.  It may be also a moral
+duty to do this.  But then there is also a large class of minds which
+cannot be sure it is false--minds of very various degrees of
+conscientiousness and intellectual power, up to the highest.  They will
+think those who are quite sure it is false unphilosophical through lack
+of doubt.  For their part, they make allowance in their scheme of life
+for a great possibility, and with some of them that bare concession of
+possibility (the subject of it being what it is) becomes the most
+important fact in the world.
+
+The recognition of it straightway opens wide the door to hope and love;
+and such persons are, as we fancy they always will be, the nucleus of a
+Church.  Their particular phase of doubt, of philosophic uncertainty,
+has been the secret of millions of good Christians, multitudes of
+worthy priests.  They knit themselves to believers, in various degrees,
+of all ages.  As against the purely negative action of the scientific
+spirit, the high-pitched Grey, the theistic Elsmere, the "ritualistic
+priest," the quaint Methodist Fleming, both so admirably sketched,
+present [69] perhaps no unconquerable differences.  The question of the
+day is not between one and another of these, but in another sort of
+opposition, well defined by Mrs. Ward herself, between--
+
+"Two estimates of life--the estimate which is the offspring of the
+scientific spirit, and which is for ever making the visible world
+fairer and more desirable in mortal eyes; and the estimate of Saint
+Augustine."
+
+To us, the belief in God, in goodness at all, in the story of
+Bethlehem, does not rest on evidence so diverse in character and force
+as Mrs. Ward supposes.  At his death Elsmere has started what to us
+would be a most unattractive place of worship, where he preaches an
+admirable sermon on the purely human aspect of the life of Christ.  But
+we think there would be very few such sermons in the new church or
+chapel, for the interest of that life could hardly be very varied, when
+all such sayings as that "though He was rich, for our sakes He became
+poor" have ceased to be applicable to it.  It is the infinite nature of
+Christ which has led to such diversities of genius in preaching as St.
+Francis, and Taylor, and Wesley.
+
+[70] And after all we fear we have been unjust to Mrs. Ward's work. If
+so, we should read once more, and advise our readers to read, the
+profoundly thought and delicately felt chapter--chapter forty-three in
+her third volume--in which she describes the final spiritual reunion,
+on a basis of honestly diverse opinion, of the husband and wife.  Her
+view, we think, could hardly have been presented more attractively.
+For ourselves we can only thank her for pleasure and profit in the
+reading of her book, which has refreshed actually the first and deepest
+springs of feeling, while it has charmed the literary sense.
+
+28th March 1888
+
+
+
+
+V.  THEIR MAJESTIES' SERVANTS
+
+
+Annals of the English Stage, from Thomas Betterton to Edmund Kean. By
+Dr. Doran, F.S.A.  Edited and revised by Robert W. Lowe.  John C. Nimmo.
+
+[73] THOSE who care for the history of the drama as a branch of
+literature, or for the history of that general development of human
+manners of which the stage has been always an element and a very lively
+measure or index, will be grateful to Mr. Lowe for this revised and
+charmingly illustrated edition of Dr. Doran's pleasant old book.  Three
+hundred years and more of a singularly varied and vivacious sort of
+history!--it was a bold thing to undertake; and Dr. Doran did his work
+well--did it with adequate "love."  These Annals of the English Stage,
+from Thomas Betterton to Edmund [74] Kean, are full of the colours of
+life in their most emphatic and motley contrasts, as is natural in
+proportion as the stage itself concentrates and artificially
+intensifies the character and conditions of ordinary life.  The long
+story of "Their Majesties' Servants," treated thus, becomes from age to
+age an agreeable addition to those personal memoirs--Evelyn's, and the
+like--which bring the influence and charm of a visible countenance to
+the dry tenour of ordinary history, and the critic's work upon it
+naturally becomes, in the first place, a mere gathering of some of the
+flowers which lie so abundantly scattered here and there.
+
+A history of the English stage must necessarily be in part a history of
+one of the most delightful of subjects--old London, of which from time
+to time we catch extraordinary glimpses in Dr. Doran's pages. From 1682
+to 1695, as if the Restoration had not come, there was but one theatre
+in London.  In Charles I.'s time Shoreditch was the dramatic quarter of
+London par excellence.--
+
+"The popular taste was not only there directed towards the stage, but
+it was a district [75] wherein many actors dwelt, and consequently
+died.  The baptismal register of St.  Leonard's, Shoreditch, contains
+Christian names which appear to have been chosen with reference to the
+heroines of Shakespeare; and the record of burials bears the name of
+many an old actor of mark whose remains now lie within the churchyard."
+
+Earlier and later, the Surrey side of the Thames was the favourite
+locality for play-houses.  The Globe was there, and the Bear-garden,
+represented in Mr. Lowe's luxurious new edition by delightful woodcuts.
+For this new edition adds to the original merits of the work the very
+substantial charm of abundant illustrations, first-rate in subject and
+execution, and of three kinds--copper-plate likenesses of actors and
+other personages connected with theatrical history; a series of
+delicate, picturesque, highly detailed woodcuts of theatrical
+topography, chiefly the little old theatres; and, by way of tail-pieces
+to the chapters, a second series of woodcuts of a vigour and reality of
+information, within very limited compass, which make one think of
+Callot and the German [76] "little masters," depicting Garrick and
+other famous actors in their favourite scenes.
+
+In the vignettes of the Bear-garden and the Swan Theatre, for instance,
+the artist has managed to throw over his minute plate a wonderful air
+of pleasantness, a light which, though very delicate, is very
+theatrical.  The river and its tiny craft, the little gabled houses of
+the neighbourhood, with a garden or two dropped in, tell delightfully
+in the general effect.  They are worthy to rank with Cruikshank's
+illustrations of Jack Sheppard and The Tower of London, as mementoes of
+the little old smokeless London before the century of Johnson, though
+that, too, as Dr. Doran bears witness, knew what fogs could be.  Then
+there is the Fortune Theatre near Cripplegate, and, most charming of
+all, two views--street and river fronts--the Duke's Theatre, Dorset
+Garden, in Fleet Street, designed by Wren, decorated by
+Gibbons--graceful, naive, dainty, like the work of a very refined
+Palladio, working minutely, perhaps more delicately than at Vicenza, in
+the already crowded city on the Thames side.
+
+[77] The portraits of actors and other theatrical celebrities range
+from Elizabeth, from the melodramatic costumes and faces of the
+contemporaries of Shakespeare, to the conventional costumes, the rotund
+expression, of the age of the Georges, masking a power of imaginative
+impersonation probably unknown in Shakespeare's day. Edward Burbage,
+like Shakespeare's own portrait, is, we venture to think, a trifle
+stolid.  Field--Nathaniel Field, author of The Fatal Dowry, and an
+actor of reputation--in his singular costume, and with a face of
+perhaps not quite reassuring subtlety, might pass for the original of
+those Italian, or Italianized, voluptuaries in sin which pleased the
+fancy of Shakespeare's age.  Mixed up with many striking, thoroughly
+dramatic physiognomies, it must be confessed that some of these
+portraits scarcely help at all to explain the power of the players to
+whom they belonged.  That, perhaps, is what we might naturally expect;
+the more, in proportion as the dramatic art is a matter in which many
+very subtle and indirect channels to men's sympathy are called into
+play.  Edward Alleyn, from the portrait preserved at [78] his noble
+foundation at Dulwich, like a fine Holbein, figures, in blent strength
+and delicacy, as a genial, or perhaps jovial, soul, finding time for
+sentiment,--Prynne (included, we suppose, in this company, like the
+skull at the feast) as a likable if somewhat melancholic young man;
+while Garrick and his wife playing cards, after Zoffany, present a pair
+of just very nice young people.  On the other hand, the tail-pieces,
+chiefly devoted to Garrick, prove what a wonderful natural variety
+there was in Garrick's soul, and are well worth comparative study.
+Noticeable again, among the whole-plate portraits, is the thoroughly
+reassuring countenance of Steele, the singularly fine heads of John,
+Charles, and Fanny Kemble, while the certainly plain, pinched
+countenance of William Davenant reminds one of Charles Kean, and might
+well have lighted up, as did his, when the soul came into it, into
+power and charm, as the speaking eyes assure us even in its repose.
+
+The Renaissance inherited the old foolish prejudice of Roman times,
+when, although the writers of plays were the intimate friends of
+emperors, the actors were thought infamous. [79] Still, on the whole,
+actors fared better in England than in Romanist France, where Moliere
+was buried with less ceremony than a favourite dog.  Very different was
+the treatment of the eminent Mrs. Oldfield, who died in 1730:--
+
+"Poor 'Narcissa' after death (says Walpole) was attired in a Holland
+nightdress, with tucker and double ruffles of Brunswick lace, of which
+latter material she also wore a headdress, and a pair of new kid
+gloves.  In this dress the deceased actress received such honour as
+actress never received before, nor has ever received since.  The lady
+lay in state in the Jerusalem Chamber.  Had she been really a queen the
+public could not have thronged more eagerly to the spectacle; and after
+the lying in state there was a funeral of as much ceremony as has been
+observed at the obsequies of many a queen. There were anthems and
+prayers and a sermon; and Dr. Parker, who officiated, remarked, when
+all was over, to a few particular friends, and with some equivocation,
+as it seems to me, that he  'buried her very willingly, and with much
+satisfaction.'"
+
+Yet even in England players had need of [80] powerful protectors.
+"Wit," said Chesterfield, opposing an unjust licensing Act, "Wit, my
+lords! is the property of those who have it, and too often the only
+property they have to depend on."  Wit, indeed, with the other gifts
+that make good company, has largely gone with theatrical talents, too
+often little to the benefit of the gifted persons.  Theatrical society,
+rather than the theatre, has made the lives of actors as we see them in
+these volumes, in many cases so tragic, even sordidly tragic.
+
+If misery and madness abound in stage life, so also does an indomitable
+cheerfulness, always at least a cheerful countenance. Dr. Doran's book
+abounds, as might be expected, with admirable impromptus and the like;
+one might collect a large posy of them. Foote, seeing a sweep on a
+blood-horse, remarked, "There goes Warburton on Shakespeare!"  When he
+heard that the Rockingham Cabinet was fatigued to death and at its
+wits' end, he exclaimed that it could not have been the length of the
+journey which had tired it. Again, when Lord Carmarthen, at a party,
+told him his handkerchief was hanging from his pocket, Foote replaced
+[81] it with a "Thank you, my lord; you know the company better than
+I."  Jevon, a century earlier, was in the habit of taking great
+liberties with authors and audience.  He made Settle half mad and the
+house ecstatic when having, as Lycurgus, Prince of China, to "fall on
+his sword," he placed it flat on the stage, and, falling over it,
+"died," according to the direction of the acting copy.  Quaint enough,
+but certainly no instance of anybody's wit, is the account of how a
+French translation of a play of Vanbrugh--not architect of Blenheim
+only, but accomplished in many other ways--appeared at the Odeon, in
+1862, with all fitting raptures, as a posthumous work of Voltaire
+recently discovered.  The Voltairean wit vas found as "delightful in
+this as in the last century."
+
+Of Shakespeare on the stage Dr. Doran has a hundred curious things to
+note:--that Richard the Third, for instance, who has retained a so
+unflattering possession of the stage, was its "first practically useful
+patron."  We see Queen Elizabeth full of misgiving at a difficult time
+at the popularity of Richard the Second:--"The deposition and death of
+King Richard the [82] Second."  "Tongues whisper to the Queen that this
+play is part of a great plot to teach her subjects how to murder
+kings."  It is perhaps not generally known that Charles Shakespeare,
+William's brother, survived till the Restoration.
+
+Oldys says, a propos of the restoration of the stage at that time:--
+
+"The actors were greedily inquisitive into every little circumstance,
+more especially in Shakespeare's dramatic character, which his brother
+could relate of him.  But he, it seems, was so stricken in years, and
+possibly his memory so weakened by infirmities, that he could give them
+but little light into their inquiries; and all that could be
+recollected from him of his brother Will in that station was the faint,
+general, and almost lost ideas he had of having once seen him act a
+part in one of his own comedies, wherein being present to personate a
+decrepit old man, he wore a long beard, and appeared so weak and
+drooping and unable to walk, that he was forced to be supported and
+carried by another person to a table, at which he was seated among some
+company who were eating, and one of them sang a song."
+
+[83] This description applies to old Adam in As You Like It.  Many are
+the evidences that Shakespeare's reputation had from time to time a
+struggle to maintain itself.  James Howard, in Pepys's day--
+
+"Belonged to the faction which affected to believe that there was no
+popular love for Shakespeare, to render whom palatable he arranged
+Romeo and Juliet for the stage, with a double denouement--one serious,
+the other hilarious.  If your heart were too sensitive to bear the
+deaths of the loving pair, you had only to go on the succeeding
+afternoon to see them wedded, and set upon the way of a well-assured
+domestic felicity."
+
+In 1678 Rymer asserted (was it undesignedly a true testimony to the
+acting of his time?) that Shakespeare had depicted Brutus and Cassius
+as "Jack Puddins."
+
+Here, as in many another detail, we are reminded, of course, of the
+difference between our own and past times in mimic as in real life. For
+Prynne one of the great horrors of the stage was the introduction of
+actresses from France by Henrietta Maria, to take the place of young
+[84] male actors of whom Dr. Doran has some interesting notices.  Who
+the lady was who first trod the stage as a professional actress is not
+known, but her part was Desdemona.  And yet it was long after that--
+
+"Edward Kynaston died (in 1712).  He lies buried in the churchyard of
+St. Paul's, Covent Garden.  If not the greatest actor of his day,
+Kynaston was the greatest of the 'boy-actresses.'  So exalted was his
+reputation 'that,' says Downes, 'it has since been disputable among the
+judicious, whether any woman that succeeded him so sensibly touched the
+audience as he.'"
+
+In Charles II.'s time it was a custom to return the price of admission
+to all persons who left the theatre before the close of the first act.
+Consequently, many shabby persons were wont to force their way in
+without paying, on the plea that they did not intend to remain beyond
+the time limited.  Hence much noisy contention, to the great discomfort
+even of Royalty.  The brawling, drinking habits of the time were even
+more discomforting.  An angry word, passed one April evening of 1682
+between the son of Sir Edward Dering and a hot-blooded young [85]
+Welshman, led to recrimination and sword-drawing. The two young fellows
+not having elbow-room in the pit, clambered on to the stage, and fought
+there, to the greater comfort of the audience, and with a more excited
+fury on the part of the combatants. The mingling of the public with the
+players was a practice which so annoyed the haughty French actor,
+Baron, that to suggest to the audience the absurdity of it, he would
+turn his back on them for a whole act, and play to the audience on the
+stage.  Sometimes the noise was so loud that an actor's voice would
+scarcely be heard.  It was about 1710 that the word encore was
+introduced at the operatic performances in the Haymarket, and very much
+objected to by plain-going Englishmen.  It was also the custom of some
+who desired the repetition of a song to cry Altra volta!  Altra volta!
+
+Even indirectly the history of the stage illustrates life, and affords
+many unexpected lights on historical characters.  Oliver Cromwell,
+though he despised the stage, could condescend to laugh at, and with,
+men of less dignity than actors.  Buffoonery was not entirely expelled
+[86] from his otherwise grave court.  Oxford and Drury Lane itself
+dispute the dignity of giving birth to Nell Gwynne with Hereford, where
+a mean house is still pointed out as the first home of this mother of a
+line of dukes, whose great-grandson was to occupy the neighbouring
+palace as Bishop of Hereford for forty years. At her burial in St.
+Martin's-in-the-Fields, Archbishop Tenison preached the sermon.  When
+this was subsequently made the ground of exposing him to the reproof of
+Queen Mary, she remarked that the good doctor, no doubt, had said
+nothing but what the facts authorized.
+
+"Who should act genteel comedy perfectly," asks Walpole, "but people of
+fashion, that have sense?"  And, in truth, the seventeenth century gave
+many ladies to the stage, Mrs. Barry being the most famous of them.
+Like many eminent actors, she was famous for the way in which she would
+utter one single expression in a play.  Dr. Doran gives some curious
+instances from later actors.  "What mean my grieving subjects?" uttered
+in the character of Queen Elizabeth, was invested by her with such
+emphatic grace and dignity as to call up murmurs of approbation [87]
+which swelled into thunders of applause.  Her noble head is here
+engraved after Kneller, like the head of a magnificent visionary man.
+
+Should we really care for the greatest actors of the past could we have
+them before us?  Should we find them too different from our accent of
+thought, of feeling, of speech, in a thousand minute particulars which
+are of the essence of all three?  Dr. Doran's long and interesting
+records of the triumphs of Garrick, and other less familiar, but in
+their day hardly less astonishing, players, do not relieve one of the
+doubt.  Garrick himself, as sometimes happens with people who have been
+the subject of much anecdote and other conversation, here as elsewhere,
+bears no very distinct figure.  One hardly sees the wood for the trees.
+On the other hand, the account of Betterton, "perhaps the greatest of
+English actors," is delightfully fresh.  That intimate friend of
+Dryden, Tillatson, Pope, who executed a copy of the actor's portrait by
+Kneller which is still extant, was worthy of their friendship; his
+career brings out the best elements in stage life.  The stage in these
+volumes presents itself indeed not merely [88] as a mirror of life, but
+as an illustration of the utmost intensity of life, in the fortunes and
+characters of the players.  Ups and downs, generosity, dark fates, the
+most delicate goodness, have nowhere been more prominent than in the
+private existence of those devoted to the public mimicry of men and
+women.  Contact with the stage, almost throughout its history, presents
+itself as a kind of touchstone, to bring out the bizarrerie, the
+theatrical tricks and contrasts, of the actual world.
+
+27th June 1888
+
+
+
+
+VI.  WORDSWORTH
+
+
+The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth.  With an
+Introduction by John Morley.  Macmillans.
+
+The Recluse.  By William Wordsworth.  Macmillans.
+
+Selections from Wordsworth.  By William Knight and other Members of the
+Wordsworth Society.  With Preface and Notes.  Kegan Paul.
+
+[91] THE appearance, so close to each other, of Professor Knight's
+careful and elaborately annotated Selections from William Wordsworth,
+of Messrs. Macmillan's collected edition of the poet's works, with the
+first book of The Recluse, now published for the first time, and of an
+excellent introductory essay by Mr. John Morley, forms a welcome proof
+that the study of the [92] most philosophic of English poets is
+increasing among us.  Surely nothing could be better, hardly anything
+more directly fitted than careful reading of Wordsworth, to counter the
+faults and offences of our busy generation, in regard both to thought
+and taste, and to remind people, amid the enormous expansion, at the
+present time, of all that is material and mechanical in life, of the
+essential value, the permanent ends, of life itself.  In the collected
+edition the poems are printed with the dates, so far as can be
+ascertained, in the order of their composition--an arrangement which
+has indisputable recommendations for the student of Wordsworth's
+genius; though the former method of distributing his work into large
+groups of subject had its value, as throwing light upon his poetic
+motives, and more especially as coming from himself.
+
+In his introductory essay Mr. Morley has dwelt strongly on the
+circumstance of Wordsworth's remarkable personal happiness, as having
+had much to do with the physiognomy of his poetic creation--a calm,
+irresistible, well-being--almost mystic in character, and yet doubtless
+[93] connected with physical conditions.  Long ago De Quincey noted it
+as a strongly determinant fact in Wordsworth's literary career,
+pointing, at the same time, to his remarkable good luck also, on the
+material side of life.  The poet's own flawless temperament, his fine
+mountain atmosphere of mind (so to express it), had no doubt a good
+deal to do with that.  What a store of good fortune, what a goodly
+contribution to happiness, in the very best sense of that term, is
+really involved in a cheerful, grateful, physical temperament;
+especially, in the case of a poet--a great poet--who will, of course,
+have to face the appropriate trials of a great poet.
+
+Coleridge and other English critics at the beginning of the present
+century had a great deal to say concerning a psychological distinction
+of much importance (as it appeared to them) between the fancy and the
+imagination.  Stripped of a great deal of somewhat obscure metaphysical
+theory, this distinction reduced itself to the certainly vital one,
+with which all true criticism more or less directly has to do, between
+the lower and higher degrees of intensity in the [94] poet's conception
+of his subject, and his concentration of himself upon his work.  It was
+Wordsworth who made most of this distinction, assuming it as the basis
+for the final classification (abandoned, as we said, in the new
+edition) of his poetical writings. And nowhere is the distinction more
+realizable than in Wordsworth's own work.  For though what may be
+called professed Wordsworthians, including Matthew Arnold, found a
+value in all that remains of him--could read anything he wrote, "even
+the 'Thanksgiving Ode,'--everything, I think, except 'Vaudracour and
+Julia,'"--yet still the decisiveness of such selections as those made
+by Arnold himself, and now by Professor Knight, hint at a certain very
+obvious difference of level in his poetic work.
+
+This perpetual suggestion of an absolute duality between his lower and
+higher moods, and the poetic work produced in them, stimulating the
+reader to look below the immediate surface of his poetry, makes the
+study of Wordsworth an excellent exercise for the training of those
+mental powers in us, which partake both of thought and imagination.  It
+begets in those [95] who fall in with him at the right moment of their
+spiritual development, a habit of reading between the lines, a faith in
+the effect of concentration and collectedness of mind on the right
+appreciation of poetry, the expectation that what is really worth
+having in the poetic order will involve, on their part, a certain
+discipline of the temper not less than of the intellect.  Wordsworth
+meets them with the assurance that he has much to give them, and of a
+very peculiar kind, if they will follow a certain difficult way, and
+seems to possess the secret of some special mental illumination.  To
+follow that way is an initiation, by which they will become able to
+distinguish, in art, speech, feeling, manners, in men and life
+generally, what is genuine, animated, and expressive from what is only
+conventional and derivative, and therefore inexpressive.
+
+A very intimate sense of the expressiveness of outward things, which
+ponders, listens, penetrates, where the earlier, less developed
+consciousness passed lightly by, is an important element in the general
+temper of our modern poetry.  Critics of literary history have again
+[96] and again remarked upon it; it is a characteristic which reveals
+itself in many different forms, but is strongest and most sympathetic
+in what is strongest and most serious in modern literature; it is
+exemplified by writers as unlike Wordsworth as the French romanticist
+poets.  As a curious chapter in the history of the human mind, its
+growth might be traced from Rousseau and St. Pierre to Chateaubriand,
+from Chateaubriand to Victor Hugo; it has no doubt some obscure
+relationship to those pantheistic theories which have greatly occupied
+people's minds in many modern readings of philosophy; it makes as much
+difference between the modern and the earlier landscape art as there is
+between the roughly outlined masks of a Byzantine mosaic and a portrait
+by Reynolds or Romney.  Of this new landscape sense the poetry of
+Wordsworth is the elementary and central exposition; he is more
+exclusively occupied with its development than any other poet.
+Wordsworth's own character, as we have already observed, was dominated
+by a certain contentment, a sort of naturally religious placidity, not
+often found in union with a poetic sensibility so [97] active as his;
+and this gentle sense of well-being was favourable to the quiet,
+habitual observation of the inanimate, or imperfectly animate, world.
+His life of eighty placid years was almost without what, with most
+human beings, count for incidents.  His flight from the active world,
+so genially celebrated in this newly published poem of The Recluse; his
+flight to the Vale of Grasmere, like that of some pious youth to the
+Chartreuse, is the most marked event of his existence.  His life's
+changes are almost entirely inward ones; it falls into broad,
+untroubled, perhaps somewhat monotonous, spaces; his biographers have
+very little to tell.  What it really most resembles, different as its
+superficies may look, is the career of those early mediaeval religious
+artists, who, precisely because their souls swarmed with heavenly
+visions, passed their fifty or sixty years in tranquil, systematic
+industry, seemingly with no thoughts beyond it.  This placid life
+developed in Wordsworth, to an extraordinary degree, an innate
+sensibility to natural sights and sounds--the flower and its shadow on
+the stone, the cuckoo and its echo.  The poem of [98] "Resolution and
+Independence" is a storehouse of such records; for its fulness of
+lovely imagery it may be compared to Keats's "Saint Agnes' Eve."  To
+read one of his greater pastoral poems for the first time is like a day
+spent in a new country; the memory is crowded for a while with its
+precise and vivid incidents:--
+
+  The pliant harebell swinging in the breeze,
+  On some grey rock:
+  The single sheep, and the one blasted tree,
+  And the bleak music from that old stone wall:--
+  In the meadows and the lower ground,
+  Was all the sweetness of a common dawn:--
+  And that green corn all day is rustling in thine ears!
+
+Clear and delicate at once as he is in the outlining of visible
+imagery, he is more finely scrupulous still in the noting of sounds; he
+conceives of noble sound as even moulding the human countenance to
+nobler types, and as something actually "profaned" by visible form or
+colour.  He has a power likewise of realizing and conveying to the
+consciousness of his reader abstract and elementary impressions,
+silence, darkness, absolute motionlessness, or, again, the whole
+complex sentiment of a particular place, the abstract expression of
+desolation in the long [99] white road, of peacefulness in a particular
+folding of the hills.
+
+That sense of a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but a
+rhetorical artifice, was, then, in Wordsworth the assertion of what was
+for him almost literal fact.  To him every natural object seemed to
+possess something of moral or spiritual life, to be really capable of a
+companionship with man, full of fine intimacies.  An emanation, a
+particular spirit, belonged not to the moving leaves or water only, but
+to the distant peak arising suddenly, by some change of perspective,
+above the nearer horizon of the hills, to the passing space of light
+across the plain, to the lichened Druidic stone even, for a certain
+weird fellowship in it with the moods of men.  That he awakened "a sort
+of thought in sense" is Shelley's just estimate of this element in
+Wordsworth's poetry.
+
+It was through nature, ennobled in this way by the semblance of passion
+and thought, that the poet approached the spectacle of human life.  For
+him, indeed, human life is, in the first instance, only an additional,
+and as it were incidental grace, upon this expressive landscape.
+
+[100] When he thought of men and women, it was of men and women as in
+the presence and under the influence of those effective natural
+objects, and linked to them by many associations.  Such influences have
+sometimes seemed to belittle those who are the subject of them, at the
+least to be likely to narrow the range of their sympathies. To
+Wordsworth, on the contrary, they seemed directly to dignify human
+nature, as tending to tranquillize it.  He raises physical nature to
+the level of human thought, giving it thereby a mystic power and
+expression; he subdues man to the level of nature, but gives him
+therewith a certain breadth and vastness and solemnity.
+
+Religious sentiment, consecrating the natural affections and rights of
+the human heart, above all that pitiful care and awe for the perishing
+human clay of which relic-worship is but the corruption, has always had
+much to do with localities, with the thoughts which attach themselves
+to definite scenes and places.  And what is true of it everywhere is
+truest in those secluded valleys, where one generation after another
+maintains the same abiding-place; and [101] it was on this side that
+Wordsworth apprehended religion most strongly.  Having so much to do
+with the recognition of local sanctities, the habit of connecting the
+very trees and stones of a particular spot of earth with the great
+events of life, till the low walls, the green mounds, the
+half-obliterated epitaphs, seemed full of oracular voices, even the
+religion of those people of the dales appeared but as another link
+between them and the solemn imageries of the natural world.  And,
+again, this too tranquillized them, by bringing them under the rule of
+traditional, narrowly localized observances.  "Grave livers," they
+seemed to him under this aspect, of stately speech, and something of
+that natural dignity of manners which underlies the highest courtesy.
+
+And, seeing man thus as a part of nature, elevated and solemnized in
+proportion as his daily life and occupations brought him into
+companionship with permanent natural objects, he was able to appreciate
+passion in the lowly.  He chooses to depict people from humble life,
+because, being nearer to nature than others, they are on the whole more
+impassioned, certainly [102] more direct in their expression of
+passion, than other men; it is for this direct expression of passion
+that he values their humble words.  In much that he said in exaltation
+of rural life he was but pleading indirectly for that sincerity, that
+perfect fidelity to one's own inward presentations, to the precise
+features of the picture within, without which any profound poetry is
+impossible.  It was not for their tameness, but for their impassioned
+sincerity, that he chose incidents and situations from common life,
+"related in a selection of language really used by men."  He constantly
+endeavours to bring his language nearer to the real language of men;
+but it is to the real language of men, not on the dead level of their
+ordinary intercourse, but in certain select moments of vivid sensation,
+when this language is winnowed and ennobled by sentiment.  There are
+poets who have chosen rural life for their subject for the sake of its
+passionless repose; and there are times when Wordsworth himself extols
+the mere calm and dispassionate survey of things as the highest aim of
+poetical culture.  But it was not for such passionless calm that he
+preferred the scenes of [103] pastoral life; and the meditative poet,
+sheltering himself from the agitations of the outward world, is in
+reality only clearing the scene for the exhibition of great emotions,
+and what he values most is the almost elementary expression of
+elementary feelings.
+
+In Wordsworth's prefatory advertisement to the first edition of The
+Prelude, published in 1850, it is stated that that work was intended to
+be introductory to The Recluse: and that The Recluse, if completed,
+would have consisted of three parts.  The second part is The Excursion.
+The third part was only planned; but the first book of the first part
+was left in manuscript by Wordsworth--though in manuscript, it is said,
+in no great condition of forwardness for the printers.  This book, now
+for the first time printed in extenso (a very noble passage from it
+found place in that prose advertisement to The Excursion), is the great
+novelty of this latest edition of Wordsworth's poetic works.  It was
+well worth adding to the poet's great bequest to English literature.
+The true student of his work, who has formulated for himself what he
+supposes to be the leading characteristics [104] of Wordsworth's
+genius, will feel, we think, a lively interest in putting them to test
+by the many and various striking passages in what is there presented
+for the first time.
+
+17th February 1889
+
+
+
+
+VII.  MR. GOSSE'S POEMS
+
+
+On Viol and Flute.  By Edmund Gosse.
+
+[107] PERHAPS no age of literature, certainly no age of literature in
+England, has been so rich as ours in excellent secondary poetry; and it
+is with our poetry (in a measure) as with our architecture, constrained
+by the nature of the case to be imitative.  Our generation, quite
+reasonably, is not very proud of its architectural creations; confesses
+that it knows too much--knows, but cannot do. And yet we could name
+certain modern churches in London, for instance, to which posterity may
+well look back puzzled.--Could these exquisitely pondered buildings
+have been indeed works of the nineteenth century?  Were they not the
+subtlest creations of the age in which Gothic art was spontaneous?  In
+truth, we have had instances of workmen, who, through long, large,
+[108] devoted study of the handiwork of the past, have done the thing
+better, with a more fully enlightened consciousness, with full
+intelligence of what those early workmen only guessed at.  And
+something like this is true of some of our best secondary poetry.  It
+is the least that is true--the least that can fairly be said in praise
+of the poetic work of Mr. Edmund Gosse.
+
+Of course there can be no exact parallel between arts so different as
+architecture and poetic composition: But certainly in the poetry of our
+day also, though it has been in some instances powerfully initiative
+and original, there is great scholarship, a large comparative
+acquaintance with the poetic methods of earlier workmen, and a very
+subtle intelligence of their charm.  Of that fine scholarship in this
+matter there is no truer example than Mr. Gosse. It is manifested
+especially in the even finish of his varied work, in the equality of
+his level--a high level--in species of composition so varied as the
+three specimens which follow.
+
+Far away, in late spring, "by the sea in the south," the swallows are
+still lingering around "white Algiers."  In Mr. Gosse's "Return of
+[109] the Swallows," the northern birds--lark and thrush--have long
+been calling to them:--
+
+  And something awoke in the slumbering heart
+  Of the alien birds in their African air,
+  And they paused, and alighted, and twittered apart,
+  And met in the broad white dreamy square,
+  And the sad slave woman, who lifted up
+  From the fountain her broad-lipped earthen cup,
+  Said to herself, with a weary sigh,
+  "To-morrow the swallows will northward fly."
+
+Compare the following stanzas, from a kind of palinode, "1870-1871,"
+years of the Franco-German war and the Parisian Commune:--
+
+  The men who sang that pain was sweet
+  Shuddered to see the mask of death
+  Storm by with myriad thundering feet;
+  The sudden truth caught up our breath
+  Our throats like pulses beat.
+
+  The songs of pale emaciate hours,
+  The fungus-growth of years of peace,
+  Withered before us like mown flowers;
+  We found no pleasure more in these
+  When bullets fell in showers.
+
+  For men whose robes are dashed with blood,
+  What joy to dream of gorgeous stairs,
+  Stained with the torturing interlude
+  That soothed a Sultan's midday prayers,
+  In old days harsh and rude?
+
+[110]
+
+  For men whose lips are blanched and white,
+  With aching wounds and torturing thirst,
+  What charm in canvas shot with light,
+  And pale with faces cleft and curst,
+  Past life and life's delight?
+
+And then Mr. Gosse's purely descriptive power, his aptitude for
+still-life and landscape, is unmistakably vivid and sound.  Take, for
+an instance, this description of high-northern summer:--
+
+  The ice-white mountains clustered all around us,
+  But arctic summer blossomed at our feet;
+  The perfume of the creeping sallows found us,
+  The cranberry-flowers were sweet.
+
+  Below us through the valley crept a river,
+  Cleft round an island where the Lap-men lay;
+  Its sluggish water dragged with slow endeavour
+  The mountain snows away.
+
+  There is no night-time in the northern summer,
+  But golden shimmer fills the hours of sleep,
+  And sunset fades not, till the bright new-comer,
+  Red sunrise, smites the deep.
+
+  But when the blue snow-shadows grew intenser
+  Across the peaks against the golden sky,
+  And on the hills the knots of deer grew denser,
+  And raised their tender cry,
+
+[111]
+
+  And wandered downward to the Lap-men's dwelling,
+  We knew our long sweet day was nearly spent,
+  And slowly, with our hearts within us swelling,
+  Our homeward steps we bent.
+
+"Sunshine before Sunrise!"  There's a novelty in that, for poetic use
+at least, so far as we know, though we remember one fine paragraph
+about it in Sartor Resartus.  The grim poetic sage of Chelsea, however,
+had never seen what he describes: not so Mr. Gosse, whose acquaintance
+with northern lands and northern literature is special. We have indeed
+picked out those stanzas from a quiet personal record of certain
+amorous hours of early youth in that quaint arctic land, Mr. Gosse's
+description of which, like his pretty poem on Luebeck, made one think
+that what the accomplished group of poets to which he belongs requires
+is, above all, novelty of motive, of subject.
+
+He takes, indeed, the old themes, and manages them better than their
+old masters, with more delicate cadences, more delicate transitions of
+thought, through long dwelling on earlier practice.  He seems to
+possess complete command of the technique of poetry--every form of what
+may be called skill of hand in it; and what marks in [112] him the
+final achievement of poetic scholarship is the perfect balance his work
+presents of so many and varied effects, as regards both matter and
+form.  The memories of a large range of poetic reading are blent into
+one methodical music so perfectly that at times the notes seem almost
+simple.  Sounding almost all the harmonies of the modern lyre, he has,
+perhaps as a matter of course, some of the faults also, the "spasmodic"
+and other lapses, which from age to age, in successive changes of
+taste, have been the "defects" of excellent good "qualities."  He is
+certainly not the--
+
+  Pathetic singer, with no strength to sing,
+
+as he says of the white-throat on the tulip-tree,
+
+  Whose leaves unfinished ape her faulty song.
+
+In effect, a large compass of beautiful thought and expression, from
+poetry old and new, have become to him matter malleable anew for a
+further and finer reach of literary art.  And with the perfect grace of
+an intaglio, he shows, as in truth the minute intaglio may do, the
+faculty of structure, the logic of poetry.  "The New Endymion" is a
+good instance of such sustained [113] power.  Poetic scholar!--If we
+must reserve the sacred name of "poet" to a very small number, that
+humbler but perhaps still rarer title is due indisputably to Mr. Gosse.
+His work is like exquisite modern Latin verse, into the academic shape
+of which, discreet and coy, comes a sincere, deeply felt consciousness
+of modern life, of the modern world as it is.  His poetry, according
+with the best intellectual instincts of our critical age, is as pointed
+out recently by a clever writer in the Nineteenth Century, itself a
+kind of exquisite, finally revised criticism.
+
+Not that he fails in originality; only, the graces, inborn certainly,
+but so carefully educated, strike one more.  The sense of his
+originality comes to one as but an after-thought; and certainly one
+sign of his vocation is that he has made no conscious effort to be
+original.  In his beautiful opening poem of the "White-throat," giving
+his book its key-note, he seems, indeed, to accept that position,
+reasons on and justifies it.  Yet there is a clear note of originality
+(so it seems to us) in the peculiar charm of his strictly personal
+compositions; and, generally, in such touches as he gives us of the
+soul, the life, of the [114] nineteenth century.  Far greater, we
+think, than the charm of poems strictly classic in interest, such as
+the "Praise of Dionysus," exquisite as that is, is the charm of those
+pieces in which, so to speak, he transforms, by a kind of
+colour-change, classic forms and associations into those--say! of
+Thames-side--pieces which, though in manner or subject promising a
+classic entertainment, almost unaware bring you home.--No! after all,
+it is not imagined Greece, dreamy, antique Sicily, but the present
+world about us, though mistakable for a moment, delightfully, for the
+land, the age, of Sappho, of Theocritus:--
+
+  There is no amaranth, no pomegranate here,
+  But can your heart forget the Christmas rose,
+  The crocuses and snowdrops once so dear?
+
+Quite congruously with the placid, erudite, quality of his culture,
+although, like other poets, he sings much of youth, he is often most
+successful in the forecast, the expression, of the humours, the
+considerations, that in truth are more proper to old age:--
+
+  When age comes by and lays his frosty hands
+  So lightly on mine eyes, that, scarce aware
+
+[115]
+
+  Of what an endless weight of gloom they bear,
+  I pause, unstirred, and wait for his commands.
+  When time has bound these limbs of mine with bands,
+  And hushed mine ears, and silvered all my hair,
+  May sorrow come not, nor a vain despair
+  Trouble my soul that meekly girdled stands.
+
+  As silent rivers into silent lakes,
+  Through hush of reeds that not a murmur breaks,
+  Wind, mindful of the poppies whence they came,
+  So may my life, and calmly burn away,
+  As ceases in a lamp at break of day
+  The flagrant remnant of memorial flame.
+
+Euthanasia!--Yet Mr. Gosse, with all his accomplishment, is still a
+young man.  His youthful confidence in the perpetuity of poetry, of the
+poetical interests in life, creed-less as he may otherwise seem to be,
+is, we think, a token, though certainly an unconscious token, of the
+spontaneous originality of his muse.  For a writer of his peculiar
+philosophic tenets, at all events, the world itself, in truth, must
+seem irretrievably old or even decadent.
+
+Old, decadent, indeed, it would seem with Mr. Gosse to be also
+returning to the thoughts, the fears, the consolations, of its youth in
+Greece, in Italy:--
+
+[116]
+
+  Nor seems it strange indeed
+  To hold the happy creed
+  That all fair things that bloom and die
+  Have conscious life as well as I.
+
+  Then let me joy to be
+  Alive with bird and tree,
+  And have no haughtier aim than this,
+  To be a partner in their bliss.
+
+Convinced, eloquent,--again and again the notes of Epicurean philosophy
+fall almost unconsciously from his lips.  With poetry at hand, he
+appears to feel no misgivings.  A large faith he might seem to have in
+what is called "natural optimism," the beauty and benignity of nature,
+if let alone, in her mechanical round of changes with man and beast and
+flower.  Her method, however, certainly involves forgetfulness for the
+individual; and to this, to the prospect of oblivion, poetry, too, may
+help to brace us, if, unlike so genial and cheerful a poet as Mr.
+Gosse, we need bracing thereto:--
+
+  Now, giant-like, the tall young ploughmen go
+  Between me and the sunset, footing slow;
+  My spirit, as an uninvited guest,
+  Goes with them, wondering what desire, what aim,
+  May stir their hearts and mine with common flame,
+  Or, thoughtless, do their hands suffice their soul?
+
+[117]
+
+  I know not, care not, for I deem no shame
+  To hold men, flowers, and trees and stars the same,
+  Myself, as these, one atom in the whole.
+
+That is from one of those half-Greek, half-English idylls, reminding
+one of Frederick Walker's "Ploughman," of Mason's "Evening Hymn," in
+which Mr. Gosse is at his best.  A favourite motive, he has treated it
+even more melodiously in "Lying in the Grass":--
+
+  I do not hunger for a well-stored mind,
+  I only wish to live my life, and find
+  My heart in unison with all mankind.
+
+  My life is like the single dewy star
+  That trembles on the horizon's primrose-bar,--
+  A microcosm where all things living are.
+
+  And if, among the noiseless grasses, Death
+  Should come behind and take away my breath,
+  I should not rise as one who sorroweth;
+
+  For I should pass, but all the world would be
+  Full of desire and young delight and glee,
+  And why should men be sad through loss of me?
+
+  The light is flying; in the silver-blue
+  The young moon shines from her bright window through:
+  The mowers are all gone, and I go too.
+
+A vein of thought as modern as it is old!  More not less depressing,
+certainly, to our over-meditative [118], susceptible, nervous, modern
+age, than to that antiquity which was indeed the genial youth of the
+world, but, sweetly attuned by his skill of touch, it is the sum of
+what Mr. Gosse has to tell us of the experience of life.  Or is it,
+after all, to quote him once more, that beyond those ever-recurring
+pagan misgivings, those pale pagan consolations, our generation feels
+yet cannot adequately express--
+
+  The passion and the stress
+  Of thoughts too tender and too sad to be
+  Enshrined in any melody she knows?
+
+29th October 1890
+
+
+
+
+VIII.  FERDINAND FABRE
+
+
+[NORINE]: AN IDYLL OF THE CEVENNES
+
+
+[121] A FRENCH novelist who, with much of Zola's undoubted power,
+writes always in the interest of that high type of Catholicism which
+still prevails in the remote provinces of France, of that high type of
+morality of which the French clergy have nobly maintained the ideal, is
+worth recommending to the more serious class of English readers.
+Something of the gift of Francois Millet, whose peasants are veritable
+priests, of those older religious painters who could portray saintly
+heads so sweetly and their merely human proteges so truly, seems indeed
+to have descended to M. Ferdinand Fabre.  In the Abbe Tigrane, in
+Lucifer, and elsewhere, he has delineated, with wonderful power and
+patience, a strictly ecclesiastical portraiture-- [122] shrewd,
+passionate, somewhat melancholy heads, which, though they are often of
+peasant origin, are never by any chance undignified.  The passions he
+treats of in priests are, indeed, strictly clerical, most often their
+ambitions--not the errant humours of the mere man in the priest, but
+movements of spirit properly incidental to the clerical type itself.
+Turning to the secular brothers and sisters of these peasant
+ecclesiastics, at first sight so strongly contrasted with them, M.
+Fabre shows a great acquaintance with the sources, the effects, of
+average human feeling; but still in contact--in contact, as its
+conscience, its better mind, its ideal--with the institutions of
+religion.  What constitutes his distinguishing note as a writer is the
+recognition of the religious, the Catholic, ideal, intervening
+masterfully throughout the picture he presents of life, as the only
+mode of poetry realizable by the poor; and although, of course, it does
+a great deal more beside, certainly doing the high work of poetry
+effectively.  For his background he has chosen, has made his own and
+conveys very vividly to his readers, a district of France, gloomy, in
+spite of its almonds, its [123] oil and wine, but certainly grandiose.
+The large towns, the sparse hamlets, the wide landscape of the
+Cevennes, are for his books what the Rhineland is to those delightful
+authors, Messrs. Erckmann-Chatrian.  In Les Courbezon, the French Vicar
+of Wakefield, as Sainte-Beuve declared, with this imposing background,
+the Church and the world, as they shape themselves in the Cevennes, the
+priest and the peasant, occupy about an equal share of interest.
+Sometimes, as in the charming little book we wish now to introduce,
+unclerical human nature occupies the foreground almost exclusively;
+though priestly faces will still be found gazing upon us from time to
+time.
+
+In form, the book is a bundle of letters from a Parisian litterateur to
+the friend of his boyhood, now the cure of one of those mountain
+villages.  He is refreshing himself, in the midst of dusty,
+sophisticated Paris, with memories of their old, delightful
+existence--vagabonde, libre, agreste, pastorale--in their upland
+valley.  He can appeal safely to the aged cure's friendly justice, even
+in exposing delicacies of sentiment which most men conceal:--
+
+[124] "As for you, frank, certain of your own mind, joyous of heart,
+methinks scarce understanding those whose religion makes their souls
+tremble instead of fortifying them--you, I am sure, take things by the
+large and kindly side of human life."
+
+The story our Parisian has to tell is simple enough, and we have no
+intention of betraying it, but only to note some of the faces, the
+scenes, that peep out in the course of it.
+
+The gloom of the Cevennes is the impression M. Fabre most commonly
+conveys.  In this book it is rather the cheerful aspect of summer,
+those upland valleys of the Cevennes presenting then a symphony in red,
+so to call it--as in a land of cherries and goldfinches; and he has a
+genial power certainly of making you really feel the sun on the backs
+of the two boys out early for a long ramble, of old peasants resting
+themselves a little, with spare enjoyment, ere the end:--
+
+"As we turned a sharp elbow of the stream the aspect of the country
+changed.  It seemed to me entirely red.  Cherries in enormous bunches
+were hanging everywhere over our heads....
+
+[125] "It was a hut, rather low, rather dark.  A log of chestnut was
+smouldering in a heap of ashes.  Every object was in its place: the
+table, the chairs, the plates ranged on the dresser.  A fairy, in
+truth, reigned there, and, by the touch of her wand, brought
+cleanliness and order on every side.
+
+"'Is it you, Norine?' asked a voice from a dark corner, three steps
+from the fireplace.
+
+"'Yes, mon grand, it is I!  The heat was growing greater every moment,
+and I have taken in the goats.'
+
+"Norine unclosed the window.  A broad light spread over the floor of
+beaten earth, like a white cloth.  The cottage was illuminated.  I saw
+an old man seated on a wooden stool in a recess, where an ample serge
+curtain concealed a bed.  He held himself slightly bent, the two hands
+held forth, one over the other, on the knob of a knotty staff, highly
+polished.  In spite of eighty years, Norine's grandfather--le grand, as
+they say up there--had not lost a hair: beautiful white locks fell over
+his shoulders--crisp, thick, outspread.  I thought of those fine wigs
+of tow or hemp with which the distaff of [126] our Prudence was always
+entangled.  He was close shaved, after the manner of our peasants; and
+the entire mask was to be seen disengaged, all its admirable lines
+free, commanded by a full-sized nose, below which the good, thick lips
+were smiling, full of kindness.  The eyes, however, though still clear
+and soft in expression, had a certain fixity which startled me.  He
+raised himself.  His stature seemed to me beyond proportion.  He was
+really beautiful, with the contentment of his face, straight as the
+trunk of a chestnut, his old velvet coat thrown back, his shirt of
+coarse cloth open at the breast, so that one saw the play of the ribs.
+
+"'Monsieur le neveu!' he cried; 'where are you? Come to me!  I am
+blind.'
+
+"I approached.  He felt me, with ten fingers, laying aside his staff.
+
+"'And you would not take offence if a poor peasant like me embraced
+you?'
+
+"'Quick, Jalaguier!'  I cried, throwing myself into his arms. 'Quick!'
+He pressed me till the joints started.  Leaned upon his broad chest, I
+heard the beating of his heart.  It beat under my ears with a burden
+like our bell at [126] Camplong.  What powerful vitality in Norine's
+grand!  'It does an old man good:--a good hug!' he said, letting me go."
+
+The boyish visitors are quite ready to sit down there to dinner:--
+
+"With the peasant of the Cevennes (M. Fabre tells us) the meal is what
+nature meant it to be--a few moments for self-recovery after fatigue, a
+short space of silence of a quite elevated character, almost sacred.
+The poor human creature has given the sweat of his brow to extort from
+an ungrateful soil his daily bread; and now he eats that well-savoured
+bread in silent self-respect.
+
+"'It is a weary thing to be thinking always of one's work (says the
+grand to the somewhat sparing Norine).  We must also think of our
+sustenance.  You are too enduring, my child! it is a mistake to demand
+so much of your arms.  In truth, le bon Dieu has cut you out after the
+pattern of your dead father.  Every morning, in my prayers, I put in my
+complaint thereanent.  My poor boy died from going too fast.  He could
+never sit still when it was a question of gathering a few sous from the
+[128] fields; and those fields took and consumed him.'"
+
+The boy fancies that the blind eyes are turned towards a particular
+spot in the landscape, as if they saw:--
+
+"'I often turn my eyes in that direction (the old man explains) from
+habit.  One might suppose that a peasant had the scent of the earth on
+which he has laboured.  I have given so much of the sweat of my
+brow--there--towards Rocaillet!  Angelique, my dead wife, was of
+Rocaillet; and when she married me, brought a few morsels of land in
+her apron.  What a state they're in now!--those poor morsels of land we
+used to weed and rake and hoe, my boy and I!  What superb crops of
+vetches we mowed then, for feeding, in due time, our lambs, our calves!
+All is gone to ruin since my blindness, and especially since Angelique
+left me for the churchyard, never to come back.'  He paused to my great
+relief.  For every one of those phrases he modulated under the
+fig-trees more sadly than the Lamentations of Jeremiah on Jeudi Saint
+overset me--was like death."
+
+[129] That is good drawing, in its simple and quiet way!  The actual
+scene, however, is cheerful enough on this early summer day--a
+symphony, as we said, in cherries and goldfinches, in which the higher
+valleys of the Cevennes abound.  In fact, the boys witness the
+accordailles, the engagement, of Norine and Justin Lebasset.  The
+latter is calling the birds to sing good luck to the event:--
+
+"He had a long steady look towards the fruit-trees, and then whistled,
+on a note at once extremely clear and extremely soft.  He paused,
+watched awhile, recommenced.  The note became more rapid, more
+sonorous.  What an astounding man he was, this Justin Lebasset!
+Upright, his red beard forward, his forehead thrown back, his eyes on
+the thick foliage of the cherry-trees, his hands on his haunches, in an
+attitude of repose, easy, superb, he was like some youthful pagan god,
+gilded with red gold, on his way across the country--like Pan, if he
+chose to amuse himself by charming birds.  You should have seen the
+enthusiastic glances with which Norine watched him.  Upright--she too,
+slim, at full height, inclining from [130] time to time towards Justin
+with a movement of irresistible fascination, she followed the notes of
+her mate; and sometimes, her, lips half opening, added thereto a
+sigh--something of a sigh, an aspiration, a prayer, towards the
+goldfinch, withdrawn into the shadows.
+
+"The leaves were shaken in the clear, burning green; and, on a sudden,
+a multitude of goldfinches, the heads red in the wind, the wings half
+spread, were fluttering from branch to branch.  I could have fancied,
+amid the quivering of the great bunches of fruit, that they were
+cherries on the wing.  Justin suffered his pipe to die away: the birds
+were come at his invitation, and performed their prelude."
+
+It is forty years afterwards that the narrator, now a man of letters in
+Paris, writes to his old friend, with tidings of Justin and Norine:--
+
+"In 1842 (he observes) you were close on fifteen; I scarcely twelve. In
+my eyes your age made you my superior.  And then, you were so strong,
+so tender, so amiteux, to use a word from up there--a charming word.
+And so God, Who had His designs for you, whereas I, in spite of my
+pious childhood, wandered on [131] my way as chance bade me, led you by
+the hand, attached, ended by keeping you for Himself.  He did well
+truly when He chose you and rejected me!"
+
+His finding the pair in the wilds of Paris is an adventure, in which,
+in fact, a goldfinch again takes an important part--a goldfinch who is
+found to understand the Cevenol dialect:--
+
+"The goldfinch (escaped from its cage somewhere, into the dreary court
+of the Institute) has seen me: is looking at me.  If he chose to make
+his way into my apartment, he would be very welcome.  I feel a strong
+impulse to try him with that unique patois word, which, whistled after
+a peculiar manner, when I was a boy never failed to succeed in the
+mountains of Orb--Beni!  Beni!  Viens!  Viens!  I dare not!  He might
+take fright and fly away altogether."
+
+In effect, the Cevenol bird, true to call, introduces Norine, his
+rightful owner, whose husband Justin is slowly dying.  Towards the end
+of a hard life, faithful to their mountain ideal, they have not lost
+their dignity, though in a comparatively sordid medium: [132]
+
+"As for me, my dear Arribas, I remained in deep agitation, an attentive
+spectator of the scene; and while Justin and Norine, set both alike in
+the winepress of sorrow, le pressoir de la douleur, as your good books
+express it, murmured to each other their broken consoling words, I saw
+them again, in thought, young, handsome, in the full flower of life,
+under the cherry-trees, the swarming goldfinches, of blind Barthelemy
+Jalaguier.  Ah me!  It was thus that, five-and-forty years after, in
+this dark street of Paris, that festive day was finishing, blessed, in
+the plenitude of nature, by that august old man, celebrated by the
+alternate song of all the birds of Rocaillet."
+
+Justin's one remaining hope is to go home to those native mountains, if
+it may be, with the dead body of his boy, dead "the very morning on
+which he should have received the tonsure from the hands of Mgr.
+l'Archeveque," and buried now temporarily at the cemetery of
+Montparnasse:--
+
+Theodore calls me.  I saw him distinctly to-night.  He gave me a sign.
+After all said, life is heavy, sans le fillot, and but [133] for you it
+were well to be released from it....'
+
+"I have seen Justin Lebasset die, dear Arribas, and was touched,
+edified, to the bottom of my soul.  God grant, when my hour comes, I
+may find that calm, that force, in the last struggle with life.  Not a
+complaint!  not a sigh!  Once only he gave Norine a sorrowful,
+heartrending look; then, from lips already cold, breathed that one
+word, 'Theodore!'  Marcus Aurelius used to say: 'A man should leave the
+world as a ripe olive falls from the tree that bore it, and with a kiss
+for the earth that nourished it.'  Well! the peasant of Rocaillet had
+the beautiful, noble, simple death of the fruit of the earth, going to
+the common receptacle of all mortal beings, with no sense that he was
+torn away.  Pardon, I pray, my quotation from Marcus Aurelius, who
+persecuted the Christians.  I give it with the same respect with which
+you would quote some holy writer.  Ah! my dear Arribas! not all the
+saints have received canonization."
+
+It is to the priestly character, in truth, that M. Fabre always comes
+back for tranquillizing [134] effect; and if his peasants have
+something akin to Wordsworth's, his priests may remind one of those
+solemn ecclesiastical heads familiar in the paintings and etchings of
+M. Alphonse Legros.  The reader travelling in Italy, or Belgium
+perhaps, has doubtless visited one or more of those spacious
+sacristies, introduced to which for the inspection of some more than
+usually recherche work of art, one is presently dominated by their
+reverend quiet: simple people coming and going there, devout, or at
+least on devout business, with half-pitched voices, not without touches
+of kindly humour, in what seems to express like a picture the most
+genial side, midway between the altar and the home, of the
+ecclesiastical life.  Just such interiors we seem to visit under the
+magic of M. Fabre's well-trained pen.  He has a real power of taking
+one from Paris, or from London, to places and people certainly very
+different from either, to the satisfaction of those who seek in fiction
+an escape.
+
+12th June 1889
+
+
+
+
+IX.  THE "CONTES" OF M. AUGUSTIN FILON
+
+
+TALES OF A HUNDRED YEARS SINCE ["CONTES DU CENTENAIRE."  PAR AUGUSTIN
+FILON.  PARIS: HACHETTE ET CIE. ]
+
+
+[137] IT was a happy thought of M. Filon to put into the mouth of an
+imaginary centenarian a series of delightfully picturesque studies
+which aim at the minute presentment of life in France under the old
+regime, and end for the most part with the Revolution.  A genial
+centenarian, whose years have told happily on him, he appreciates not
+only those humanities of feeling and habit which were peculiar to the
+last century and passed away with it, but also that permanent humanity
+which has but undergone a change of surface in the new world of our
+own, wholly different though it may look.  With a sympathetic sense of
+life as it is always, [138] M. Filon has transplanted the creations of
+his fancy into an age certainly at a greater distance from ourselves
+than can be estimated by mere lapse of time, and where a fully detailed
+antiquarian knowledge, used with admirable tact and economy, is indeed
+serviceable in giving reality of effect to scene and character.  In
+truth, M. Filon's very lively antiquarianism carries with it a genuine
+air of personal memory.  With him, as happens so rarely, an intimate
+knowledge of historic detail is the secret of life, of the impression
+of life; puts his own imagination on the wing; secures the imaginative
+cooperation of the reader.  A stately age--to us, perhaps, in the
+company of the historic muse, seeming even more stately than it
+actually was--it is pleasant to find it, as we do now and again on
+these pages, in graceful deshabille.  With perfect lightness of touch,
+M. Filon seems to have a complete command of all the physiognomic
+details of old France, of old Paris and its people--how they made a
+holiday; how they got at the news; the fashions.  Did the English
+reader ever hear before of the beautifully dressed doll which came once
+a month [139] from Paris to Soho to teach an expectant world of fashion
+how to dress itself? Old Paris!  For young lovers at their windows; for
+every one fortunate enough to have seen it: "Qu'il est joli ce paysage
+du Paris nocturne d'il y a cent ans!"  We think we shall best do
+justice to an unusually pretty book by taking one of M. Filon's stories
+(not because we are quite sure it is the cleverest of them) with a view
+to the more definite illustration of his method, therein.
+
+Christopher Marteau was a warden of the corporation of Luthiers.  He
+dealt in musical instruments, as his father and grandfather had done
+before him, at the sign of Saint Cecilia.  With his wife, his only
+child Phlipote, and Claude his apprentice, who was to marry Phlipote,
+he occupied a good house of his own.  Of course the disposition of the
+young people, bred together from their childhood, does not at first
+entirely concur with the parental arrangements.  But the story tells,
+reassuringly, how--to some extent how sadly--they came heartily to do
+so.  M. Marteau was no ordinary shopkeeper.  The various distinguished
+people who had fingered his clavecins, and turned over the [140] folios
+of music, for half a century past, had left their memories behind them;
+M. de Voltaire, for instance, who had caressed the head of Phlipote
+with an aged, skeleton hand, leaving, apparently, no very agreeable
+impression on the child, though her father delighted to recall the
+incident, being himself a demi-philosophe.  He went to church, that is
+to say, only twice a year, on the Feast of St. Cecilia and on the
+Sunday when the Luthiers offered the pain benit.  It was his opinion
+that everything in the State needed reform except the Corporations.
+The relations of the husband to his affectionate, satiric,
+pleasure-seeking wife, who knew so well all the eighteen theatres which
+then existed in Paris, are treated with much quiet humour.  On Sundays
+the four set forth together for a country holiday.  At such times
+Phlipote would walk half-a-dozen paces in advance of her father and
+mother, side by side with her intended.  But they never talked to each
+other: the hands, the eyes, never met.  Of what was Phlipote dreaming?
+and what was in the thoughts of Claude?
+
+It happened one day that, like sister and brother, the lovers exchanged
+confidences.  "It [141] is not always," observes Phlipote, whom every
+one excepting Claude on those occasions sought with admiring eyes--
+
+"'It is not always one loves those one is told to love.'
+
+"'What, have you, too, a secret, my little Phlipote?'
+
+"'I too, Claude!  Then what may be yours?'
+
+"'Listen, Phlipote!' he answered.  'We don't wish to be husband and
+wife, but we can be friends--good and faithful friends, helping each
+other to change the decision of our parents.'
+
+"'Were I but sure you would not betray me--'
+
+"'Would you like me to confess first?  The woman I love--Ah! but you
+will laugh at my folly!'
+
+"'No, Claude!  I shall not laugh.  I know too well what one suffers.'
+
+"'Especially when love is hopeless.'
+
+"'Hopeless?'
+
+"'Alas!  I have never spoken to her.  Perhaps never shall!'
+
+[142] "'Well! as for me, I don't even know the name of him to whom my
+heart is given!'
+
+"'Ah! poor Phlipote!'
+
+"'Poor Claude!'
+
+"They had approached each other.  The young man took the tiny hand of
+his friend, pressing it in his own.
+
+"'The woman I adore is Mademoiselle Guimard!'
+
+"'What!  Guimard of the Opera?--the fiancee of Despreaux?'"
+
+Claude still held the hands of Phlipote, who was trembling now, and
+almost on fire at the story of this ambitious love.  In return she
+reveals her own.  It was Good Friday.  She had come with her mother to
+the Sainte Chapelle to hear Mademoiselle Coupain play the organ and
+witness the extraordinary spectacle of the convulsionnaires, brought
+thither to be touched by the relic of the True Cross.  In the press of
+the crowd at this exciting scene Phlipote faints, or nearly faints,
+when a young man comes kindly to their aid.  "She is so young!" he
+explains to the mother, "she seems so delicate!"  "He looked at me,"
+she tells Claude--"he looked at [143] me, through his half-closed
+eyelids; and his words were like a caress."--
+
+"'And have you seen him no More?' asks Claude, full of sympathy.
+
+"'Yes! once again.  He pretended to be looking at the window of the
+Little Dunkirk, over the way, but with cautious glances towards our
+house.  Only, as he did not know what storey we live on, he failed to
+discover me behind my curtain, where I was but half visible.'
+
+"'You should have shown yourself.'
+
+"'Oh, Claude!' she cried, with a delicious gesture of timidity, of
+shame.
+
+"So they prattled for a long time; he talking of the great Guimard, she
+of her unknown lover, scarce listening to, but completely understanding
+each other.
+
+"'Holloa!'cries the loud voice of Christopher Marteau.  'What are you
+doing out there?'
+
+"The young people arose.  Phlipote linked her arm gaily in that of
+Claude.  'How contented I feel!' she says; 'how good it is to have a
+friend--to have you whom I used to detest, because I thought you were
+in love with me.  Now, when I know you can't bear me, I [144] shall be
+nicely in love with you.'  The soft warmth of her arm seemed to pass
+through Claude, and gave him strange sensations.  He resumed naively,
+'Yes! and how odd it is after all that I am not in love with you.  You
+are so pretty!'  Phlipote raised her finger coquettishly, 'No
+compliments, monsieur.  Since we are not to marry each other, it is
+forbidden to pay court to me!'"
+
+From that day a close intimacy established itself between the formerly
+affianced pair, now become accomplices in defeating the good intentions
+of their elders.  In long conversations, they talked in turn, or both
+together, of their respective loves.  Phlipote allows Claude entrance
+to her chamber, full of admiration for its graceful arrangements, its
+virgin cleanliness.  He inspects slowly all the familiar objects daily
+touched by her, her books, her girlish ornaments.  One day she cried
+with an air of mischief, "If she were here in my place, what would you
+do?" and no sooner were the words uttered than his arms were round her
+neck.  "'Tis but to teach you what I would do were she here."  They
+were a little troubled by this adventure.
+
+[145] And the next day was a memorable one.  By the kind contrivance of
+Phlipote herself, Claude gains the much-desired access to the object of
+his affections, but to his immense disillusion.  If he could but speak
+to her, he fancies he should find the courage, the skill, to bend her.
+Breathless, Phlipote comes in secret with the good news.  The great
+actress desires some one to tune her clavecin:--
+
+"'Papa would have gone; but I begged him so earnestly to take me to the
+Theatre Francais that he could not refuse; and it is yourself will go
+this evening to tune the clavecin of your beloved.'
+
+"'Phlipote, you've a better heart than I!  This morning I saw a
+gentleman, who resembled point by point your description of the unknown
+at the Sainte Chapelle, prowling about our shop.'
+
+"'And you didn't tell me!'
+
+"Claude hung his head.
+
+"'But why not?' the young girl asks imperiously.  'Why not?'
+
+"'In truth I could hardly say, hardly understand, myself.  Do you
+forgive me, Phlipote?'
+
+"'I suppose I must.  So make yourself as smart as you can, to please
+your goddess.'"
+
+[146] Next day she hears the story of Claude's grievous disappointment
+on seeing the great actress at home--plain, five-and-forty,
+ill-tempered.  He had tuned the clavecin and taken flight.
+
+And now for Phlipote's idol!  It was agreed that Whitsunday should be
+spent at Versailles.  On that day the royal apartments were open to the
+public, and at the hour of High Mass the crowd flowed back towards the
+vestibule of the chapel to witness what was called the procession of
+the Cordons Bleus.  The "Blue Ribbons" were the knights of the Order Du
+Saint-Esprit in their robes of ceremony, who came to range themselves
+in the choir according to the date of their creation.  The press was so
+great that the parents were separated from the young people.  Claude,
+however, at the side of Phlipote, realized the ideal of a faithful and
+jealous guardian.  The hallebardes of the Suisses rang on the marble
+pavement of the gallery.  Royalty, now unconsciously presenting its
+ceremonies for the last time, advanced through a cloud of splendour;
+but before the Queen appeared it was necessary that all the knights of
+the order down to the youngest should pass by, slow, solemn, majestic.
+
+[147] They wore, besides their ribbons of blue moire, the silver dove
+on the shoulder, and the long mantle of sombre blue velvet lined with
+yellow satin.  Phlipote watched mechanically the double file of haughty
+figures passing before them: then, on a sudden, with a feeble cry,
+falls fainting into the arms of Claude.
+
+Recovered after a while, under shelter of the great staircase, she wept
+as those weep whose heart is broken by a great blow.  Claude, without a
+word, sustained, soothed her.  A sentiment of gratitude mingled itself
+with her distress.  "How good he is!" she thought.
+
+"It was a pity," says her mother a little later "a pity you did not see
+the Cordons Bleus.  Fancy!  You will laugh at me!  But in one of the
+handsomest of the Chevaliers I felt sure I recognized the stranger who
+helped us at the Sainte Chapelle, and was so gallant with you."
+
+Phlipote did not laugh.  "You are deceived, mother!" she said in a
+faint voice.  "Pardi!" cries the father.  "'Tis what I always say. Your
+stranger was some young fellow from a shop."
+
+Two months later the young people receive [148] the nuptial
+benediction, and continue the musical business when the elders retire
+to the country.  At first a passionate lover, Claude was afterwards a
+good and devoted husband.  Phlipote never again opened her lips
+regarding the vague love which for a moment had flowered in her heart:
+only sometimes, a cloud of reverie veiled her eyes, which seemed to
+seek sadly, beyond the circle of her slow, calm life, a brilliant but
+chimeric image visible for her alone.
+
+And once again she saw him.  It was in the terrible year 1794.  She
+knew the hour at which the tumbril with those condemned to die passed
+the windows; and at the first signal would close them and draw the
+curtain.  But on this day some invincible fascination nailed her to her
+place.  There were ten faces; but she had eyes for one alone. She had
+not forgotten, could not mistake, him--that pale head, so proud and
+fine, but now thin with suffering; the beautiful mobile eyes, now
+encircled with the signs of sorrow and watching.  The convict's shirt,
+open in large, broad folds, left bare the neck, delicate as a woman's,
+and made for that youthful face an aureole, of innocence, of martyrdom.
+His looks [149] met hers.  Did he recognize her?  She could not have
+said.  She remained there, paralyzed with emotion, till the moment when
+the vision disappeared.
+
+Then she flung herself into her chamber, fell on her knees, lost
+herself in prayer.  There was a distant roll of drums.  The man to whom
+she had given her maiden soul was gone.
+
+"Cursed be their anger, for it was cruel!" says the reader.  But
+Monsieur Filon's stories sometimes end as merrily as they begin; and
+always he is all delicacy--a delicacy which keeps his large yet minute
+antiquarian knowledge of that vanished time ever in service to a direct
+interest in humanity as it is permanently, alike before and after '93.
+His book is certainly one well worth possessing.
+
+
+
+THE END
+
+16th July 1890
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Essays from 'The Guardian', by Walter Horatio Pater
+
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+*END THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.07/27/01*END*
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Alfred J. Drake, Ph.D.
+
+
+
+
+
+ESSAYS FROM 'THE GUARDIAN'
+
+By WALTER HORATIO PATER
+
+E-text Editor: Alfred J. Drake, Ph.D.
+Electronic Version 1.0 / Date 10-12-01
+
+
+DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
+
+[1] I DISCLAIM ALL LIABILITY TO YOU FOR DAMAGES, COSTS AND EXPENSES,
+INCLUDING LEGAL FEES, AND
+
+[2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR
+FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU
+GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
+
+THE E-TEXTS ON THIS SITE ARE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS".  NO WARRANTIES
+OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS TO THE E-TEXTS OR
+ANY MEDIUM THEY MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF
+MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
+
+Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or the
+exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the above
+disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you may have
+other legal rights.
+
+
+ESSAYS FROM 'THE GUARDIAN'
+
+
+NOTES BY THE E-TEXT EDITOR:
+
+Reliability: Although I have done my best to ensure that the text you
+read is error-free in comparison with an exact reprint of the
+standard edition--Macmillan's 1910 Library Edition--please exercise
+scholarly caution in using it.  It is not intended as a substitute
+for the printed original but rather as a searchable supplement.  My
+e-texts may prove convenient substitutes for hard-to-get works in a
+course where both instructor and students accept the possibility of
+some imperfections in the text, but if you are writing a scholarly
+article, dissertation, or book, you should use the standard hard-copy
+editions of any works you cite.
+
+
+Pagination and Paragraphing: To avoid an unwieldy electronic copy, I
+have transferred original pagination to brackets.  A bracketed
+numeral such as [22] indicates that the material immediately
+following the number marks the beginning of the relevant page.  I
+have preserved paragraph structure except for first-line indentation.
+
+Hyphenation: I have not preserved original hyphenation since an e-
+text does not require line-end or page-end hyphenation.
+
+Greek typeface: For this full-text edition, I have transliterated
+Pater's Greek quotations.  If there is a need for the original Greek,
+it can be viewed at my site, http://www.ajdrake.com/etexts, a
+Victorianist archive that contains the complete works of Walter Pater
+and many other nineteenth-century texts, mostly in first editions.
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+
+
+1. English Literature: 1-16
+
+2. Amiel's "Journal Intime": 17-37
+
+3. Browning: 39-51
+
+4. "Robert Elsmere": 53-70
+
+5. Their Majesties' Servants: 71-88
+
+6. Wordsworth: 89-104
+
+7. Mr. Gosse's Poems: 105-118
+
+8. Ferdinand Fabre: 119-134
+
+9. The "Contes" of M. Augustin Filon: 135-149
+
+
+
+
+
+ESSAYS FROM 'THE GUARDIAN'
+
+WALTER HORATIO PATER
+
+
+E-text Editor: Alfred J. Drake, Ph.D.
+Electronic Version 1.0 / Date 10-12-01
+
+
+
+
+PATER'S NOTE: The nine papers contained in the following volume
+originally appeared anonymously in The Guardian newspaper.
+
+
+
+
+E-TEXT EDITOR'S NOTE: I have not preserved the title pages of this
+volume, but have instead moved dates to each essay's end and included
+any necessary title-page material in the heading area of the first
+substantive page.
+
+
+
+
+
+I.  ENGLISH LITERATURE
+
+
+
+
+FOUR BOOKS FOR STUDENTS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE
+
+
+[3] THE making of an anthology of English prose is what must have
+occurred to many of its students, by way of pleasure to themselves,
+or of profit to other persons.  Such an anthology, the compass and
+variety of our prose literature being considered, might well follow
+exclusively some special line of interest in it; exhibiting, for
+instance, what is so obviously striking, its imaginative power, or
+its (legitimately) poetic beauty, or again, its philosophical
+capacity.  Mr. Saintsbury's well-considered Specimens of English
+Prose Style, from Malory to Macaulay (Kegan Paul), a volume, as we
+think, which bears fresh witness to the truth of the old remark that
+it takes a scholar indeed to make a [4] good literary selection, has
+its motive sufficiently indicated in the very original "introductory
+essay," which might well stand, along with the best of these extracts
+from a hundred or more deceased masters of English, as itself a
+document or standard, in the matter of prose style.  The essential
+difference between poetry and prose--"that other beauty of prose"--in
+the words of the motto he has chosen from Dryden, the first master of
+the sort of prose he prefers:--that is Mr. Saintsbury's burden.  It
+is a consideration, undoubtedly, of great importance both for the
+writer and the critic; in England especially, where, although (as Mr.
+Saintsbury rightly points out, in correction of an imperfectly
+informed French critic of our literature) the radical distinction
+between poetry and prose has ever been recognized by its students,
+yet the imaginative impulse, which is perhaps the richest of our
+purely intellectual gifts, has been apt to invade the province of
+that tact and good judgment, alike as to matter and manner, in which
+we are not richer than other people.  Great poetry and great prose,
+it might be found, have most of their qualities in common.  But [5]
+their indispensable qualities are different, or even opposed; and it
+is just the indispensable qualities of prose and poetry respectively,
+which it is so necessary for those who have to do with either to bear
+ever in mind.  Order, precision, directness, are the radical merits
+of prose thought; and it is more than merely legitimate that they
+should form the criterion of prose style, because within the scope of
+those qualities, according to Mr. Saintsbury, there is more than just
+the quiet, unpretending usefulness of the bare sermo pedestris.
+Acting on language, those qualities generate a specific and unique
+beauty--"that other beauty of prose"--fitly illustrated by these
+specimens, which the reader needs hardly be told, after what has been
+now said, are far from being a collection of "purple patches."
+
+Whether or not he admits their practical cogency, an attentive reader
+will not fail to be interested in the attempt Mr. Saintsbury has made
+to give technical rules of metre for the production of the true prose
+rhythm.  Any one who cares to do so might test the validity of those
+rules in the nearest possible way, by applying them to the varied
+examples in this wide [6] survey of what has been actually well done
+in English prose, here exhibited on the side of their strictly
+prosaic merit--their conformity, before all other aims, to laws of a
+structure primarily reasonable.  Not that that reasonable prose
+structure, or architecture, as Mr. Saintsbury conceives it, has been
+always, or even generally, the ideal, even of those chosen writers
+here in evidence.  Elizabethan prose, all too chaotic in the beauty
+and force which overflowed into it from Elizabethan poetry, and
+incorrect with an incorrectness which leaves it scarcely legitimate
+prose at all: then, in reaction against that, the correctness of
+Dryden, and his followers through the eighteenth century, determining
+the standard of a prose in the proper sense, not inferior to the
+prose of the Augustan age in Latin, or of the "great age in France":
+and, again in reaction against this, the wild mixture of poetry and
+prose, in our wild nineteenth century, under the influence of such
+writers as Dickens and Carlyle: such are the three periods into which
+the story of our prose literature divides itself.  And Mr. Saintsbury
+has his well-timed, practical suggestions, upon a survey of them.
+
+[7] If the invasion of the legitimate sphere of prose in England by
+the spirit of poetry, weaker or stronger, has been something far
+deeper than is indicated by that tendency to write unconscious blank
+verse, which has made it feasible to transcribe about one-half of
+Dickens's otherwise so admirable Barnaby Rudge in blank-verse lines,
+a tendency (outdoing our old friend M. Jourdain) commoner than Mr.
+Saintsbury admits, such lines being frequent in his favourite Dryden;
+yet, on the other hand, it might be maintained, and would be
+maintained by its French critics, that our English poetry has been
+too apt to dispense with those prose qualities, which, though not the
+indispensable qualities of poetry, go, nevertheless, to the making of
+all first-rate poetry--the  qualities, namely, of orderly structure,
+and such qualities generally as depend upon second thoughts.  A
+collection of specimens of English poetry, for the purpose of
+exhibiting the achievement of prose excellences by it (in their
+legitimate measure) is a desideratum we commend to Mr. Saintsbury.
+It is the assertion, the development, the product of those very
+different indispensable qualities of poetry, in the presence [8] of
+which the English is equal or superior to all other modern
+literature--the native, sublime, and beautiful, but often wild and
+irregular, imaginative power in English poetry from Chaucer to
+Shakespeare, with which Professor Minto deals, in his Characteristics
+of English Poets (Blackwood), lately reprinted.  That his book should
+have found many readers we can well understand, in the light of the
+excellent qualities which, in high degree, have gone to the making of
+it: a tasteful learning, never deserted by that hold upon
+contemporary literature which is so animating an influence in the
+study of what belongs to the past.  Beginning with an elaborate
+notice of Chaucer, full of the minute scholarship of our day, he
+never forgets that his subject is, after all, poetry.  The followers
+of Chaucer, and the precursors of Shakespeare, are alike real persons
+to him--old Langland reminding him of Carlyle's "Gospel of Labour."
+The product of a large store of reading has been here secreted anew
+for the reader who desires to see, in bird's-eye view, the light and
+shade of a long and varied period of poetic literature, by way of
+preparation for Shakespeare, [9] (with a full essay upon whom the
+volume closes,) explaining Shakespeare, so far as he can be explained
+by literary antecedents.
+
+That powerful poetry was twin-brother to a prose, of more varied, but
+certainly of wilder and more irregular power than the admirable, the
+typical, prose of Dryden.  In Dryden, and his followers through the
+eighteenth century, we see the reaction against the exuberance and
+irregularity of that prose, no longer justified by power, but
+cognizable rather as bad taste.  But such reaction was effective only
+because an age had come--the age of a negative, or agnostic
+philosophy--in which men's minds must needs be limited to the
+superficialities of things, with a kind of narrowness amounting to a
+positive gift.  What that mental attitude was capable of, in the way
+of an elegant, yet plain-spoken, and life-like delineation of men's
+moods and manners, as also in the way of determining those moods and
+manners themselves to all that was lively, unaffected, and
+harmonious, can be seen nowhere better than in Mr. Austin Dobson's
+Selections from Steele (Clarendon Press) prefaced by his careful
+"Life."  The well-known qualities of [10] Mr. Dobson's own original
+work are a sufficient guarantee of the taste and discrimination we
+may look for in a collection like this, in which the random
+lightnings of the first of the essayists are grouped under certain
+heads--"Character Sketches," "Tales and Incidents," "Manners and
+Fashions," and the like--so as to diminish, for the general reader,
+the scattered effect of short essays on a hundred various subjects,
+and give a connected, book-like character to the specimens.
+
+Steele, for one, had certainly succeeded in putting himself, and his
+way of taking the world--for this pioneer of an everybody's
+literature had his subjectivities--into books.  What a survival of
+one long-past day, for instance, in "A Ramble from Richmond to
+London"!  What truth to the surface of common things, to their direct
+claim on our interest! yet with what originality of effect in that
+truthfulness, when he writes, for instance:
+
+"I went to my lodgings, led by a light, whom I put into the discourse
+of his private economy, and made him give me an account of the
+charge, hazard, profit, and loss of a family that depended upon a
+link."
+
+[11] It was one of his peculiarities, he tells us, to live by the eye
+far more than by any other sense (a peculiarity, perhaps, in an
+Englishman), and this is what he sees at the early daily service then
+common in some City churches.  Among those who were come only to see
+or be seen, "there were indeed a few in whose looks there appeared a
+heavenly joy and gladness upon the entrance of a new day, as if they
+had gone to sleep with expectation of it."
+
+The industrious reader, indeed, might select out of these specimens
+from Steele, a picture, in minute detail, of the characteristic
+manners of that time.  Still, beside, or only a little way beneath,
+such a picture of passing fashion, what Steele and his fellows really
+deal with is the least transitory aspects of life, though still
+merely aspects--those points in which all human nature, great or
+little, finds what it has in common, and directly shows itself up.
+The natural strength of such literature will, of course, be in the
+line of its tendencies; in transparency, variety, and directness.  To
+the unembarrassing matter, the unembarrassed style!  Steele is,
+perhaps, the most impulsive writer of the school [12] to which he
+belongs; he abounds in felicities of impulse.  Yet who can help
+feeling that his style is regular because the matter he deals with is
+the somewhat uncontentious, even, limited soul, of an age not
+imaginative, and unambitious in its speculative flight?  Even in
+Steele himself we may observe with what sureness of instinct the men
+of that age turned aside at the contact of anything likely to make
+them, in any sense, forget themselves.
+
+No one indicates better than Charles Lamb, to whose memory Mr. Alfred
+Ainger has done such good service, the great and peculiar change
+which was begun at the end of the last century, and dominates our
+own; that sudden increase of the width, the depth, the complexity of
+intellectual interest, which has many times torn and distorted
+literary style, even with those best able to comprehend its laws.  In
+Mrs. Leicester's School, with other Writings in Prose and Verse
+(Macmillan), Mr. Ainger has collected and annotated certain remains
+of Charles and Mary Lamb, too good to lie unknown to the present
+generation, in forgotten periodicals or inaccessible reprints.  The
+story of the Odyssey, abbreviated [13] in very simple prose, for
+children--of all ages--will speak for itself.  But the garland of
+graceful stories which gives name to the volume, told by a party of
+girls on the evening of their assembling at school, are in the
+highest degree characteristic of the brother and sister who were ever
+so successful in imparting to others their own enjoyment of books and
+people.  The tragic circumstance which strengthened and consecrated
+their natural community of interest had, one might think, something
+to do with the far-reaching pensiveness even of their most humorous
+writing, touching often the deepest springs of pity and awe, as the
+way of the highest humour is--a way, however, very different from
+that of the humorists of the eighteenth century.  But one cannot
+forget also that Lamb was early an enthusiastic admirer of
+Wordsworth: of Wordsworth, the first characteristic power of the
+nineteenth century, his essay on whom, in the Quarterly Review, Mr.
+Ainger here reprints.  Would that he could have reprinted it as
+originally composed, and ungarbled by Gifford, the editor!  Lamb,
+like Wordsworth, still kept the charm of a serenity, [14] a
+precision, unsurpassed by the quietest essayist of the preceding age.
+But it might have been foreseen that the rising tide of thought and
+feeling, on the strength of which they too are borne upward, would
+sometimes overflow barriers.  And so it happens that these simple
+stories are touched, much as Wordsworth's verse-stories were, with
+tragic power.  Dealing with the beginnings of imagination in the
+minds of children, they record, with the reality which a very
+delicate touch preserves from anything lugubrious, not those merely
+preventible miseries of childhood over which some writers have been
+apt to gloat, but the contact of childhood with the great and
+inevitable sorrows of life, into which children can enter with depth,
+with dignity, and sometimes with a kind of simple, pathetic
+greatness, to the discipline of the heart.  Let the reader begin with
+the "Sea Voyage," which is by Charles Lamb; and, what Mr. Ainger
+especially recommends, the "Father's Wedding-Day," by his sister
+Mary.
+
+The ever-increasing intellectual burden of our age is hardly likely
+to adapt itself to the exquisite, but perhaps too delicate and
+limited, [15] literary instruments of the age of Queen Anne.  Yet Mr.
+Saintsbury is certainly right in thinking that, as regards style,
+English literature has much to do.  Well, the good quality of an age,
+the defect of which lies in the direction of intellectual anarchy and
+confusion, may well be eclecticism: in style, as in other things, it
+is well always to aim at the combination of as many excellences as
+possible--opposite excellences, it may be--those other beauties of
+prose.  A busy age will hardly educate its writers in correctness.
+Let its writers make time to write English more as a learned
+language; and completing that correction of style which had only gone
+a certain way in the last century, raise the general level of
+language towards their own.  If there be a weakness in Mr.
+Saintsbury's view, it is perhaps in a tendency to regard style a
+little too independently of matter.  And there are still some who
+think that, after all, the style is the man; justified, in very great
+varieties, by the simple consideration of what he himself has to say,
+quite independently of any real or supposed connection with this or
+that literary age or school.  Let us close with the words of a most
+[16] versatile master of English--happily not yet included in Mr.
+Saintsbury's book--a writer who has dealt with all the perturbing
+influences of our century in a manner as classical, as idiomatic, as
+easy and elegant, as Steele's:
+
+"I wish you to observe," says Cardinal Newman, "that the mere dealer
+in words cares little or nothing for the subject which he is
+embellishing, but can paint and gild anything whatever to order;
+whereas the artist, whom I am acknowledging, has his great or rich
+visions before him, and his only aim is to bring out what he thinks
+or what he feels in a way adequate to the thing spoken of, and
+appropriate to the speaker."
+
+17th February 1886
+
+
+
+
+
+II.  AMIEL'S "JOURNAL INTIME"
+
+
+
+
+
+Amiel's Journal.  The Journal Intime of Henri-Frederic Amiel.
+Translated, with an Introduction and Notes, by Mrs. Humphry Ward.
+Two vols.  Macmillans.
+
+[19] CERTAIN influential expressions of opinion have attracted much
+curiosity to Amiel's Journal Intime, both in France, where the book
+has already made its mark, and in England, where Mrs. Humphry Ward's
+translation is likely to make it widely known among all serious
+lovers of good literature.  Easy, idiomatic, correct, this English
+version reads like an excellent original English work, and gives
+fresh proof that the work of translation, if it is to be done with
+effect, must be done by those who, possessing, like Mrs. Ward,
+original literary gifts, are willing to make a long act of self-
+denial or self-effacement [20] for the benefit of the public.  In
+this case, indeed, the work is not wholly one of self-effacement, for
+the accomplished translator has prefaced Amiel's Journal by an able
+and interesting essay of seventy pages on Amiel's life and
+intellectual position.  And certainly there is much in the book, thus
+effectively presented to the English reader, to attract those who
+interest themselves in the study of the finer types of human nature,
+of literary expression, of metaphysical and practical philosophy; to
+attract, above all, those interested in such philosophy, at points
+where it touches upon questions of religion, and especially at the
+present day.
+
+Henri-Frederic Amiel was born at Geneva in 1821.  Orphaned of both
+his parents at the age of twelve, his youth was necessarily "a little
+bare and forlorn," and a deep interest in religion became fixed in
+him early.  His student days coming to an end, the years which
+followed, from 1842 to 1848--Wanderjahre, in which he visited
+Holland, Italy, Sicily, and the principal towns of Germany--seem to
+have been the happiest of his life.  In 1849 he became a Professor at
+Geneva, and there is little more to tell of him in [21] the way of
+outward events.  He published some volumes of verse; to the last
+apparently still only feeling after his true literary metier.  Those
+last seven years were a long struggle against the disease which ended
+his life, consumption, at the age of fifty-three.  The first entry in
+his Journal is in 1848.  From that date to his death, a period of
+over twenty-five years, this Journal was the real object of all the
+energies of his richly-endowed nature: and from its voluminous sheets
+his literary executors have selected the deeply interesting volumes
+now presented in English.
+
+With all its gifts and opportunities it was a melancholy life--
+melancholy with something not altogether explained by the somewhat
+pessimistic philosophy exposed in the Journal, nor by the consumptive
+tendency of Amiel's physical constitution, causing him from a very
+early date to be much preoccupied with the effort to reconcile
+himself with the prospect of death, and reinforcing the far from
+sanguine temperament of one intellectually also a poitrinaire.
+
+You might think him at first sight only an admirable specimen of a
+thoroughly well-educated [22] man, full, of course, of the modern
+spirit; stimulated and formed by the influences of the varied
+intellectual world around him; and competing, in his turn, with many
+very various types of contemporary ability.  The use of his book to
+cultivated people might lie in its affording a kind of standard by
+which they might take measure of the maturity and producible quality
+of their own thoughts on a hundred important subjects.  He will write
+a page or two, giving evidence of that accumulated power and
+attainment which, with a more strenuous temperament, might have
+sufficed for an effective volume.  Continually, in the Journal, we
+pause over things that would rank for beauties among widely differing
+models of the best French prose.  He has said some things in Pascal's
+vein not unworthy of Pascal.  He had a right to compose "Thoughts":
+they have the force in them which makes up for their unavoidable want
+of continuity.
+
+But if, as Amiel himself challenges us to do, we look below the
+surface of a very equable and even smoothly accomplished literary
+manner, we discover, in high degree of development, that perplexity
+or complexity of soul, the expression [23] of which, so it be with an
+adequate literary gift, has its legitimate, because inevitable,
+interest for the modern reader.  Senancour and Maurice de Guerin in
+one, seem to have been supplemented here by a larger experience, a
+far greater education, than either of them had attained to.  So
+multiplex is the result that minds of quite opposite type might well
+discover in these pages their own special thought or humour, happily
+expressed at last (they might think) in precisely that just shade of
+language themselves had searched for in vain.  And with a writer so
+vivid and impressive as Amiel, those varieties of tendency are apt to
+present themselves as so many contending persons.  The perplexed
+experience gets the apparent clearness, as it gets also the
+animation, of a long dialogue; only, the disputants never part
+company, and there is no real conclusion.  "This nature," he
+observes, of one of the many phases of character he has discovered in
+himself, "is, as it were, only one of the men which exist in me.  It
+is one of my departments.  It is not the whole of my territory, the
+whole of my inner kingdom"; and again, "there are ten men in me,
+according to time, place, surrounding, [24] and occasion; and, in my
+restless diversity, I am for ever escaping myself."
+
+Yet, in truth, there are but two men in Amiel--two sufficiently
+opposed personalities, which the attentive reader may define for
+himself; compare with, and try by each other--as we think, correct
+also by each other.  There is the man, in him and in these pages, who
+would be "the man of disillusion," only that he has never really been
+"the man of desires"; and who seems, therefore, to have a double
+weariness about him.  He is akin, of course, to Obermann, to Rene,
+even to Werther, and, on our first introduction to him, we might
+think that we had to do only with one more of the vague
+"renunciants," who in real life followed those creations of fiction,
+and who, however delicate, interesting as a study, and as it were
+picturesque on the stage of life, are themselves, after all,
+essentially passive, uncreative, and therefore necessarily not of
+first-rate importance in literature.  Taken for what it is worth, the
+expression of this mood--the culture of ennui for its own sake--is
+certainly carried to its ideal of negation by Amiel.  But the
+completer, the positive, soul, which will merely take [25] that mood
+into its service (its proper service, as we hold, is in counteraction
+to the vulgarity of purely positive natures) is also certainly in
+evidence in Amiel's "Thoughts"--that other, and far stronger person,
+in the long dialogue; the man, in short, possessed of gifts, not for
+the renunciation, but for the reception and use, of all that is
+puissant, goodly, and effective in life, and for the varied and
+adequate literary reproduction of it; who, under favourable
+circumstances, or even without them, will become critic, or poet, and
+in either case a creative force; and if he be religious (as Amiel was
+deeply religious) will make the most of "evidence," and almost
+certainly find a Church.
+
+The sort of purely poetic tendency in his mind, which made Amiel
+known in his own lifetime chiefly as a writer of verse, seems to be
+represented in these volumes by certain passages of natural
+description, always sincere, and sometimes rising to real
+distinction.  In Switzerland it is easy to be pleased with scenery.
+But the record of such pleasure becomes really worth while when, as
+happens with Amiel, we feel that there has been, and with success, an
+intellectual [26] effort to get at the secret, the precise motive,
+of the pleasure; to define feeling, in this matter.  Here is a good
+description of an effect of fog, which we commend to foreigners
+resident in London:
+
+"Fog has certainly a poetry of its own--a grace, a dreamy charm.  It
+does for the daylight what a lamp does for us at night; it turns the
+mind towards meditation; it throws the soul back on itself.  The sun,
+as it were, sheds us abroad in nature, scatters and disperses us;
+mist draws us together and concentrates us--it is cordial, homely,
+charged with feeling.  The poetry of the sun has something of the
+epic in it; that of fog and mist is elegiac and religious.  Pantheism
+is the child of light; mist engenders faith in near protectors.  When
+the great world is shut off from us, the house becomes itself a small
+universe.  Shrouded in perpetual mist, men love each other better;
+for the only reality then is the family, and, within the family, the
+heart; and the greatest thoughts come from the heart--so says the
+moralist."
+
+It is of Swiss fog, however, that he is speaking, as, in what
+follows, of Swiss frost:
+
+[27] "Three snowstorms this afternoon.  Poor blossoming plum-trees
+and peach-trees!  What a difference from six years ago, when the
+cherry-trees, adorned in their green spring dress and laden with
+their bridal flowers, smiled at my departure along the Vaudois
+fields, and the lilacs of Burgundy threw great gusts of perfume into
+my face!"  The weather is seldom talked of with so much real
+sensitiveness to it as in this:
+
+"The weather is rainy, the whole atmosphere grey; it is a time
+favourable to thought and meditation.  I have a liking for such days
+as these; they revive one's converse with oneself and make it
+possible to live the inner life: they are quiet and peaceful, like a
+song in a minor key.  We are nothing but thought, but we feel our
+life to its very centre.  Our very sensations turn to reverie.  It is
+a strange state of mind; it is like those silences in worship which
+are not the empty moments of devotion, but the full moments, and
+which are so because at such times the soul, instead of being
+polarized, dispersed, localized, in a single impression or thought,
+feels her own totality and is conscious of herself."
+
+[28] "Every landscape," he writes, "is, as it were, a state of the
+soul": and again, "At bottom there is but one subject of study; the
+forms and metamorphoses of mind: all other subjects may be reduced to
+that; all other studies bring us back to this study."  And, in truth,
+if he was occupied with the aspects of nature to such an excellent
+literary result, still, it was with nature only as a phenomenon of
+the moral order.  His interest, after all, is, consistently, that of
+the moralist (in no narrow sense) who deals, from predilection, with
+the sort of literary work which stirs men--stirs their intellect--
+through feeling; and with that literature, especially, as looked at
+through the means by which it became capable of thus commanding men.
+The powers, the culture, of the literary producer: there, is the
+centre of Amiel's curiosity.
+
+And if we take Amiel at his own word, we must suppose that but for
+causes, the chief of which were bad health and a not long life, he
+too would have produced monumental work, whose scope and character he
+would wish us to conjecture from his "Thoughts."  Such indications
+there certainly are in them.  He was [29] meant--we see it in the
+variety, the high level both of matter and style, the animation, the
+gravity, of one after another of these thoughts--on religion, on
+poetry, on politics in the highest sense; on their most abstract
+principles, and on the authors who have given them a personal colour;
+on the genius of those authors, as well as on their concrete works;
+on outlying isolated subjects, such as music, and special musical
+composers--he was meant, if people ever are meant for special lines
+of activity, for the best sort of criticism, the imaginative
+criticism; that criticism which is itself a kind of construction, or
+creation, as it penetrates, through the given literary or artistic
+product, into the mental and inner constitution of the producer,
+shaping his work.  Of such critical skill, cultivated with all the
+resources of Geneva in the nineteenth century, he has given in this
+Journal abundant proofs.  Corneille, Cherbuliez; Rousseau, Sismondi;
+Victor Hugo, and Joubert; Mozart and Wagner--all who are interested
+in these men will find a value in what Amiel has to say of them.
+Often, as for instance in his excellent criticism of Quinet, he has
+to make large exceptions [30]; limitations, skilfully effected by
+the way, in the course of a really appreciative estimate.  Still,
+through all, what we feel is that we have to do with one who
+criticises in this fearlessly equitable manner only because he is
+convinced that his subject is of a real literary importance.  A
+powerful, intellectual analysis of some well-marked subject, in such
+form as makes literature enduring, is indeed what the world might
+have looked for from him: those institutes of aesthetics, for
+instance, which might exist, after Lessing and Hegel, but which
+certainly do not exist yet.  "Construction," he says--artistic or
+literary construction--"rests upon feeling, instinct, and," alas!
+also, "upon will."  The instinct, at all events, was certainly his.
+And over and above that he had possessed himself of the art of
+expressing, in quite natural language, very difficult thoughts; those
+abstract and metaphysical conceptions especially, in which German
+mind has been rich, which are bad masters, but very useful ministers
+towards the understanding, towards an analytical survey, of all that
+the intellect has produced.
+
+But something held him back: not so much [31] a reluctancy of
+temperament, or of physical constitution (common enough cause why men
+of undeniable gifts fail of commensurate production) but a cause
+purely intellectual--the presence in him, namely, of a certain vein
+of opinion; that other, constituent but contending, person, in his
+complex nature.  "The relation of thought to action," he writes,
+"filled my mind on waking, and I found myself carried towards a
+bizarre formula, which seems to have something of the night still
+clinging about it.  Action is but coarsened thought."  That is but an
+ingenious metaphysical point, as he goes on to show.  But, including
+in "action" that literary production in which the line of his own
+proper activity lay, he followed--followed often--that fastidious
+utterance to a cynical and pessimistic conclusion.
+
+Maia, as he calls it, the empty "Absolute" of the Buddhist, the
+"Infinite," the "All," of which those German metaphysicians he loved
+only too well have had so much to say: this was for ever to give the
+go-by to all positive, finite, limited interests whatever.  The vague
+pretensions of an abstract expression acted on him with all the force
+of a prejudice.  "The ideal," he admits, [32] "poisons for me all
+imperfect possession"; and again, "The Buddhist tendency in me blunts
+the faculty of free self-government, and weakens the power of action.
+I feel a terror of action and am only at ease in the impersonal,
+disinterested, and objective line of thought."  But then, again, with
+him "action" meant chiefly literary production.  He quotes with
+approval those admirable words from Goethe, "In der Beschrankung
+zeigt sich erst der Meister"; yet still always finds himself wavering
+between "frittering myself away on the infinitely little, and longing
+after what is unknown and distant."  There is, doubtless, over and
+above the physical consumptive tendency, an instinctive turn of
+sentiment in this touching confession.  Still, what strengthened both
+tendencies was that metaphysical prejudice for the "Absolute," the
+false intellectual conscience.  "I have always avoided what attracted
+me, and turned my back upon the point where secretly I desired to
+be"; and, of course, that is not the way to a free and generous
+productivity, in literature, or in anything else; though in
+literature, with Amiel at all events, it meant the fastidiousness
+which [33] is incompatible with any but the very best sort of
+production.
+
+And as that abstract condition of Maia, to the kind and quantity of
+concrete literary production we hold to have been originally possible
+for him; so was the religion he actually attained, to what might have
+been the development of his profoundly religious spirit, had he been
+able to see that the old-fashioned Christianity is itself but the
+proper historic development of the true "essence" of the New
+Testament.  There, again, is the constitutional shrinking, through a
+kind of metaphysical prejudice, from the concrete--that fear of the
+actual--in this case, of the Church of history; to which the
+admissions, which form so large a part of these volumes, naturally
+lead.  Assenting, on probable evidence, to so many of the judgments
+of the religious sense, he failed to see the equally probable
+evidence there is for the beliefs, the peculiar direction of men's
+hopes, which complete those judgments harmoniously, and bring them
+into connection with the facts, the venerable institutions of the
+past--with the lives of the saints.  By failure, as we think, of that
+historic sense, of [34] which he could speak so well, he got no
+further in this direction than the glacial condition of rationalistic
+Geneva.  "Philosophy," he says, "can never replace religion."  Only,
+one cannot see why it might not replace a religion such as his: a
+religion, after all, much like Seneca's.
+
+"I miss something," he himself confesses, "common worship, a positive
+religion, shared with other people.  Ah!  when will the Church to
+which I belong in heart rise into being?"  To many at least of those
+who can detect the ideal through the disturbing circumstances which
+belong to all actual institutions in the world, it was already there.
+Pascal, from considerations to which Amiel was no stranger, came to
+the large hopes of the Catholic Church; Amiel stopped short at a
+faith almost hopeless; and by stopping short just there he really
+failed, as we think, of intellectual consistency, and missed that
+appeasing influence which his nature demanded as the condition of its
+full activity, as a force, an intellectual force, in the world--in
+the special business of his life.  "Welcome the unforeseen," he says
+again, by way of a counsel of perfection in the matter of culture,
+"but give to [35] your life unity, and bring the unforeseen within
+the lines of your plan."  Bring, we should add, the Great Possibility
+at least within the lines of your plan--your plan of action or
+production; of morality; especially of your conceptions of religion.
+And still, Amiel too, be it remembered (we are not afraid to repeat
+it), has said some things in Pascal's vein not unworthy of Pascal.
+
+And so we get only the Journal.  Watching in it, in the way we have
+suggested, the contention of those two men, those two minds in him,
+and observing how the one might have ascertained and corrected the
+shortcomings of the other, we certainly understand, and can
+sympathize with Amiel's despondency in the retrospect of a life which
+seemed to have been but imperfectly occupied.  But, then, how
+excellent a literary product, after all, the Journal is.  And already
+we have found that it improves also on second reading.  A book of
+"thoughts" should be a book that may be fairly dipped into, and yield
+good quotable sayings.  Here are some of its random offerings:
+
+Look twice, if what you want is a just [36] conception; look once, if
+what you want is a sense of beauty."
+
+"It is not history which teaches conscience to be honest; it is the
+conscience which educates history.  Fact is corrupting--it is we who
+correct it by the persistence of our ideal."
+
+"To do easily what is difficult for others is the mark of talent.  To
+do what is impossible for talent is the mark of genius."
+
+"Duty has the virtue of making us feel the reality of a positive
+world, while at the same time detaching us from it."
+
+"As it is impossible to be outside God, the best is consciously to
+dwell in Him."
+
+"He also (the Son of Man), He above all, is the great Misunderstood,
+the least comprehended."
+
+"The pensee writer is to the philosopher what the dilettante is to
+the artist."
+
+There are some, we know, who hold that genius cannot, in the nature
+of things, be "sterile"; that there are no "mute" Miltons, or the
+like.  Well! genius, or only a very distinguished talent, the gift
+which Amiel nursed so jealously did come into evidence.  And the [37]
+reader, we hope, sees also already how well his English translator
+has done her work.  She may justly feel, as part at least of the
+reward of a labour which must have occupied much time, so many of the
+freshest hours of mind and spirit, that she has done something to
+help her author in the achievement of his, however discouraged still
+irrepressible, desire, by giving additional currency to a book which
+the best sort of readers will recognize as an excellent and certainly
+very versatile companion, not to be forgotten.
+
+17th March 1886
+
+
+
+
+
+III.  BROWNING
+
+
+
+
+
+An Introduction to the Study of Browning.
+By Arthur Symons.  Cassells.
+
+
+[41] WHETHER it be true or not that Mr. Browning is justly chargeable
+with "obscurity"--with a difficulty of manner, that is, beyond the
+intrinsic difficulty of his matter--it is very probable that an
+Introduction to the study of his works, such as this of Mr. Symons,
+will add to the number of his readers.  Mr. Symons's opening essay on
+the general characteristics of Mr. Browning is a just and acceptable
+appreciation of his poetry as a whole, well worth reading, even at
+this late day.  We find in Mr. Symons the thoughtful and practised
+yet enthusiastic student in literature--in intellectual problems;
+always quiet and sane, praising Mr. Browning with tact, with a real
+refinement and grace; saying well many [42] things which every
+competent reader of the great poet must feel to be true; devoting to
+the subject he loves a critical gift so considerable as to make us
+wish for work from his hands of larger scope than this small volume.
+His book is, according to his intention, before all things a useful
+one.  Appreciating Mr. Browning fairly, as we think, in all his
+various efforts, his aim is to point his readers to the best, the
+indisputable, rather than to the dubious portions of his author's
+work.  Not content with his own excellent general criticism of Mr.
+Browning, he guides the reader to his works, or division of work,
+seriatim, making of each a distinct and special study, and giving a
+great deal of welcome information about the poems, the circumstances
+of their composition, and the like, with delightful quotations.
+Incidentally, his Introduction has the interest of a brief but
+effective selection from Mr. Browning's poems; and he has added an
+excellent biography.
+
+Certainly we shall not quarrel with Mr. Symons for reckoning Mr.
+Browning, among English poets, second to Shakespeare alone--"He comes
+very near the gigantic total of [43] Shakespeare."  The quantity of
+his work?  Yes! that too, in spite of a considerable unevenness, is a
+sign of genius.  "So large, indeed, appear to be his natural
+endowments that we cannot feel as if even thirty volumes would have
+come near to exhausting them."  Imaginatively, indeed, Mr. Browning
+has been a multitude of persons; only (as Shakespeare's only untried
+style was the simple one) almost never simple ones; and certainly he
+has controlled them all to profoundly interesting artistic ends by
+his own powerful personality.  The world and all its action, as a
+show of thought, that is the scope of his work.  It makes him pre-
+eminently a modern poet--a poet of the self-pondering, perfectly
+educated, modern world, which, having come to the end of all direct
+and purely external experiences, must necessarily turn for its
+entertainment to the world within:--
+
+"The men and women who live and move in that new world of his
+creation are as varied as life itself; they are kings and beggars,
+saints and lovers, great captains, poets, painters, musicians,
+priests and Popes, Jews, gipsies and dervishes, street-girls,
+princesses, dancers with the wicked [44] witchery of the daughter of
+Herodias, wives with the devotion of the wife of Brutus, joyous girls
+and malevolent grey-beards, statesmen, cavaliers, soldiers of
+humanity, tyrants and bigots, ancient sages and modern spiritualists,
+heretics, scholars, scoundrels, devotees, rabbis, persons of quality
+and men of low estate--men and women as multiform as nature or
+society has made them."
+
+The individual, the personal, the concrete, as distinguished from,
+yet revealing in its fulness, the general, the universal--that is Mr.
+Browning's chosen subject-matter: "Every man is for him an epitome of
+the universe, a centre of creation."  It is always the particular
+soul, and the particular act or episode, as the flower of the
+particular soul--the act or episode by which its quality comes to the
+test--in which he interests us.  With him it is always "a drama of
+the interior, a tragedy or comedy of the soul, to see thereby how
+each soul becomes conscious of itself."  In the Preface to the later
+edition of Sordello, Mr. Browning himself told us that to him little
+else seems worth study except the development of a soul, the
+incidents, the story, of that.  And, [45] in fact, the intellectual
+public generally agrees with him.  It is because he has ministered
+with such marvellous vigour, and variety, and fine skill to this
+interest, that he is the most modern, to modern people the most
+important, of poets.
+
+So much for Mr. Browning's matter; for his manner, we hold Mr. Symons
+right in thinking him a master of all the arts of poetry.  "These
+extraordinary little poems," says Mr. Symons of "Johannes Agricola"
+and "Porphyria's Lover"--
+
+"Reveal not only an imagination of intense fire and heat, but an
+almost finished art--a power of conceiving subtle mental complexities
+with clearness and of expressing them in a picturesque form and in
+perfect lyric language.  Each poem renders a single mood, and renders
+it completely."
+
+Well, after all, that is true of a large portion of Mr. Browning's
+work.  A curious, an erudite artist, certainly, he is to some extent
+an experimenter in rhyme or metre, often hazardous.  But in spite of
+the dramatic rudeness which is sometimes of the idiosyncrasy, the
+true and native colour of his multitudinous dramatis personae, or
+monologists, Mr. Symons is right in [46] laying emphasis on the
+grace, the finished skill, the music, native and ever ready to the
+poet himself--tender, manly, humorous, awe-stricken--when speaking in
+his own proper person.  Music herself, the analysis of the musical
+soul, in the characteristic episodes of its development is a wholly
+new range of poetic subject in which Mr. Browning is simply unique.
+Mr. Symons tells us:--
+
+"When Mr. Browning was a mere boy, it is recorded that he debated
+within himself whether he should not become a painter or a musician
+as well as a poet.  Finally, though not, I believe, for a good many
+years, he decided in the negative.  But the latent qualities of
+painter and musician had developed themselves in his poetry, and much
+of his finest and very much of his most original verse is that which
+speaks the language of painter and musician as it had never before
+been spoken.  No English poet before him has ever excelled his
+utterances on music, none has so much as rivalled his utterances on
+art.  'Abt Vogler' is the richest, deepest, fullest poem on music in
+the language.  It is not the theories of the poet, but the instincts
+of the [47] musician, that it speaks.  'Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha,'
+another special poem on music, is unparalleled for ingenuity of
+technical interpretation: 'A Toccata of Galuppi's' is as rare a
+rendering as can anywhere be found of the impressions and sensations
+caused by a musical piece; but 'Abt Vogler' is a very glimpse into
+the heaven where music is born."
+
+It is true that "when the head has to be exercised before the heart
+there is chilling of sympathy."  Of course, so intellectual a poet
+(and only the intellectual poet, as we have pointed out, can be
+adequate to modern demands) will have his difficulties.  They were a
+part of the poet's choice of vocation, and he was fully aware of
+them:--
+
+"Mr. Browning might say, as his wife said in an early preface, I
+never mistook pleasure for the final cause of poetry, nor leisure for
+the hour of the poet--as indeed he has himself said, to much the same
+effect, in a letter printed many years ago: I never pretended to
+offer such literature as should be a substitute for a cigar or a game
+at dominoes to an idle man."
+
+"Moreover, while a writer who deals with [48] easy themes has no
+excuse if he is not pellucid to a glance, one who employs his
+intellect and imagination on high and hard questions has a right to
+demand a corresponding closeness of attention, and a right to say
+with Bishop Butler, in answer to a similar complaint: 'It must be
+acknowledged that some of the following discourses are very abstruse
+and difficult, or, if you please, obscure; but I must take leave to
+add that those alone are judges whether or no, and how far this is a
+fault, who are judges whether or no, and how far it might have been
+avoided--those only who will be at the trouble to understand what is
+here said, and to see how far the things here insisted upon, and not
+other things, might have been put in a plainer manner.'"
+
+In Mr. Symons's opinion Pippa Passes is Mr. Browning's most perfect
+piece of work, for pregnancy of intellect, combined with faultless
+expression in a perfectly novel yet symmetrical outline: and he is
+very likely right.  He is certainly right in thinking Mas they
+formerly stood, Mr. Browning's most delightful volumes.  It is only
+to be regretted [49] that in the later collected edition of the works
+those two magical old volumes are broken up and scattered under other
+headings.  We think also that Mr. Symons in his high praise does no
+more than justice to The Ring and the Book.  The Ring and the Book is
+at once the largest and the greatest of Mr. Browning's works, the
+culmination of his dramatic method, and the turning-point more
+decisively than Dramatis Personae of his style.  Yet just here he
+rightly marks a change in Mr. Browning's manner:--
+
+"Not merely the manner of presentment, the substance, and also the
+style and versification have undergone a change.  I might point to
+the profound intellectual depth of certain pieces as its
+characteristic, or, equally, to the traces here and there of an
+apparent carelessness of workmanship; or, yet again, to the new and
+very marked partiality for scenes and situations of English and
+modern rather than medieval and foreign life."
+
+Noble as much of Mr. Browning's later work is, full of intellect,
+alive with excellent passages (in the first volume of the Dramatic
+Idyls [50] perhaps more powerful than in any earlier work);
+notwithstanding all that, we think the change here indicated matter
+of regret.  After all, we have to conjure up ideal poets for
+ourselves out of those who stand in or behind the range of volumes on
+our book-shelves; and our ideal Browning would have for his entire
+structural type those two volumes of Men and Women with Pippa Passes.
+
+Certainly, it is a delightful world to which Mr. Browning has given
+us the key, and those volumes a delightful gift to our age-record of
+so much that is richest in the world of things, and men, and their
+works--all so much the richer by the great intellect, the great
+imagination, which has made the record, transmuted them into
+imperishable things of art:--
+
+"'With souls should souls have place'--this, with Mr. Browning, is
+something more than a mere poetical conceit.  It is the condensed
+expression of an experience, a philosophy, and an art.  Like the
+lovers of his lyric, Mr. Browning has renounced the selfish
+serenities of wild-wood and dream-palace; he has fared up and down
+among men, listening to the music of humanity, [51] observing the
+acts of men, and he has sung what he has heard, and he has painted
+what he has seen.  Will the work live? we ask; and we can answer only
+in his own words--
+
+It lives,
+If precious be the soul of man to man."
+
+9th November 1887
+
+
+
+
+
+IV.  "ROBERT ELSMERE"
+
+
+
+
+[55] THOSE who, in this bustling age, turn to fiction not merely for
+a little passing amusement, but for profit, for the higher sort of
+pleasure, will do well, we think (after a conscientious perusal on
+our own part) to bestow careful reading on Robert Elsmere.  A chef
+d'oeuvre of that kind of quiet evolution of character through
+circumstance, introduced into English literature by Miss Austen, and
+carried to perfection in France by George Sand (who is more to the
+point, because, like Mrs. Ward, she was not afraid to challenge
+novel-readers to an interest in religious questions), it abounds in
+sympathy with people as we find them, in aspiration towards something
+better--towards a certain ideal--in a refreshing sense of second
+thoughts everywhere.  The author clearly has developed a remarkable
+natural aptitude for literature by liberal reading and most patient
+care [56] in composition--composition in that narrower sense which is
+concerned with the building of a good sentence; as also in that wider
+sense, which ensures, in a work like this, with so many joints, so
+many currents of interest, a final unity of impression an the part of
+the reader, and easy transition by him from one to the other.  Well-
+used to works of fiction which tell all they have to tell in one thin
+volume, we have read Mrs. Ward's three volumes with unflagging
+readiness.
+
+For, in truth, that quiet method of evolution, which she pursues
+undismayed to the end, requires a certain lengthiness; and the
+reader's reward will be in a secure sense that he has been in
+intercourse with no mere flighty remnants, but with typical forms, of
+character, firmly and fully conceived.  We are persuaded that the
+author might have written a novel which should have been all shrewd
+impressions of society, or all humorous impressions of country life,
+or all quiet fun and genial caricature.  Actually she has chosen to
+combine something of each of these with a very sincerely felt
+religious interest; and who will deny that to trace the influence of
+religion upon human character is one of the [57] legitimate functions
+of the novel?  In truth, the modern "novel of character" needs some
+such interest, to lift it sufficiently above the humdrum of life; as
+men's horizons are enlarged by religion, of whatever type it may be--
+and we may say at once that the religious type which is dear to Mrs.
+Ward, though avowedly "broad," is not really the broadest.  Having
+conceived her work thus, she has brought a rare instinct for
+probability and nature to the difficult task of combining this
+religious motive and all the learned thought it involves, with a very
+genuine interest in many  varieties of average mundane life.
+
+We should say that the author's special ethical gift lay in a
+delicately intuitive sympathy, not, perhaps, with all phases of
+character, but certainly with the very varied class of persons
+represented in these volumes.  It may be congruous with this,
+perhaps, that her success should be more assured in dealing with the
+characters of women than with those of men.  The men who pass before
+us in her pages, though real and tangible and effective enough, seem,
+nevertheless, from time to time to reveal their joinings.  They are
+composite of many different men we seem to have [58] known, and fancy
+we could detach again from the ensemble and from each other.  And
+their goodness, when they are good, is--well! a little conventional;
+the kind of goodness that men themselves discount rather largely in
+their estimates of each other.  Robert himself is certainly worth
+knowing--a really attractive union of manliness and saintliness, of
+shrewd sense and unworldly aims, and withal with that kindness and
+pity the absence of which so often abates the actual value of those
+other gifts.  Mrs. Ward's literary power is sometimes seen at its
+best (it is a proof of her high cultivation of this power that so it
+should be) in the analysis of minor characters, both male and female.
+Richard Leyburn, deceased before the story begins, but warm in the
+memory of the few who had known him, above all of his great-souled
+daughter Catherine, strikes us, with his religious mysticism, as
+being in this way one of the best things in the book:--
+
+"Poor Richard Leyburn!  Yet where had the defeat lain?
+
+"'Was he happy in his school life?'  Robert asked gently.  'Was
+teaching what he liked?'
+
+[59] "'Oh! yes, only--' and then added hurriedly, as though drawn on
+in spite of herself by the grave sympathy of his look, 'I never knew
+anybody so good who thought himself of so little account.  He always
+believed that he had missed everything, wasted everything, and that
+anybody else would have made infinitely more out of his life.  He vas
+always blaming, scourging himself.  And all the time he was the
+noblest, purest, most devoted--'
+
+"She stopped.  Her voice had passed beyond her control.  Elsmere was
+startled by the feeling she showed.  Evidently he had touched one of
+the few sore places in this pure heart.  It was as though her memory
+of her father had in it elements of almost intolerable pathos, as
+though the child's brooding love and loyalty were in perpetual
+protest even now after this lapse of years against the verdict which
+an over-scrupulous, despondent soul had pronounced upon itself.  Did
+she feel that he had gone uncomforted out of life--even by her--even
+by religion?  Was that the sting?"
+
+A little later she gives the record of his last hours:--
+
+[60] "'Catherine!  Life is harder, the narrower way narrower than
+ever.  I die--and memory caught still the piteous long-drawn breath
+by which the voice was broken--'in much--much perplexity about many
+things.  You have a clear soul, an iron will.  Strengthen the others.
+Bring them safe to the day of account.'"
+
+And then the smaller--some of them, ethically, very small--women;
+Lady Wynnstay, Mrs. Fleming, Mrs. Thornburgh; above all, Robert's
+delightful Irish mother, and Mrs. Darcy; how excellent they are!
+Mrs. Darcy we seem to have known, yet cannot have enough of, rejoiced
+to catch sight of her capital letter on the page, as we read on.  In
+truth, if a high and ideal purpose, really learned in the school of
+Wordsworth and among the Westmorland hills which Mrs. Ward describes
+so sympathetically, with fitting dignity and truth of style, has
+accompanied the author throughout; no less plain, perhaps more
+pleasing to some readers, is the quiet humour which never fails her,
+and tests, while it relieves, the sincerity of her more serious
+thinking:--
+
+"At last Mrs. Darcy fluttered off, only, however, to come hurrying
+back with little, short, [61] scudding steps, to implore them all to
+come to tea with her as soon as possible in the garden that was her
+special hobby, and in her last new summer-house.
+
+"'I build two or three every summer,' she said; 'now there are
+twenty-one!  Roger laughs at me,' and there was a momentary
+bitterness in the little eerie face; 'but how can one live without
+hobbies?  That's one--then I've two more.  My album--oh, you will all
+write in my album, won't you?  When I was young--when I was Maid of
+Honour'--and she drew herself up slightly--'everybody had albums.
+Even the dear Queen herself!  I remember how she made M. Guizot write
+in it; something quite stupid, after all.  Those hobbies--the garden
+and the album--are quite harmless, aren't they?  They hurt nobody, do
+they?'  Her voice dropped a little, with a pathetic expostulating
+intonation in it, as of one accustomed to be rebuked."
+
+Mrs. Ward's women, as we have said, are more organic, sympathetic,
+and really creative, than her men, and make their vitality evident by
+becoming, quite naturally, the centres of very [62] life-like and
+dramatic groups of people, family or social; while her men are the
+very genii of isolation and division.  It is depressing to see so
+really noble a character as Catherine soured, as we feel, and
+lowered, as time goes on, from the happy resignation of the first
+volume (in which solemn, beautiful, and entire, and so very real, she
+is like a poem of Wordsworth) down to the mere passivity of the third
+volume, and the closing scene of Robert Elsmere's days, very
+exquisitely as this episode of unbelieving yet saintly biography has
+been conceived and executed.  Catherine certainly, for one, has no
+profit in the development of Robert's improved gospel.  The "stray
+sheep," we think, has by no means always the best of the argument,
+and her story is really a sadder, more testing one than his.  Though
+both alike, we admit it cordially, have a genuine sense of the
+eternal moral charm of "renunciation," something even of the thirst
+for martyrdom, for those wonderful, inaccessible, cold heights of the
+Imitation, eternal also in their aesthetic charm.
+
+These characters and situations, pleasant or profoundly interesting,
+which it is good to have [63] come across, are worked out, not in
+rapid sketches, nor by hazardous epigram, but more securely by
+patient analysis; and though we have said that Mrs. Ward is most
+successful in female portraiture, her own mind and culture have an
+unmistakable virility and grasp and scientific firmness.  This
+indispensable intellectual process, which will be relished by
+admirers of George Eliot, is relieved constantly by the sense of a
+charming landscape background, for the most part English.  Mrs. Ward
+has been a true disciple in the school of Wordsworth, and really
+undergone its influence.  Her Westmorland scenery is more than a mere
+background; its spiritual and, as it were, personal hold on persons,
+as understood by the great poet of the Lakes, is seen actually at
+work, in the formation, in the refining, of character.  It has been a
+stormy day:--
+
+"Before him the great hollow of High Fell was just coming out from
+the white mists surging round it.  A shaft of sunlight lay across its
+upper end, and he caught a marvellous apparition of a sunlit valley
+hung in air, a pale strip of blue above it, a white thread of stream
+wavering [64] through it, and all around it and below it the rolling
+rain-clouds."
+
+There is surely something of "natural magic" in that!  The wilder
+capacity of the mountains is brought out especially in a weird story
+of a haunted girl, an episode well illustrating the writer's more
+imaginative psychological power; for, in spite of its quiet general
+tenour, the book has its adroitly managed elements of sensation--
+witness the ghost, in which the average human susceptibility to
+supernatural terrors takes revenge on the sceptical Mr. Wendover, and
+the love-scene with Madame de Netteville, which, like those other
+exciting passages, really furthers the development of the proper
+ethical interests of the book.  The Oxford episodes strike us as
+being not the author's strongest work, as being comparatively
+conventional, coming, as they do, in a book whose predominant note is
+reality.  Yet her sympathetic command over, her power of evoking, the
+genius of places, is clearly shown in the touches by which she brings
+out the so well-known grey and green of college and garden--touches
+which bring the real Oxford to the mind's eye better than any
+elaborate description [65] --for the beauty of the place itself
+resides also in delicate touches.  The book passes indeed,
+successively, through distinct, broadly conceived phases of scenery,
+which, becoming veritable parts of its texture, take hold on the
+reader, as if in an actual sojourn in the places described.  Surrey--
+its genuine though almost suburban wildness, with the vicarage and
+the wonderful abode, above all, the ancient library of Mr. Wendover,
+all is admirably done, the landscape naturally counting for a good
+deal in the development of the profoundly meditative, country-loving
+souls of Mrs. Ward's favourite characters.
+
+Well!  Mrs. Ward has chosen to use all these varied gifts and
+accomplishments for a certain purpose.  Briefly, Robert Elsmere, a
+priest of the Anglican Church, marries a very religious woman; there
+is the perfection of "mutual love"; at length he has doubts about
+"historic Christianity"; he gives up his orders; carries his
+learning, his fine intellect, his goodness, nay, his saintliness,
+into a kind of Unitarianism; the wife becomes more intolerant than
+ever; there is a long and faithful effort on both sides, eventually
+successful, on the part of these mentally [66] divided people, to
+hold together; ending with the hero's death, the genuine piety and
+resignation of which is the crowning touch in the author's able,
+learned, and thoroughly sincere apology for Robert Elsmere's
+position.
+
+For good or evil, the sort of doubts which troubled Robert Elsmere
+are no novelty in literature, and we think the main issue of the
+"religious question" is not precisely where Mrs. Ward supposes--that
+it has advanced, in more senses than one, beyond the point raised by
+Renan's Vie de Jesus.  Of course, a man such as Robert Elsmere came
+to be ought not to be a clergyman of the Anglican Church.  The priest
+is still, and will, we think, remain, one of the necessary types of
+humanity; and he is untrue to his type, unless, with whatever
+inevitable doubts in this doubting age, he feels, on the whole, the
+preponderance in it of those influences which make for faith.  It is
+his triumph to achieve as much faith as possible in an age of
+negation.  Doubtless, it is part of the ideal of the Anglican Church
+that, under certain safeguards, it should find room for
+latitudinarians even among its clergy.  Still, with these, as [67]
+with all other genuine priests, it is the positive not the negative
+result that justifies the position.  We have little patience with
+those liberal clergy who dwell on nothing else than the difficulties
+of faith and the propriety of concession to the opposite force.  Yes!
+Robert Elsmere was certainly right in ceasing to be a clergyman.  But
+it strikes us as a blot on his philosophical pretensions that he
+should have been both so late in perceiving the difficulty, and then
+so sudden and trenchant in dealing with so great and complex a
+question.  Had he possessed a perfectly philosophic or scientific
+temper he would have hesitated.  This is not the place to discuss in
+detail the theological position very ably and seriously argued by
+Mrs. Ward.  All we can say is that, one by one, Elsmere's objections
+may be met by considerations of the same genus, and not less equal
+weight, relatively to a world so obscure, in its origin and issues,
+as that in which we live.
+
+Robert Elsmere was a type of a large class of minds which cannot be
+sure that the sacred story is true.  It is philosophical, doubtless,
+and a duty to the intellect to recognize our doubts, [68] to locate
+them, perhaps to give them practical effect.  It may be also a moral
+duty to do this.  But then there is also a large class of minds which
+cannot be sure it is false--minds of very various degrees of
+conscientiousness and intellectual power, up to the highest.  They
+will think those who are quite sure it is false unphilosophical
+through lack of doubt.  For their part, they make allowance in their
+scheme of life for a great possibility, and with some of them that
+bare concession of possibility (the subject of it being what it is)
+becomes the most important fact in the world.
+
+The recognition of it straightway opens wide the door to hope and
+love; and such persons are, as we fancy they always will be, the
+nucleus of a Church.  Their particular phase of doubt, of philosophic
+uncertainty, has been the secret of millions of good Christians,
+multitudes of worthy priests.  They knit themselves to believers, in
+various degrees, of all ages.  As against the purely negative action
+of the scientific spirit, the high-pitched Grey, the theistic
+Elsmere, the "ritualistic priest," the quaint Methodist Fleming, both
+so admirably sketched, present [69] perhaps no unconquerable
+differences.  The question of the day is not between one and another
+of these, but in another sort of opposition, well defined by Mrs.
+Ward herself, between--
+
+"Two estimates of life--the estimate which is the offspring of the
+scientific spirit, and which is for ever making the visible world
+fairer and more desirable in mortal eyes; and the estimate of Saint
+Augustine."
+
+To us, the belief in God, in goodness at all, in the story of
+Bethlehem, does not rest on evidence so diverse in character and
+force as Mrs. Ward supposes.  At his death Elsmere has started what
+to us would be a most unattractive place of worship, where he
+preaches an admirable sermon on the purely human aspect of the life
+of Christ.  But we think there would be very few such sermons in the
+new church or chapel, for the interest of that life could hardly be
+very varied, when all such sayings as that "though He was rich, for
+our sakes He became poor" have ceased to be applicable to it.  It is
+the infinite nature of Christ which has led to such diversities of
+genius in preaching as St. Francis, and Taylor, and Wesley.
+
+[70] And after all we fear we have been unjust to Mrs. Ward's work.
+If so, we should read once more, and advise our readers to read, the
+profoundly thought and delicately felt chapter--chapter forty-three
+in her third volume--in which she describes the final spiritual
+reunion, on a basis of honestly diverse opinion, of the husband and
+wife.  Her view, we think, could hardly have been presented more
+attractively.  For ourselves we can only thank her for pleasure and
+profit in the reading of her book, which has refreshed actually the
+first and deepest springs of feeling, while it has charmed the
+literary sense.
+
+28th March 1888
+
+
+
+
+
+V.  THEIR MAJESTIES' SERVANTS
+
+
+
+
+Annals of the English Stage, from Thomas Betterton to Edmund Kean.
+By Dr. Doran, F.S.A.  Edited and revised by Robert W. Lowe.  John C.
+Nimmo.
+
+[73] THOSE who care for the history of the drama as a branch of
+literature, or for the history of that general development of human
+manners of which the stage has been always an element and a very
+lively measure or index, will be grateful to Mr. Lowe for this
+revised and charmingly illustrated edition of Dr. Doran's pleasant
+old book.  Three hundred years and more of a singularly varied and
+vivacious sort of history!--it was a bold thing to undertake; and Dr.
+Doran did his work well--did it with adequate "love."  These Annals
+of the English Stage, from Thomas Betterton to Edmund [74] Kean, are
+full of the colours of life in their most emphatic and motley
+contrasts, as is natural in proportion as the stage itself
+concentrates and artificially intensifies the character and
+conditions of ordinary life.  The long story of "Their Majesties'
+Servants," treated thus, becomes from age to age an agreeable
+addition to those personal memoirs--Evelyn's, and the like--which
+bring the influence and charm of a visible countenance to the dry
+tenour of ordinary history, and the critic's work upon it naturally
+becomes, in the first place, a mere gathering of some of the flowers
+which lie so abundantly scattered here and there.
+
+A history of the English stage must necessarily be in part a history
+of one of the most delightful of subjects--old London, of which from
+time to time we catch extraordinary glimpses in Dr. Doran's pages.
+From 1682 to 1695, as if the Restoration had not come, there was but
+one theatre in London.  In Charles I.'s time Shoreditch was the
+dramatic quarter of London par excellence.--
+
+"The popular taste was not only there directed towards the stage, but
+it was a district [75] wherein many actors dwelt, and consequently
+died.  The baptismal register of St.  Leonard's, Shoreditch, contains
+Christian names which appear to have been chosen with reference to
+the heroines of Shakespeare; and the record of burials bears the name
+of many an old actor of mark whose remains now lie within the
+churchyard."
+
+Earlier and later, the Surrey side of the Thames was the favourite
+locality for play-houses.  The Globe was there, and the Bear-garden,
+represented in Mr. Lowe's luxurious new edition by delightful
+woodcuts.  For this new edition adds to the original merits of the
+work the very substantial charm of abundant illustrations, first-rate
+in subject and execution, and of three kinds--copper-plate likenesses
+of actors and other personages connected with theatrical history; a
+series of delicate, picturesque, highly detailed woodcuts of
+theatrical topography, chiefly the little old theatres; and, by way
+of tail-pieces to the chapters, a second series of woodcuts of a
+vigour and reality of information, within very limited compass, which
+make one think of Callot and the German [76] "little masters,"
+depicting Garrick and other famous actors in their favourite scenes.
+
+In the vignettes of the Bear-garden and the Swan Theatre, for
+instance, the artist has managed to throw over his minute plate a
+wonderful air of pleasantness, a light which, though very delicate,
+is very theatrical.  The river and its tiny craft, the little gabled
+houses of the neighbourhood, with a garden or two dropped in, tell
+delightfully in the general effect.  They are worthy to rank with
+Cruikshank's illustrations of Jack Sheppard and The Tower of London,
+as mementoes of the little old smokeless London before the century of
+Johnson, though that, too, as Dr. Doran bears witness, knew what fogs
+could be.  Then there is the Fortune Theatre near Cripplegate, and,
+most charming of all, two views--street and river fronts--the Duke's
+Theatre, Dorset Garden, in Fleet Street, designed by Wren, decorated
+by Gibbons--graceful, naive, dainty, like the work of a very refined
+Palladio, working minutely, perhaps more delicately than at Vicenza,
+in the already crowded city on the Thames side.
+
+[77] The portraits of actors and other theatrical celebrities range
+from Elizabeth, from the melodramatic costumes and faces of the
+contemporaries of Shakespeare, to the conventional costumes, the
+rotund expression, of the age of the Georges, masking a power of
+imaginative impersonation probably unknown in Shakespeare's day.
+Edward Burbage, like Shakespeare's own portrait, is, we venture to
+think, a trifle stolid.  Field--Nathaniel Field, author of The Fatal
+Dowry, and an actor of reputation--in his singular costume, and with
+a face of perhaps not quite reassuring subtlety, might pass for the
+original of those Italian, or Italianized, voluptuaries in sin which
+pleased the fancy of Shakespeare's age.  Mixed up with many striking,
+thoroughly dramatic physiognomies, it must be confessed that some of
+these portraits scarcely help at all to explain the power of the
+players to whom they belonged.  That, perhaps, is what we might
+naturally expect; the more, in proportion as the dramatic art is a
+matter in which many very subtle and indirect channels to men's
+sympathy are called into play.  Edward Alleyn, from the portrait
+preserved at [78] his noble foundation at Dulwich, like a fine
+Holbein, figures, in blent strength and delicacy, as a genial, or
+perhaps jovial, soul, finding time for sentiment,--Prynne (included,
+we suppose, in this company, like the skull at the feast) as a
+likable if somewhat melancholic young man; while Garrick and his wife
+playing cards, after Zoffany, present a pair of just very nice young
+people.  On the other hand, the tail-pieces, chiefly devoted to
+Garrick, prove what a wonderful natural variety there was in
+Garrick's soul, and are well worth comparative study.  Noticeable
+again, among the whole-plate portraits, is the thoroughly reassuring
+countenance of Steele, the singularly fine heads of John, Charles,
+and Fanny Kemble, while the certainly plain, pinched countenance of
+William Davenant reminds one of Charles Kean, and might well have
+lighted up, as did his, when the soul came into it, into power and
+charm, as the speaking eyes assure us even in its repose.
+
+The Renaissance inherited the old foolish prejudice of Roman times,
+when, although the writers of plays were the intimate friends of
+emperors, the actors were thought infamous. [79] Still, on the whole,
+actors fared better in England than in Romanist France, where Moliere
+was buried with less ceremony than a favourite dog.  Very different
+was the treatment of the eminent Mrs. Oldfield, who died in 1730:--
+
+"Poor 'Narcissa' after death (says Walpole) was attired in a Holland
+nightdress, with tucker and double ruffles of Brunswick lace, of
+which latter material she also wore a headdress, and a pair of new
+kid gloves.  In this dress the deceased actress received such honour
+as actress never received before, nor has ever received since.  The
+lady lay in state in the Jerusalem Chamber.  Had she been really a
+queen the public could not have thronged more eagerly to the
+spectacle; and after the lying in state there was a funeral of as
+much ceremony as has been observed at the obsequies of many a queen.
+There were anthems and prayers and a sermon; and Dr. Parker, who
+officiated, remarked, when all was over, to a few particular friends,
+and with some equivocation, as it seems to me, that he  'buried her
+very willingly, and with much satisfaction.'"
+
+Yet even in England players had need of [80] powerful protectors.
+"Wit," said Chesterfield, opposing an unjust licensing Act, "Wit, my
+lords! is the property of those who have it, and too often the only
+property they have to depend on."  Wit, indeed, with the other gifts
+that make good company, has largely gone with theatrical talents, too
+often little to the benefit of the gifted persons.  Theatrical
+society, rather than the theatre, has made the lives of actors as we
+see them in these volumes, in many cases so tragic, even sordidly
+tragic.
+
+If misery and madness abound in stage life, so also does an
+indomitable cheerfulness, always at least a cheerful countenance.
+Dr. Doran's book abounds, as might be expected, with admirable
+impromptus and the like; one might collect a large posy of them.
+Foote, seeing a sweep on a blood-horse, remarked, "There goes
+Warburton on Shakespeare!"  When he heard that the Rockingham Cabinet
+was fatigued to death and at its wits' end, he exclaimed that it
+could not have been the length of the journey which had tired it.
+Again, when Lord Carmarthen, at a party, told him his handkerchief
+was hanging from his pocket, Foote replaced [81] it with a "Thank
+you, my lord; you know the company better than I."  Jevon, a century
+earlier, was in the habit of taking great liberties with authors and
+audience.  He made Settle half mad and the house ecstatic when
+having, as Lycurgus, Prince of China, to "fall on his sword," he
+placed it flat on the stage, and, falling over it, "died," according
+to the direction of the acting copy.  Quaint enough, but certainly no
+instance of anybody's wit, is the account of how a French translation
+of a play of Vanbrugh--not architect of Blenheim only, but
+accomplished in many other ways--appeared at the Odeon, in 1862, with
+all fitting raptures, as a posthumous work of Voltaire recently
+discovered.  The Voltairean wit vas found as "delightful in this as
+in the last century."
+
+Of Shakespeare on the stage Dr. Doran has a hundred curious things to
+note:--that Richard the Third, for instance, who has retained a so
+unflattering possession of the stage, was its "first practically
+useful patron."  We see Queen Elizabeth full of misgiving at a
+difficult time at the popularity of Richard the Second:--"The
+deposition and death of King Richard the [82] Second."  "Tongues
+whisper to the Queen that this play is part of a great plot to teach
+her subjects how to murder kings."  It is perhaps not generally known
+that Charles Shakespeare, William's brother, survived till the
+Restoration.
+
+Oldys says, a propos of the restoration of the stage at that time:--
+
+"The actors were greedily inquisitive into every little circumstance,
+more especially in Shakespeare's dramatic character, which his
+brother could relate of him.  But he, it seems, was so stricken in
+years, and possibly his memory so weakened by infirmities, that he
+could give them but little light into their inquiries; and all that
+could be recollected from him of his brother Will in that station was
+the faint, general, and almost lost ideas he had of having once seen
+him act a part in one of his own comedies, wherein being present to
+personate a decrepit old man, he wore a long beard, and appeared so
+weak and drooping and unable to walk, that he was forced to be
+supported and carried by another person to a table, at which he was
+seated among some company who were eating, and one of them sang a
+song."
+
+[83] This description applies to old Adam in As You Like It.  Many
+are the evidences that Shakespeare's reputation had from time to time
+a struggle to maintain itself.  James Howard, in Pepys's day--
+
+"Belonged to the faction which affected to believe that there was no
+popular love for Shakespeare, to render whom palatable he arranged
+Romeo and Juliet for the stage, with a double denouement--one
+serious, the other hilarious.  If your heart were too sensitive to
+bear the deaths of the loving pair, you had only to go on the
+succeeding afternoon to see them wedded, and set upon the way of a
+well-assured domestic felicity."
+
+In 1678 Rymer asserted (was it undesignedly a true testimony to the
+acting of his time?) that Shakespeare had depicted Brutus and Cassius
+as "Jack Puddins."
+
+Here, as in many another detail, we are reminded, of course, of the
+difference between our own and past times in mimic as in real life.
+For Prynne one of the great horrors of the stage was the introduction
+of actresses from France by Henrietta Maria, to take the place of
+young [84] male actors of whom Dr. Doran has some interesting
+notices.  Who the lady was who first trod the stage as a professional
+actress is not known, but her part was Desdemona.  And yet it was
+long after that--
+
+"Edward Kynaston died (in 1712).  He lies buried in the churchyard of
+St. Paul's, Covent Garden.  If not the greatest actor of his day,
+Kynaston was the greatest of the 'boy-actresses.'  So exalted was his
+reputation 'that,' says Downes, 'it has since been disputable among
+the judicious, whether any woman that succeeded him so sensibly
+touched the audience as he.'"
+
+In Charles II.'s time it was a custom to return the price of
+admission to all persons who left the theatre before the close of the
+first act.  Consequently, many shabby persons were wont to force
+their way in without paying, on the plea that they did not intend to
+remain beyond the time limited.  Hence much noisy contention, to the
+great discomfort even of Royalty.  The brawling, drinking habits of
+the time were even more discomforting.  An angry word, passed one
+April evening of 1682 between the son of Sir Edward Dering and a hot-
+blooded young [85] Welshman, led to recrimination and sword-drawing.
+The two young fellows not having elbow-room in the pit, clambered on
+to the stage, and fought there, to the greater comfort of the
+audience, and with a more excited fury on the part of the combatants.
+The mingling of the public with the players was a practice which so
+annoyed the haughty French actor, Baron, that to suggest to the
+audience the absurdity of it, he would turn his back on them for a
+whole act, and play to the audience on the stage.  Sometimes the
+noise was so loud that an actor's voice would scarcely be heard.  It
+was about 1710 that the word encore was introduced at the operatic
+performances in the Haymarket, and very much objected to by plain-
+going Englishmen.  It was also the custom of some who desired the
+repetition of a song to cry Altra volta!  Altra volta!
+
+Even indirectly the history of the stage illustrates life, and
+affords many unexpected lights on historical characters.  Oliver
+Cromwell, though he despised the stage, could condescend to laugh at,
+and with, men of less dignity than actors.  Buffoonery was not
+entirely expelled [86] from his otherwise grave court.  Oxford and
+Drury Lane itself dispute the dignity of giving birth to Nell Gwynne
+with Hereford, where a mean house is still pointed out as the first
+home of this mother of a line of dukes, whose great-grandson was to
+occupy the neighbouring palace as Bishop of Hereford for forty years.
+At her burial in St.  Martin's-in-the-Fields, Archbishop Tenison
+preached the sermon.  When this was subsequently made the ground of
+exposing him to the reproof of Queen Mary, she remarked that the good
+doctor, no doubt, had said nothing but what the facts authorized.
+
+"Who should act genteel comedy perfectly," asks Walpole, "but people
+of fashion, that have sense?"  And, in truth, the seventeenth century
+gave many ladies to the stage, Mrs. Barry being the most famous of
+them.  Like many eminent actors, she was famous for the way in which
+she would utter one single expression in a play.  Dr. Doran gives
+some curious instances from later actors.  "What mean my grieving
+subjects?" uttered in the character of Queen Elizabeth, was invested
+by her with such emphatic grace and dignity as to call up murmurs of
+approbation [87] which swelled into thunders of applause.  Her noble
+head is here engraved after Kneller, like the head of a magnificent
+visionary man.
+
+Should we really care for the greatest actors of the past could we
+have them before us?  Should we find them too different from our
+accent of thought, of feeling, of speech, in a thousand minute
+particulars which are of the essence of all three?  Dr. Doran's long
+and interesting records of the triumphs of Garrick, and other less
+familiar, but in their day hardly less astonishing, players, do not
+relieve one of the doubt.  Garrick himself, as sometimes happens with
+people who have been the subject of much anecdote and other
+conversation, here as elsewhere, bears no very distinct figure.  One
+hardly sees the wood for the trees.  On the other hand, the account
+of Betterton, "perhaps the greatest of English actors," is
+delightfully fresh.  That intimate friend of Dryden, Tillatson, Pope,
+who executed a copy of the actor's portrait by Kneller which is still
+extant, was worthy of their friendship; his career brings out the
+best elements in stage life.  The stage in these volumes presents
+itself indeed not merely [88] as a mirror of life, but as an
+illustration of the utmost intensity of life, in the fortunes and
+characters of the players.  Ups and downs, generosity, dark fates,
+the most delicate goodness, have nowhere been more prominent than in
+the private existence of those devoted to the public mimicry of men
+and women.  Contact with the stage, almost throughout its history,
+presents itself as a kind of touchstone, to bring out the bizarrerie,
+the theatrical tricks and contrasts, of the actual world.
+
+27th June 1888
+
+
+
+
+
+VI.  WORDSWORTH
+
+
+
+
+The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth.  With an
+Introduction by John Morley.  Macmillans.
+
+The Recluse.  By William Wordsworth.  Macmillans.
+
+Selections from Wordsworth.  By William Knight and other Members of
+the Wordsworth Society.  With Preface and Notes.  Kegan Paul.
+
+[91] THE appearance, so close to each other, of Professor Knight's
+careful and elaborately annotated Selections from William Wordsworth,
+of Messrs. Macmillan's collected edition of the poet's works, with the
+first book of The Recluse, now published for the first time, and of
+an excellent introductory essay by Mr. John Morley, forms a welcome
+proof that the study of the [92] most philosophic of English poets is
+increasing among us.  Surely nothing could be better, hardly anything
+more directly fitted than careful reading of Wordsworth, to counter
+the faults and offences of our busy generation, in regard both to
+thought and taste, and to remind people, amid the enormous expansion,
+at the present time, of all that is material and mechanical in life,
+of the essential value, the permanent ends, of life itself.  In the
+collected edition the poems are printed with the dates, so far as can
+be ascertained, in the order of their composition--an arrangement
+which has indisputable recommendations for the student of
+Wordsworth's genius; though the former method of distributing his
+work into large groups of subject had its value, as throwing light
+upon his poetic motives, and more especially as coming from himself.
+
+In his introductory essay Mr. Morley has dwelt strongly on the
+circumstance of Wordsworth's remarkable personal happiness, as having
+had much to do with the physiognomy of his poetic creation--a calm,
+irresistible, well-being--almost mystic in character, and yet
+doubtless [93] connected with physical conditions.  Long ago De
+Quincey noted it as a strongly determinant fact in Wordsworth's
+literary career, pointing, at the same time, to his remarkable good
+luck also, on the material side of life.  The poet's own flawless
+temperament, his fine mountain atmosphere of mind (so to express it),
+had no doubt a good deal to do with that.  What a store of good
+fortune, what a goodly contribution to happiness, in the very best
+sense of that term, is really involved in a cheerful, grateful,
+physical temperament; especially, in the case of a poet--a great
+poet--who will, of course, have to face the appropriate trials of a
+great poet.
+
+Coleridge and other English critics at the beginning of the present
+century had a great deal to say concerning a psychological
+distinction of much importance (as it appeared to them) between the
+fancy and the imagination.  Stripped of a great deal of somewhat
+obscure metaphysical theory, this distinction reduced itself to the
+certainly vital one, with which all true criticism more or less
+directly has to do, between the lower and higher degrees of intensity
+in the [94] poet's conception of his subject, and his concentration
+of himself upon his work.  It was Wordsworth who made most of this
+distinction, assuming it as the basis for the final classification
+(abandoned, as we said, in the new edition) of his poetical writings.
+And nowhere is the distinction more realizable than in Wordsworth's
+own work.  For though what may be called professed Wordsworthians,
+including Matthew Arnold, found a value in all that remains of him--
+could read anything he wrote, "even the 'Thanksgiving Ode,'--
+everything, I think, except 'Vaudracour and Julia,'"--yet still the
+decisiveness of such selections as those made by Arnold himself, and
+now by Professor Knight, hint at a certain very obvious difference of
+level in his poetic work.
+
+This perpetual suggestion of an absolute duality between his lower
+and higher moods, and the poetic work produced in them, stimulating
+the reader to look below the immediate surface of his poetry, makes
+the study of Wordsworth an excellent exercise for the training of
+those mental powers in us, which partake both of thought and
+imagination.  It begets in those [95] who fall in with him at the
+right moment of their spiritual development, a habit of reading
+between the lines, a faith in the effect of concentration and
+collectedness of mind on the right appreciation of poetry, the
+expectation that what is really worth having in the poetic order will
+involve, on their part, a certain discipline of the temper not less
+than of the intellect.  Wordsworth meets them with the assurance that
+he has much to give them, and of a very peculiar kind, if they will
+follow a certain difficult way, and seems to possess the secret of
+some special mental illumination.  To follow that way is an
+initiation, by which they will become able to distinguish, in art,
+speech, feeling, manners, in men and life generally, what is genuine,
+animated, and expressive from what is only conventional and
+derivative, and therefore inexpressive.
+
+A very intimate sense of the expressiveness of outward things, which
+ponders, listens, penetrates, where the earlier, less developed
+consciousness passed lightly by, is an important element in the
+general temper of our modern poetry.  Critics of literary history
+have again [96] and again remarked upon it; it is a characteristic
+which reveals itself in many different forms, but is strongest and
+most sympathetic in what is strongest and most serious in modern
+literature; it is exemplified by writers as unlike Wordsworth as the
+French romanticist poets.  As a curious chapter in the history of the
+human mind, its growth might be traced from Rousseau and St. Pierre
+to Chateaubriand, from Chateaubriand to Victor Hugo; it has no doubt
+some obscure relationship to those pantheistic theories which have
+greatly occupied people's minds in many modern readings of
+philosophy; it makes as much difference between the modern and the
+earlier landscape art as there is between the roughly outlined masks
+of a Byzantine mosaic and a portrait by Reynolds or Romney.  Of this
+new landscape sense the poetry of Wordsworth is the elementary and
+central exposition; he is more exclusively occupied with its
+development than any other poet.  Wordsworth's own character, as we
+have already observed, was dominated by a certain contentment, a sort
+of naturally religious placidity, not often found in union with a
+poetic sensibility so [97] active as his; and this gentle sense of
+well-being was favourable to the quiet, habitual observation of the
+inanimate, or imperfectly animate, world.  His life of eighty placid
+years was almost without what, with most human beings, count for
+incidents.  His flight from the active world, so genially celebrated
+in this newly published poem of The Recluse; his flight to the Vale
+of Grasmere, like that of some pious youth to the Chartreuse, is the
+most marked event of his existence.  His life's changes are almost
+entirely inward ones; it falls into broad, untroubled, perhaps
+somewhat monotonous, spaces; his biographers have very little to
+tell.  What it really most resembles, different as its superficies
+may look, is the career of those early mediaeval religious artists,
+who, precisely because their souls swarmed with heavenly visions,
+passed their fifty or sixty years in tranquil, systematic industry,
+seemingly with no thoughts beyond it.  This placid life developed in
+Wordsworth, to an extraordinary degree, an innate sensibility to
+natural sights and sounds--the flower and its shadow on the stone,
+the cuckoo and its echo.  The poem of [98] "Resolution and
+Independence" is a storehouse of such records; for its fulness of
+lovely imagery it may be compared to Keats's "Saint Agnes' Eve."  To
+read one of his greater pastoral poems for the first time is like a
+day spent in a new country; the memory is crowded for a while with
+its precise and vivid incidents:--
+
+The pliant harebell swinging in the breeze,
+On some grey rock:
+The single sheep, and the one blasted tree,
+And the bleak music from that old stone wall:--
+In the meadows and the lower ground,
+Was all the sweetness of a common dawn:--
+And that green corn all day is rustling in thine ears!
+
+Clear and delicate at once as he is in the outlining of visible
+imagery, he is more finely scrupulous still in the noting of sounds;
+he conceives of noble sound as even moulding the human countenance to
+nobler types, and as something actually "profaned" by visible form or
+colour.  He has a power likewise of realizing and conveying to the
+consciousness of his reader abstract and elementary impressions,
+silence, darkness, absolute motionlessness, or, again, the whole
+complex sentiment of a particular place, the abstract expression of
+desolation in the long [99] white road, of peacefulness in a
+particular folding of the hills.
+
+That sense of a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but
+a rhetorical artifice, was, then, in Wordsworth the assertion of what
+was for him almost literal fact.  To him every natural object seemed
+to possess something of moral or spiritual life, to be really capable
+of a companionship with man, full of fine intimacies.  An emanation,
+a particular spirit, belonged not to the moving leaves or water only,
+but to the distant peak arising suddenly, by some change of
+perspective, above the nearer horizon of the hills, to the passing
+space of light across the plain, to the lichened Druidic stone even,
+for a certain weird fellowship in it with the moods of men.  That he
+awakened "a sort of thought in sense" is Shelley's just estimate of
+this element in Wordsworth's poetry.
+
+It was through nature, ennobled in this way by the semblance of
+passion and thought, that the poet approached the spectacle of human
+life.  For him, indeed, human life is, in the first instance, only an
+additional, and as it were incidental grace, upon this expressive
+landscape.
+
+[100] When he thought of men and women, it was of men and women as in
+the presence and under the influence of those effective natural
+objects, and linked to them by many associations.  Such influences
+have sometimes seemed to belittle those who are the subject of them,
+at the least to be likely to narrow the range of their sympathies.
+To Wordsworth, on the contrary, they seemed directly to dignify human
+nature, as tending to tranquillize it.  He raises physical nature to
+the level of human thought, giving it thereby a mystic power and
+expression; he subdues man to the level of nature, but gives him
+therewith a certain breadth and vastness and solemnity.
+
+Religious sentiment, consecrating the natural affections and rights
+of the human heart, above all that pitiful care and awe for the
+perishing human clay of which relic-worship is but the corruption,
+has always had much to do with localities, with the thoughts which
+attach themselves to definite scenes and places.  And what is true of
+it everywhere is truest in those secluded valleys, where one
+generation after another maintains the same abiding-place; and [101]
+it was on this side that Wordsworth apprehended religion most
+strongly.  Having so much to do with the recognition of local
+sanctities, the habit of connecting the very trees and stones of a
+particular spot of earth with the great events of life, till the low
+walls, the green mounds, the half-obliterated epitaphs, seemed full
+of oracular voices, even the religion of those people of the dales
+appeared but as another link between them and the solemn imageries of
+the natural world.  And, again, this too tranquillized them, by
+bringing them under the rule of traditional, narrowly localized
+observances.  "Grave livers," they seemed to him under this aspect,
+of stately speech, and something of that natural dignity of manners
+which underlies the highest courtesy.
+
+And, seeing man thus as a part of nature, elevated and solemnized in
+proportion as his daily life and occupations brought him into
+companionship with permanent natural objects, he was able to
+appreciate passion in the lowly.  He chooses to depict people from
+humble life, because, being nearer to nature than others, they are on
+the whole more impassioned, certainly [102] more direct in their
+expression of passion, than other men; it is for this direct
+expression of passion that he values their humble words.  In much
+that he said in exaltation of rural life he was but pleading
+indirectly for that sincerity, that perfect fidelity to one's own
+inward presentations, to the precise features of the picture within,
+without which any profound poetry is impossible.  It was not for
+their tameness, but for their impassioned sincerity, that he chose
+incidents and situations from common life, "related in a selection of
+language really used by men."  He constantly endeavours to bring his
+language nearer to the real language of men; but it is to the real
+language of men, not on the dead level of their ordinary intercourse,
+but in certain select moments of vivid sensation, when this language
+is winnowed and ennobled by sentiment.  There are poets who have
+chosen rural life for their subject for the sake of its passionless
+repose; and there are times when Wordsworth himself extols the mere
+calm and dispassionate survey of things as the highest aim of
+poetical culture.  But it was not for such passionless calm that he
+preferred the scenes of [103] pastoral life; and the meditative poet,
+sheltering himself from the agitations of the outward world, is in
+reality only clearing the scene for the exhibition of great emotions,
+and what he values most is the almost elementary expression of
+elementary feelings.
+
+In Wordsworth's prefatory advertisement to the first edition of The
+Prelude, published in 1850, it is stated that that work was intended
+to be introductory to The Recluse: and that The Recluse, if
+completed, would have consisted of three parts.  The second part is
+The Excursion.  The third part was only planned; but the first book
+of the first part was left in manuscript by Wordsworth--though in
+manuscript, it is said, in no great condition of forwardness for the
+printers.  This book, now for the first time printed in extenso (a
+very noble passage from it found place in that prose advertisement to
+The Excursion), is the great novelty of this latest edition of
+Wordsworth's poetic works.  It was well worth adding to the poet's
+great bequest to English literature.  The true student of his work,
+who has formulated for himself what he supposes to be the leading
+characteristics [104] of Wordsworth's genius, will feel, we think, a
+lively interest in putting them to test by the many and various
+striking passages in what is there presented for the first time.
+
+17th February 1889
+
+
+
+
+
+VII.  MR. GOSSE'S POEMS
+
+
+
+
+On Viol and Flute.  By Edmund Gosse.
+
+[107] PERHAPS no age of literature, certainly no age of literature in
+England, has been so rich as ours in excellent secondary poetry; and
+it is with our poetry (in a measure) as with our architecture,
+constrained by the nature of the case to be imitative.  Our
+generation, quite reasonably, is not very proud of its architectural
+creations; confesses that it knows too much--knows, but cannot do.
+And yet we could name certain modern churches in London, for
+instance, to which posterity may well look back puzzled.--Could these
+exquisitely pondered buildings have been indeed works of the
+nineteenth century?  Were they not the subtlest creations of the age
+in which Gothic art was spontaneous?  In truth, we have had instances
+of workmen, who, through long, large, [108] devoted study of the
+handiwork of the past, have done the thing better, with a more fully
+enlightened consciousness, with full intelligence of what those early
+workmen only guessed at.  And something like this is true of some of
+our best secondary poetry.  It is the least that is true--the least
+that can fairly be said in praise of the poetic work of Mr. Edmund
+Gosse.
+
+Of course there can be no exact parallel between arts so different as
+architecture and poetic composition: But certainly in the poetry of
+our day also, though it has been in some instances powerfully
+initiative and original, there is great scholarship, a large
+comparative acquaintance with the poetic methods of earlier workmen,
+and a very subtle intelligence of their charm.  Of that fine
+scholarship in this matter there is no truer example than Mr. Gosse.
+It is manifested especially in the even finish of his varied work, in
+the equality of his level--a high level--in species of composition so
+varied as the three specimens which follow.
+
+Far away, in late spring, "by the sea in the south," the swallows are
+still lingering around "white Algiers."  In Mr. Gosse's "Return of
+[109] the Swallows," the northern birds--lark and thrush--have long
+been calling to them:--
+
+And something awoke in the slumbering heart
+Of the alien birds in their African air,
+And they paused, and alighted, and twittered apart,
+And met in the broad white dreamy square,
+And the sad slave woman, who lifted up
+From the fountain her broad-lipped earthen cup,
+Said to herself, with a weary sigh,
+"To-morrow the swallows will northward fly."
+
+Compare the following stanzas, from a kind of palinode, "1870-1871,"
+years of the Franco-German war and the Parisian Commune:--
+
+The men who sang that pain was sweet
+Shuddered to see the mask of death
+Storm by with myriad thundering feet;
+The sudden truth caught up our breath
+Our throats like pulses beat.
+
+The songs of pale emaciate hours,
+The fungus-growth of years of peace,
+Withered before us like mown flowers;
+We found no pleasure more in these
+When bullets fell in showers.
+
+For men whose robes are dashed with blood,
+What joy to dream of gorgeous stairs,
+Stained with the torturing interlude
+That soothed a Sultan's midday prayers,
+In old days harsh and rude?
+
+[110]
+
+For men whose lips are blanched and white,
+With aching wounds and torturing thirst,
+What charm in canvas shot with light,
+And pale with faces cleft and curst,
+Past life and life's delight?
+
+And then Mr. Gosse's purely descriptive power, his aptitude for
+still-life and landscape, is unmistakably vivid and sound.  Take, for
+an instance, this description of high-northern summer:--
+
+The ice-white mountains clustered all around us,
+But arctic summer blossomed at our feet;
+The perfume of the creeping sallows found us,
+The cranberry-flowers were sweet.
+
+Below us through the valley crept a river,
+Cleft round an island where the Lap-men lay;
+Its sluggish water dragged with slow endeavour
+The mountain snows away.
+
+There is no night-time in the northern summer,
+But golden shimmer fills the hours of sleep,
+And sunset fades not, till the bright new-comer,
+Red sunrise, smites the deep.
+
+But when the blue snow-shadows grew intenser
+Across the peaks against the golden sky,
+And on the hills the knots of deer grew denser,
+And raised their tender cry,
+
+[111]
+
+And wandered downward to the Lap-men's dwelling,
+We knew our long sweet day was nearly spent,
+And slowly, with our hearts within us swelling,
+Our homeward steps we bent.
+
+"Sunshine before Sunrise!"  There's a novelty in that, for poetic use
+at least, so far as we know, though we remember one fine paragraph
+about it in Sartor Resartus.  The grim poetic sage of Chelsea,
+however, had never seen what he describes: not so Mr. Gosse, whose
+acquaintance with northern lands and northern literature is special.
+We have indeed picked out those stanzas from a quiet personal record
+of certain amorous hours of early youth in that quaint arctic land,
+Mr. Gosse's description of which, like his pretty poem on Lubeck,
+made one think that what the accomplished group of poets to which he
+belongs requires is, above all, novelty of motive, of subject.
+
+He takes, indeed, the old themes, and manages them better than their
+old masters, with more delicate cadences, more delicate transitions
+of thought, through long dwelling on earlier practice.  He seems to
+possess complete command of the technique of poetry--every form of
+what may be called skill of hand in it; and what marks in [112] him
+the final achievement of poetic scholarship is the perfect balance
+his work presents of so many and varied effects, as regards both
+matter and form.  The memories of a large range of poetic reading are
+blent into one methodical music so perfectly that at times the notes
+seem almost simple.  Sounding almost all the harmonies of the modern
+lyre, he has, perhaps as a matter of course, some of the faults also,
+the "spasmodic" and other lapses, which from age to age, in
+successive changes of taste, have been the "defects" of excellent
+good "qualities."  He is certainly not the--
+
+Pathetic singer, with no strength to sing,
+
+as he says of the white-throat on the tulip-tree,
+
+Whose leaves unfinished ape her faulty song.
+
+In effect, a large compass of beautiful thought and expression, from
+poetry old and new, have become to him matter malleable anew for a
+further and finer reach of literary art.  And with the perfect grace
+of an intaglio, he shows, as in truth the minute intaglio may do, the
+faculty of structure, the logic of poetry.  "The New Endymion" is a
+good instance of such sustained [113] power.  Poetic scholar!--If we
+must reserve the sacred name of "poet" to a very small number, that
+humbler but perhaps still rarer title is due indisputably to Mr.
+Gosse.  His work is like exquisite modern Latin verse, into the
+academic shape of which, discreet and coy, comes a sincere, deeply
+felt consciousness of modern life, of the modern world as it is.  His
+poetry, according with the best intellectual instincts of our
+critical age, is as pointed out recently by a clever writer in the
+Nineteenth Century, itself a kind of exquisite, finally revised
+criticism.
+
+Not that he fails in originality; only, the graces, inborn certainly,
+but so carefully educated, strike one more.  The sense of his
+originality comes to one as but an after-thought; and certainly one
+sign of his vocation is that he has made no conscious effort to be
+original.  In his beautiful opening poem of the "White-throat,"
+giving his book its key-note, he seems, indeed, to accept that
+position, reasons on and justifies it.  Yet there is a clear note of
+originality (so it seems to us) in the peculiar charm of his strictly
+personal compositions; and, generally, in such touches as he gives us
+of the soul, the life, of the [114] nineteenth century.  Far greater,
+we think, than the charm of poems strictly classic in interest, such
+as the "Praise of Dionysus," exquisite as that is, is the charm of
+those pieces in which, so to speak, he transforms, by a kind of
+colour-change, classic forms and associations into those--say! of
+Thames-side--pieces which, though in manner or subject promising a
+classic entertainment, almost unaware bring you home.--No! after all,
+it is not imagined Greece, dreamy, antique Sicily, but the present
+world about us, though mistakable for a moment, delightfully, for the
+land, the age, of Sappho, of Theocritus:--
+
+There is no amaranth, no pomegranate here,
+But can your heart forget the Christmas rose,
+The crocuses and snowdrops once so dear?
+
+Quite congruously with the placid, erudite, quality of his culture,
+although, like other poets, he sings much of youth, he is often most
+successful in the forecast, the expression, of the humours, the
+considerations, that in truth are more proper to old age:--
+
+When age comes by and lays his frosty hands
+So lightly on mine eyes, that, scarce aware
+
+[115]
+
+Of what an endless weight of gloom they bear,
+I pause, unstirred, and wait for his commands.
+When time has bound these limbs of mine with bands,
+And hushed mine ears, and silvered all my hair,
+May sorrow come not, nor a vain despair
+Trouble my soul that meekly girdled stands.
+
+As silent rivers into silent lakes,
+Through hush of reeds that not a murmur breaks,
+Wind, mindful of the poppies whence they came,
+So may my life, and calmly burn away,
+As ceases in a lamp at break of day
+The flagrant remnant of memorial flame.
+
+Euthanasia!--Yet Mr. Gosse, with all his accomplishment, is still a
+young man.  His youthful confidence in the perpetuity of poetry, of
+the poetical interests in life, creed-less as he may otherwise seem
+to be, is, we think, a token, though certainly an unconscious token,
+of the spontaneous originality of his muse.  For a writer of his
+peculiar philosophic tenets, at all events, the world itself, in
+truth, must seem irretrievably old or even decadent.
+
+Old, decadent, indeed, it would seem with Mr. Gosse to be also
+returning to the thoughts, the fears, the consolations, of its youth
+in Greece, in Italy:--
+
+[116]
+
+Nor seems it strange indeed
+To hold the happy creed
+That all fair things that bloom and die
+Have conscious life as well as I.
+
+Then let me joy to be
+Alive with bird and tree,
+And have no haughtier aim than this,
+To be a partner in their bliss.
+
+Convinced, eloquent,--again and again the notes of Epicurean
+philosophy fall almost unconsciously from his lips.  With poetry at
+hand, he appears to feel no misgivings.  A large faith he might seem
+to have in what is called "natural optimism," the beauty and
+benignity of nature, if let alone, in her mechanical round of changes
+with man and beast and flower.  Her method, however, certainly
+involves forgetfulness for the individual; and to this, to the
+prospect of oblivion, poetry, too, may help to brace us, if, unlike
+so genial and cheerful a poet as Mr. Gosse, we need bracing thereto:-
+-
+
+Now, giant-like, the tall young ploughmen go
+Between me and the sunset, footing slow;
+My spirit, as an uninvited guest,
+Goes with them, wondering what desire, what aim,
+May stir their hearts and mine with common flame,
+Or, thoughtless, do their hands suffice their soul?
+
+[117]
+
+I know not, care not, for I deem no shame
+To hold men, flowers, and trees and stars the same,
+Myself, as these, one atom in the whole.
+
+That is from one of those half-Greek, half-English idylls, reminding
+one of Frederick Walker's "Ploughman," of Mason's "Evening Hymn," in
+which Mr. Gosse is at his best.  A favourite motive, he has treated
+it even more melodiously in "Lying in the Grass":--
+
+I do not hunger for a well-stored mind,
+I only wish to live my life, and find
+My heart in unison with all mankind.
+
+My life is like the single dewy star
+That trembles on the horizon's primrose-bar,--
+A microcosm where all things living are.
+
+And if, among the noiseless grasses, Death
+Should come behind and take away my breath,
+I should not rise as one who sorroweth;
+
+For I should pass, but all the world would be
+Full of desire and young delight and glee,
+And why should men be sad through loss of me?
+
+The light is flying; in the silver-blue
+The young moon shines from her bright window through:
+The mowers are all gone, and I go too.
+
+A vein of thought as modern as it is old!  More not less depressing,
+certainly, to our over-meditative [118], susceptible, nervous,
+modern age, than to that antiquity which was indeed the genial youth
+of the world, but, sweetly attuned by his skill of touch, it is the
+sum of what Mr. Gosse has to tell us of the experience of life.  Or
+is it, after all, to quote him once more, that beyond those ever-
+recurring pagan misgivings, those pale pagan consolations, our
+generation feels yet cannot adequately express--
+
+The passion and the stress
+Of thoughts too tender and too sad to be
+Enshrined in any melody she knows?
+
+29th October 1890
+
+
+
+
+
+VIII.  FERDINAND FABRE
+
+
+
+
+[NORINE]: AN IDYLL OF THE CEVENNES
+
+
+[121] A FRENCH novelist who, with much of Zola's undoubted power,
+writes always in the interest of that high type of Catholicism which
+still prevails in the remote provinces of France, of that high type of
+morality of which the French clergy have nobly maintained the ideal,
+is worth recommending to the more serious class of English readers.
+Something of the gift of Francois Millet, whose peasants are
+veritable priests, of those older religious painters who could
+portray saintly heads so sweetly and their merely human proteges so
+truly, seems indeed to have descended to M. Ferdinand Fabre.  In the
+Abbe Tigrane, in Lucifer, and elsewhere, he has delineated, with
+wonderful power and patience, a strictly ecclesiastical portraiture--
+[122] shrewd, passionate, somewhat melancholy heads, which, though
+they are often of peasant origin, are never by any chance
+undignified.  The passions he treats of in priests are, indeed,
+strictly clerical, most often their ambitions--not the errant humours
+of the mere man in the priest, but movements of spirit properly
+incidental to the clerical type itself.  Turning to the secular
+brothers and sisters of these peasant ecclesiastics, at first sight
+so strongly contrasted with them, M. Fabre shows a great acquaintance
+with the sources, the effects, of average human feeling; but still in
+contact--in contact, as its conscience, its better mind, its ideal--
+with the institutions of religion.  What constitutes his
+distinguishing note as a writer is the recognition of the religious,
+the Catholic, ideal, intervening masterfully throughout the picture
+he presents of life, as the only mode of poetry realizable by the
+poor; and although, of course, it does a great deal more beside,
+certainly doing the high work of poetry effectively.  For his
+background he has chosen, has made his own and conveys very vividly
+to his readers, a district of France, gloomy, in spite of its
+almonds, its [123] oil and wine, but certainly grandiose.  The large
+towns, the sparse hamlets, the wide landscape of the Cevennes, are
+for his books what the Rhineland is to those delightful authors,
+Messrs. Erckmann-Chatrian.  In Les Courbezon, the French Vicar of
+Wakefield, as Sainte-Beuve declared, with this imposing background,
+the Church and the world, as they shape themselves in the Cevennes,
+the priest and the peasant, occupy about an equal share of interest.
+Sometimes, as in the charming little book we wish now to introduce,
+unclerical human nature occupies the foreground almost exclusively;
+though priestly faces will still be found gazing upon us from time to
+time.
+
+In form, the book is a bundle of letters from a Parisian litterateur
+to the friend of his boyhood, now the cure of one of those mountain
+villages.  He is refreshing himself, in the midst of dusty,
+sophisticated Paris, with memories of their old, delightful
+existence--vagabonde, libre, agreste, pastorale--in their upland
+valley.  He can appeal safely to the aged cure's friendly justice,
+even in exposing delicacies of sentiment which most men conceal:--
+
+[124] "As for you, frank, certain of your own mind, joyous of heart,
+methinks scarce understanding those whose religion makes their souls
+tremble instead of fortifying them--you, I am sure, take things by
+the large and kindly side of human life."
+
+The story our Parisian has to tell is simple enough, and we have no
+intention of betraying it, but only to note some of the faces, the
+scenes, that peep out in the course of it.
+
+The gloom of the Cevennes is the impression M. Fabre most commonly
+conveys.  In this book it is rather the cheerful aspect of summer,
+those upland valleys of the Cevennes presenting then a symphony in
+red, so to call it--as in a land of cherries and goldfinches; and he
+has a genial power certainly of making you really feel the sun on the
+backs of the two boys out early for a long ramble, of old peasants
+resting themselves a little, with spare enjoyment, ere the end:--
+
+"As we turned a sharp elbow of the stream the aspect of the country
+changed.  It seemed to me entirely red.  Cherries in enormous bunches
+were hanging everywhere over our heads....
+
+[125] "It was a hut, rather low, rather dark.  A log of chestnut was
+smouldering in a heap of ashes.  Every object was in its place: the
+table, the chairs, the plates ranged on the dresser.  A fairy, in
+truth, reigned there, and, by the touch of her wand, brought
+cleanliness and order on every side.
+
+"'Is it you, Norine?' asked a voice from a dark corner, three steps
+from the fireplace.
+
+"'Yes, mon grand, it is I!  The heat was growing greater every
+moment, and I have taken in the goats.'
+
+"Norine unclosed the window.  A broad light spread over the floor of
+beaten earth, like a white cloth.  The cottage was illuminated.  I
+saw an old man seated on a wooden stool in a recess, where an ample
+serge curtain concealed a bed.  He held himself slightly bent, the
+two hands held forth, one over the other, on the knob of a knotty
+staff, highly polished.  In spite of eighty years, Norine's
+grandfather--le grand, as they say up there--had not lost a hair:
+beautiful white locks fell over his shoulders--crisp, thick,
+outspread.  I thought of those fine wigs of tow or hemp with which
+the distaff of [126] our Prudence was always entangled.  He was close
+shaved, after the manner of our peasants; and the entire mask was to
+be seen disengaged, all its admirable lines free, commanded by a
+full-sized nose, below which the good, thick lips were smiling, full
+of kindness.  The eyes, however, though still clear and soft in
+expression, had a certain fixity which startled me.  He raised
+himself.  His stature seemed to me beyond proportion.  He was really
+beautiful, with the contentment of his face, straight as the trunk of
+a chestnut, his old velvet coat thrown back, his shirt of coarse
+cloth open at the breast, so that one saw the play of the ribs.
+
+"'Monsieur le neveu!' he cried; 'where are you? Come to me!  I am
+blind.'
+
+"I approached.  He felt me, with ten fingers, laying aside his staff.
+
+"'And you would not take offence if a poor peasant like me embraced
+you?'
+
+"'Quick, Jalaguier!'  I cried, throwing myself into his arms.
+'Quick!'  He pressed me till the joints started.  Leaned upon his
+broad chest, I heard the beating of his heart.  It beat under my ears
+with a burden like our bell at [126] Camplong.  What powerful
+vitality in Norine's grand!  'It does an old man good:--a good hug!'
+he said, letting me go."
+
+The boyish visitors are quite ready to sit down there to dinner:--
+
+"With the peasant of the Cevennes (M. Fabre tells us) the meal is
+what nature meant it to be--a few moments for self-recovery after
+fatigue, a short space of silence of a quite elevated character,
+almost sacred.  The poor human creature has given the sweat of his
+brow to extort from an ungrateful soil his daily bread; and now he
+eats that well-savoured bread in silent self-respect.
+
+"'It is a weary thing to be thinking always of one's work (says the
+grand to the somewhat sparing Norine).  We must also think of our
+sustenance.  You are too enduring, my child! it is a mistake to
+demand so much of your arms.  In truth, le bon Dieu has cut you out
+after the pattern of your dead father.  Every morning, in my prayers,
+I put in my complaint thereanent.  My poor boy died from going too
+fast.  He could never sit still when it was a question of gathering a
+few sous from the [128] fields; and those fields took and consumed
+him.'"
+
+The boy fancies that the blind eyes are turned towards a particular
+spot in the landscape, as if they saw:--
+
+"'I often turn my eyes in that direction (the old man explains) from
+habit.  One might suppose that a peasant had the scent of the earth
+on which he has laboured.  I have given so much of the sweat of my
+brow--there--towards Rocaillet!  Angelique, my dead wife, was of
+Rocaillet; and when she married me, brought a few morsels of land in
+her apron.  What a state they're in now!--those poor morsels of land
+we used to weed and rake and hoe, my boy and I!  What superb crops of
+vetches we mowed then, for feeding, in due time, our lambs, our
+calves!  All is gone to ruin since my blindness, and especially since
+Angelique left me for the churchyard, never to come back.'  He paused
+to my great relief.  For every one of those phrases he modulated
+under the fig-trees more sadly than the Lamentations of Jeremiah on
+Jeudi Saint overset me--was like death."
+
+[129] That is good drawing, in its simple and quiet way!  The actual
+scene, however, is cheerful enough on this early summer day--a
+symphony, as we said, in cherries and goldfinches, in which the
+higher valleys of the Cevennes abound.  In fact, the boys witness the
+accordailles, the engagement, of Norine and Justin Lebasset.  The
+latter is calling the birds to sing good luck to the event:--
+
+"He had a long steady look towards the fruit-trees, and then
+whistled, on a note at once extremely clear and extremely soft.  He
+paused, watched awhile, recommenced.  The note became more rapid,
+more sonorous.  What an astounding man he was, this Justin Lebasset!
+Upright, his red beard forward, his forehead thrown back, his eyes on
+the thick foliage of the cherry-trees, his hands on his haunches, in
+an attitude of repose, easy, superb, he was like some youthful pagan
+god, gilded with red gold, on his way across the country--like Pan,
+if he chose to amuse himself by charming birds.  You should have seen
+the enthusiastic glances with which Norine watched him.  Upright--she
+too, slim, at full height, inclining from [130] time to time towards
+Justin with a movement of irresistible fascination, she followed the
+notes of her mate; and sometimes, her, lips half opening, added
+thereto a sigh--something of a sigh, an aspiration, a prayer, towards
+the goldfinch, withdrawn into the shadows.
+
+"The leaves were shaken in the clear, burning green; and, on a
+sudden, a multitude of goldfinches, the heads red in the wind, the
+wings half spread, were fluttering from branch to branch.  I could
+have fancied, amid the quivering of the great bunches of fruit, that
+they were cherries on the wing.  Justin suffered his pipe to die
+away: the birds were come at his invitation, and performed their
+prelude."
+
+It is forty years afterwards that the narrator, now a man of letters
+in Paris, writes to his old friend, with tidings of Justin and
+Norine:--
+
+"In 1842 (he observes) you were close on fifteen; I scarcely twelve.
+In my eyes your age made you my superior.  And then, you were so
+strong, so tender, so amiteux, to use a word from up there--a
+charming word.  And so God, Who had His designs for you, whereas I,
+in spite of my pious childhood, wandered on [131] my way as chance
+bade me, led you by the hand, attached, ended by keeping you for
+Himself.  He did well truly when He chose you and rejected me!"
+
+His finding the pair in the wilds of Paris is an adventure, in which,
+in fact, a goldfinch again takes an important part--a goldfinch who
+is found to understand the Cevenol dialect:--
+
+"The goldfinch (escaped from its cage somewhere, into the dreary
+court of the Institute) has seen me: is looking at me.  If he chose
+to make his way into my apartment, he would be very welcome.  I feel
+a strong impulse to try him with that unique patois word, which,
+whistled after a peculiar manner, when I was a boy never failed to
+succeed in the mountains of Orb--Beni!  Beni!  Viens!  Viens!  I dare
+not!  He might take fright and fly away altogether."
+
+In effect, the Cevenol bird, true to call, introduces Norine, his
+rightful owner, whose husband Justin is slowly dying.  Towards the
+end of a hard life, faithful to their mountain ideal, they have not
+lost their dignity, though in a comparatively sordid medium: [132]
+
+"As for me, my dear Arribas, I remained in deep agitation, an
+attentive spectator of the scene; and while Justin and Norine, set
+both alike in the winepress of sorrow, le pressoir de la douleur, as
+your good books express it, murmured to each other their broken
+consoling words, I saw them again, in thought, young, handsome, in
+the full flower of life, under the cherry-trees, the swarming
+goldfinches, of blind Barthelemy Jalaguier.  Ah me!  It was thus
+that, five-and-forty years after, in this dark street of Paris, that
+festive day was finishing, blessed, in the plenitude of nature, by
+that august old man, celebrated by the alternate song of all the
+birds of Rocaillet."
+
+Justin's one remaining hope is to go home to those native mountains,
+if it may be, with the dead body of his boy, dead "the very morning
+on which he should have received the tonsure from the hands of Mgr.
+l'Archeveque," and buried now temporarily at the cemetery of
+Montparnasse:--
+
+Theodore calls me.  I saw him distinctly to-night.  He gave me a
+sign.  After all said, life is heavy, sans le fillot, and but [133]
+for you it were well to be released from it....'
+
+"I have seen Justin Lebasset die, dear Arribas, and was touched,
+edified, to the bottom of my soul.  God grant, when my hour comes, I
+may find that calm, that force, in the last struggle with life.  Not
+a complaint!  not a sigh!  Once only he gave Norine a sorrowful,
+heartrending look; then, from lips already cold, breathed that one
+word, 'Theodore!'  Marcus Aurelius used to say: 'A man should leave
+the world as a ripe olive falls from the tree that bore it, and with
+a kiss for the earth that nourished it.'  Well! the peasant of
+Rocaillet had the beautiful, noble, simple death of the fruit of the
+earth, going to the common receptacle of all mortal beings, with no
+sense that he was torn away.  Pardon, I pray, my quotation from
+Marcus Aurelius, who persecuted the Christians.  I give it with the
+same respect with which you would quote some holy writer.  Ah! my
+dear Arribas! not all the saints have received canonization."
+
+It is to the priestly character, in truth, that M. Fabre always comes
+back for tranquillizing [134] effect; and if his peasants have
+something akin to Wordsworth's, his priests may remind one of those
+solemn ecclesiastical heads familiar in the paintings and etchings of
+M. Alphonse Legros.  The reader travelling in Italy, or Belgium
+perhaps, has doubtless visited one or more of those spacious
+sacristies, introduced to which for the inspection of some more than
+usually recherche work of art, one is presently dominated by their
+reverend quiet: simple people coming and going there, devout, or at
+least on devout business, with half-pitched voices, not without
+touches of kindly humour, in what seems to express like a picture the
+most genial side, midway between the altar and the home, of the
+ecclesiastical life.  Just such interiors we seem to visit under the
+magic of M. Fabre's well-trained pen.  He has a real power of taking
+one from Paris, or from London, to places and people certainly very
+different from either, to the satisfaction of those who seek in
+fiction an escape.
+
+12th June 1889
+
+
+
+
+
+IX.  THE "CONTES" OF M. AUGUSTIN FILON
+
+
+
+
+TALES OF A HUNDRED YEARS SINCE
+["CONTES DU CENTENAIRE."  PAR AUGUSTIN FILON.  PARIS: HACHETTE ET
+CIE. ]
+
+
+[137] IT was a happy thought of M. Filon to put into the mouth of an
+imaginary centenarian a series of delightfully picturesque studies
+which aim at the minute presentment of life in France under the old
+regime, and end for the most part with the Revolution.  A genial
+centenarian, whose years have told happily on him, he appreciates not
+only those humanities of feeling and habit which were peculiar to the
+last century and passed away with it, but also that permanent
+humanity which has but undergone a change of surface in the new world
+of our own, wholly different though it may look.  With a sympathetic
+sense of life as it is always, [138] M. Filon has transplanted the
+creations of his fancy into an age certainly at a greater distance
+from ourselves than can be estimated by mere lapse of time, and where
+a fully detailed antiquarian knowledge, used with admirable tact and
+economy, is indeed serviceable in giving reality of effect to scene
+and character.  In truth, M. Filon's very lively antiquarianism
+carries with it a genuine air of personal memory.  With him, as
+happens so rarely, an intimate knowledge of historic detail is the
+secret of life, of the impression of life; puts his own imagination
+on the wing; secures the imaginative cooperation of the reader.  A
+stately age--to us, perhaps, in the company of the historic muse,
+seeming even more stately than it actually was--it is pleasant to
+find it, as we do now and again on these pages, in graceful
+deshabille.  With perfect lightness of touch, M. Filon seems to have
+a complete command of all the physiognomic details of old France, of
+old Paris and its people--how they made a holiday; how they got at
+the news; the fashions.  Did the English reader ever hear before of
+the beautifully dressed doll which came once a month [139] from Paris
+to Soho to teach an expectant world of fashion how to dress itself?
+Old Paris!  For young lovers at their windows; for every one
+fortunate enough to have seen it: "Qu'il est joli ce paysage du Paris
+nocturne d'il y a cent ans!"  We think we shall best do justice to an
+unusually pretty book by taking one of M. Filon's stories (not
+because we are quite sure it is the cleverest of them) with a view to
+the more definite illustration of his method, therein.
+
+Christopher Marteau was a warden of the corporation of Luthiers.  He
+dealt in musical instruments, as his father and grandfather had done
+before him, at the sign of Saint Cecilia.  With his wife, his only
+child Phlipote, and Claude his apprentice, who was to marry Phlipote,
+he occupied a good house of his own.  Of course the disposition of
+the young people, bred together from their childhood, does not at
+first entirely concur with the parental arrangements.  But the story
+tells, reassuringly, how--to some extent how sadly--they came
+heartily to do so.  M. Marteau was no ordinary shopkeeper.  The
+various distinguished people who had fingered his clavecins, and
+turned over the [140] folios of music, for half a century past, had
+left their memories behind them; M. de Voltaire, for instance, who
+had caressed the head of Phlipote with an aged, skeleton hand,
+leaving, apparently, no very agreeable impression on the child,
+though her father delighted to recall the incident, being himself a
+demi-philosophe.  He went to church, that is to say, only twice a
+year, on the Feast of St. Cecilia and on the Sunday when the Luthiers
+offered the pain benit.  It was his opinion that everything in the
+State needed reform except the Corporations.  The relations of the
+husband to his affectionate, satiric, pleasure-seeking wife, who knew
+so well all the eighteen theatres which then existed in Paris, are
+treated with much quiet humour.  On Sundays the four set forth
+together for a country holiday.  At such times Phlipote would walk
+half-a-dozen paces in advance of her father and mother, side by side
+with her intended.  But they never talked to each other: the hands,
+the eyes, never met.  Of what was Phlipote dreaming? and what was in
+the thoughts of Claude?
+
+It happened one day that, like sister and brother, the lovers
+exchanged confidences.  "It [141] is not always," observes Phlipote,
+whom every one excepting Claude on those occasions sought with
+admiring eyes--
+
+"'It is not always one loves those one is told to love.'
+
+"'What, have you, too, a secret, my little Phlipote?'
+
+"'I too, Claude!  Then what may be yours?'
+
+"'Listen, Phlipote!' he answered.  'We don't wish to be husband and
+wife, but we can be friends--good and faithful friends, helping each
+other to change the decision of our parents.'
+
+"'Were I but sure you would not betray me--'
+
+"'Would you like me to confess first?  The woman I love--Ah! but you
+will laugh at my folly!'
+
+"'No, Claude!  I shall not laugh.  I know too well what one suffers.'
+
+"'Especially when love is hopeless.'
+
+"'Hopeless?'
+
+"'Alas!  I have never spoken to her.  Perhaps never shall!'
+
+[142] "'Well! as for me, I don't even know the name of him to whom my
+heart is given!'
+
+"'Ah! poor Phlipote!'
+
+"'Poor Claude!'
+
+"They had approached each other.  The young man took the tiny hand of
+his friend, pressing it in his own.
+
+"'The woman I adore is Mademoiselle Guimard!'
+
+"'What!  Guimard of the Opera?--the fiancee of Despreaux?'"
+
+Claude still held the hands of Phlipote, who was trembling now, and
+almost on fire at the story of this ambitious love.  In return she
+reveals her own.  It was Good Friday.  She had come with her mother
+to the Sainte Chapelle to hear Mademoiselle Coupain play the organ
+and witness the extraordinary spectacle of the convulsionnaires,
+brought thither to be touched by the relic of the True Cross.  In the
+press of the crowd at this exciting scene Phlipote faints, or nearly
+faints, when a young man comes kindly to their aid.  "She is so
+young!" he explains to the mother, "she seems so delicate!"  "He
+looked at me," she tells Claude--"he looked at [143] me, through his
+half-closed eyelids; and his words were like a caress."--
+
+"'And have you seen him no More?' asks Claude, full of sympathy.
+
+"'Yes! once again.  He pretended to be looking at the window of the
+Little Dunkirk, over the way, but with cautious glances towards our
+house.  Only, as he did not know what storey we live on, he failed to
+discover me behind my curtain, where I was but half visible.'
+
+"'You should have shown yourself.'
+
+"'Oh, Claude!' she cried, with a delicious gesture of timidity, of
+shame.
+
+"So they prattled for a long time; he talking of the great Guimard,
+she of her unknown lover, scarce listening to, but completely
+understanding each other.
+
+"'Holloa!'cries the loud voice of Christopher Marteau.  'What are you
+doing out there?'
+
+"The young people arose.  Phlipote linked her arm gaily in that of
+Claude.  'How contented I feel!' she says; 'how good it is to have a
+friend--to have you whom I used to detest, because I thought you were
+in love with me.  Now, when I know you can't bear me, I [144] shall
+be nicely in love with you.'  The soft warmth of her arm seemed to
+pass through Claude, and gave him strange sensations.  He resumed
+naively, 'Yes! and how odd it is after all that I am not in love with
+you.  You are so pretty!'  Phlipote raised her finger coquettishly,
+'No compliments, monsieur.  Since we are not to marry each other, it
+is forbidden to pay court to me!'"
+
+From that day a close intimacy established itself between the
+formerly affianced pair, now become accomplices in defeating the good
+intentions of their elders.  In long conversations, they talked in
+turn, or both together, of their respective loves.  Phlipote allows
+Claude entrance to her chamber, full of admiration for its graceful
+arrangements, its virgin cleanliness.  He inspects slowly all the
+familiar objects daily touched by her, her books, her girlish
+ornaments.  One day she cried with an air of mischief, "If she were
+here in my place, what would you do?" and no sooner were the words
+uttered than his arms were round her neck.  "'Tis but to teach you
+what I would do were she here."  They were a little troubled by this
+adventure.
+
+[145] And the next day was a memorable one.  By the kind contrivance
+of Phlipote herself, Claude gains the much-desired access to the
+object of his affections, but to his immense disillusion.  If he
+could but speak to her, he fancies he should find the courage, the
+skill, to bend her.  Breathless, Phlipote comes in secret with the
+good news.  The great actress desires some one to tune her clavecin:-
+-
+
+"'Papa would have gone; but I begged him so earnestly to take me to
+the Theatre Francais that he could not refuse; and it is yourself
+will go this evening to tune the clavecin of your beloved.'
+
+"'Phlipote, you've a better heart than I!  This morning I saw a
+gentleman, who resembled point by point your description of the
+unknown at the Sainte Chapelle, prowling about our shop.'
+
+"'And you didn't tell me!'
+
+"Claude hung his head.
+
+"'But why not?' the young girl asks imperiously.  'Why not?'
+
+"'In truth I could hardly say, hardly understand, myself.  Do you
+forgive me, Phlipote?'
+
+"'I suppose I must.  So make yourself as smart as you can, to please
+your goddess.'"
+
+[146] Next day she hears the story of Claude's grievous
+disappointment on seeing the great actress at home--plain, five-and-
+forty, ill-tempered.  He had tuned the clavecin and taken flight.
+
+And now for Phlipote's idol!  It was agreed that Whitsunday should be
+spent at Versailles.  On that day the royal apartments were open to
+the public, and at the hour of High Mass the crowd flowed back
+towards the vestibule of the chapel to witness what was called the
+procession of the Cordons Bleus.  The "Blue Ribbons" were the knights
+of the Order Du Saint-Esprit in their robes of ceremony, who came to
+range themselves in the choir according to the date of their
+creation.  The press was so great that the parents were separated
+from the young people.  Claude, however, at the side of Phlipote,
+realized the ideal of a faithful and jealous guardian.  The
+hallebardes of the Suisses rang on the marble pavement of the
+gallery.  Royalty, now unconsciously presenting its ceremonies for
+the last time, advanced through a cloud of splendour; but before the
+Queen appeared it was necessary that all the knights of the order
+down to the youngest should pass by, slow, solemn, majestic.
+
+[147] They wore, besides their ribbons of blue moire, the silver dove
+on the shoulder, and the long mantle of sombre blue velvet lined with
+yellow satin.  Phlipote watched mechanically the double file of
+haughty figures passing before them: then, on a sudden, with a feeble
+cry, falls fainting into the arms of Claude.
+
+Recovered after a while, under shelter of the great staircase, she
+wept as those weep whose heart is broken by a great blow.  Claude,
+without a word, sustained, soothed her.  A sentiment of gratitude
+mingled itself with her distress.  "How good he is!" she thought.
+
+"It was a pity," says her mother a little later "a pity you did not
+see the Cordons Bleus.  Fancy!  You will laugh at me!  But in one of
+the handsomest of the Chevaliers I felt sure I recognized the
+stranger who helped us at the Sainte Chapelle, and was so gallant
+with you."
+
+Phlipote did not laugh.  "You are deceived, mother!" she said in a
+faint voice.  "Pardi!" cries the father.  "'Tis what I always say.
+Your stranger was some young fellow from a shop."
+
+Two months later the young people receive [148] the nuptial
+benediction, and continue the musical business when the elders retire
+to the country.  At first a passionate lover, Claude was afterwards a
+good and devoted husband.  Phlipote never again opened her lips
+regarding the vague love which for a moment had flowered in her
+heart: only sometimes, a cloud of reverie veiled her eyes, which
+seemed to seek sadly, beyond the circle of her slow, calm life, a
+brilliant but chimeric image visible for her alone.
+
+And once again she saw him.  It was in the terrible year 1794.  She
+knew the hour at which the tumbril with those condemned to die passed
+the windows; and at the first signal would close them and draw the
+curtain.  But on this day some invincible fascination nailed her to
+her place.  There were ten faces; but she had eyes for one alone.
+She had not forgotten, could not mistake, him--that pale head, so
+proud and fine, but now thin with suffering; the beautiful mobile
+eyes, now encircled with the signs of sorrow and watching.  The
+convict's shirt, open in large, broad folds, left bare the neck,
+delicate as a woman's, and made for that youthful face an aureole, of
+innocence, of martyrdom.  His looks [149] met hers.  Did he recognize
+her?  She could not have said.  She remained there, paralyzed with
+emotion, till the moment when the vision disappeared.
+
+Then she flung herself into her chamber, fell on her knees, lost
+herself in prayer.  There was a distant roll of drums.  The man to
+whom she had given her maiden soul was gone.
+
+"Cursed be their anger, for it was cruel!" says the reader.  But
+Monsieur Filon's stories sometimes end as merrily as they begin; and
+always he is all delicacy--a delicacy which keeps his large yet
+minute antiquarian knowledge of that vanished time ever in service to
+a direct interest in humanity as it is permanently, alike before and
+after '93.  His book is certainly one well worth possessing.
+
+THE END
+
+16th July 1890
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Essays From 'The Guardian'
+by Walter Horatio Pater
+
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Essays From 'The Guardian'
+by Walter Horatio Pater
+(#4 in our series by Walter Horatio Pater)
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+Title: Essays From 'The Guardian'
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+Author: Walter Horatio Pater
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Essays From 'The Guardian'
+by Walter Horatio Pater
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+
+
+Produced by Alfred J. Drake, Ph.D.
+
+
+
+
+
+ESSAYS FROM 'THE GUARDIAN'
+
+By WALTER HORATIO PATER
+
+E-text Editor: Alfred J. Drake, Ph.D.
+Electronic Version 1.0 / Date 10-12-01
+
+
+DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
+
+[1] I DISCLAIM ALL LIABILITY TO YOU FOR DAMAGES, COSTS AND EXPENSES,
+INCLUDING LEGAL FEES, AND
+
+[2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR
+FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU
+GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
+
+THE E-TEXTS ON THIS SITE ARE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS".  NO WARRANTIES
+OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS TO THE E-TEXTS OR
+ANY MEDIUM THEY MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF
+MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
+
+Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or the
+exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the above
+disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you may have
+other legal rights.
+
+
+ESSAYS FROM 'THE GUARDIAN'
+
+
+NOTES BY THE E-TEXT EDITOR:
+
+Reliability: Although I have done my best to ensure that the text you
+read is error-free in comparison with an exact reprint of the
+standard edition--Macmillan's 1910 Library Edition--please exercise
+scholarly caution in using it.  It is not intended as a substitute
+for the printed original but rather as a searchable supplement.  My
+e-texts may prove convenient substitutes for hard-to-get works in a
+course where both instructor and students accept the possibility of
+some imperfections in the text, but if you are writing a scholarly
+article, dissertation, or book, you should use the standard hard-copy
+editions of any works you cite.
+
+
+Pagination and Paragraphing: To avoid an unwieldy electronic copy, I
+have transferred original pagination to brackets.  A bracketed
+numeral such as [22] indicates that the material immediately
+following the number marks the beginning of the relevant page.  I
+have preserved paragraph structure except for first-line indentation.
+
+Hyphenation: I have not preserved original hyphenation since an e-
+text does not require line-end or page-end hyphenation.
+
+Greek typeface: For this full-text edition, I have transliterated
+Pater's Greek quotations.  If there is a need for the original Greek,
+it can be viewed at my site, http://www.ajdrake.com/etexts, a
+Victorianist archive that contains the complete works of Walter Pater
+and many other nineteenth-century texts, mostly in first editions.
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+
+
+1. English Literature: 1-16
+
+2. Amiel's "Journal Intime": 17-37
+
+3. Browning: 39-51
+
+4. "Robert Elsmere": 53-70
+
+5. Their Majesties' Servants: 71-88
+
+6. Wordsworth: 89-104
+
+7. Mr. Gosse's Poems: 105-118
+
+8. Ferdinand Fabre: 119-134
+
+9. The "Contes" of M. Augustin Filon: 135-149
+
+
+
+
+
+ESSAYS FROM 'THE GUARDIAN'
+
+WALTER HORATIO PATER
+
+
+E-text Editor: Alfred J. Drake, Ph.D.
+Electronic Version 1.0 / Date 10-12-01
+
+
+
+
+PATER'S NOTE: The nine papers contained in the following volume
+originally appeared anonymously in The Guardian newspaper.
+
+
+
+
+E-TEXT EDITOR'S NOTE: I have not preserved the title pages of this
+volume, but have instead moved dates to each essay's end and included
+any necessary title-page material in the heading area of the first
+substantive page.
+
+
+
+
+
+I.  ENGLISH LITERATURE
+
+
+
+
+FOUR BOOKS FOR STUDENTS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE
+
+
+[3] THE making of an anthology of English prose is what must have
+occurred to many of its students, by way of pleasure to themselves,
+or of profit to other persons.  Such an anthology, the compass and
+variety of our prose literature being considered, might well follow
+exclusively some special line of interest in it; exhibiting, for
+instance, what is so obviously striking, its imaginative power, or
+its (legitimately) poetic beauty, or again, its philosophical
+capacity.  Mr. Saintsbury's well-considered Specimens of English
+Prose Style, from Malory to Macaulay (Kegan Paul), a volume, as we
+think, which bears fresh witness to the truth of the old remark that
+it takes a scholar indeed to make a [4] good literary selection, has
+its motive sufficiently indicated in the very original "introductory
+essay," which might well stand, along with the best of these extracts
+from a hundred or more deceased masters of English, as itself a
+document or standard, in the matter of prose style.  The essential
+difference between poetry and prose--"that other beauty of prose"--in
+the words of the motto he has chosen from Dryden, the first master of
+the sort of prose he prefers:--that is Mr. Saintsbury's burden.  It
+is a consideration, undoubtedly, of great importance both for the
+writer and the critic; in England especially, where, although (as Mr.
+Saintsbury rightly points out, in correction of an imperfectly
+informed French critic of our literature) the radical distinction
+between poetry and prose has ever been recognized by its students,
+yet the imaginative impulse, which is perhaps the richest of our
+purely intellectual gifts, has been apt to invade the province of
+that tact and good judgment, alike as to matter and manner, in which
+we are not richer than other people.  Great poetry and great prose,
+it might be found, have most of their qualities in common.  But [5]
+their indispensable qualities are different, or even opposed; and it
+is just the indispensable qualities of prose and poetry respectively,
+which it is so necessary for those who have to do with either to bear
+ever in mind.  Order, precision, directness, are the radical merits
+of prose thought; and it is more than merely legitimate that they
+should form the criterion of prose style, because within the scope of
+those qualities, according to Mr. Saintsbury, there is more than just
+the quiet, unpretending usefulness of the bare sermo pedestris.
+Acting on language, those qualities generate a specific and unique
+beauty--"that other beauty of prose"--fitly illustrated by these
+specimens, which the reader needs hardly be told, after what has been
+now said, are far from being a collection of "purple patches."
+
+Whether or not he admits their practical cogency, an attentive reader
+will not fail to be interested in the attempt Mr. Saintsbury has made
+to give technical rules of metre for the production of the true prose
+rhythm.  Any one who cares to do so might test the validity of those
+rules in the nearest possible way, by applying them to the varied
+examples in this wide [6] survey of what has been actually well done
+in English prose, here exhibited on the side of their strictly
+prosaic merit--their conformity, before all other aims, to laws of a
+structure primarily reasonable.  Not that that reasonable prose
+structure, or architecture, as Mr. Saintsbury conceives it, has been
+always, or even generally, the ideal, even of those chosen writers
+here in evidence.  Elizabethan prose, all too chaotic in the beauty
+and force which overflowed into it from Elizabethan poetry, and
+incorrect with an incorrectness which leaves it scarcely legitimate
+prose at all: then, in reaction against that, the correctness of
+Dryden, and his followers through the eighteenth century, determining
+the standard of a prose in the proper sense, not inferior to the
+prose of the Augustan age in Latin, or of the "great age in France":
+and, again in reaction against this, the wild mixture of poetry and
+prose, in our wild nineteenth century, under the influence of such
+writers as Dickens and Carlyle: such are the three periods into which
+the story of our prose literature divides itself.  And Mr. Saintsbury
+has his well-timed, practical suggestions, upon a survey of them.
+
+[7] If the invasion of the legitimate sphere of prose in England by
+the spirit of poetry, weaker or stronger, has been something far
+deeper than is indicated by that tendency to write unconscious blank
+verse, which has made it feasible to transcribe about one-half of
+Dickens's otherwise so admirable Barnaby Rudge in blank-verse lines,
+a tendency (outdoing our old friend M. Jourdain) commoner than Mr.
+Saintsbury admits, such lines being frequent in his favourite Dryden;
+yet, on the other hand, it might be maintained, and would be
+maintained by its French critics, that our English poetry has been
+too apt to dispense with those prose qualities, which, though not the
+indispensable qualities of poetry, go, nevertheless, to the making of
+all first-rate poetry--the  qualities, namely, of orderly structure,
+and such qualities generally as depend upon second thoughts.  A
+collection of specimens of English poetry, for the purpose of
+exhibiting the achievement of prose excellences by it (in their
+legitimate measure) is a desideratum we commend to Mr. Saintsbury.
+It is the assertion, the development, the product of those very
+different indispensable qualities of poetry, in the presence [8] of
+which the English is equal or superior to all other modern
+literature--the native, sublime, and beautiful, but often wild and
+irregular, imaginative power in English poetry from Chaucer to
+Shakespeare, with which Professor Minto deals, in his Characteristics
+of English Poets (Blackwood), lately reprinted.  That his book should
+have found many readers we can well understand, in the light of the
+excellent qualities which, in high degree, have gone to the making of
+it: a tasteful learning, never deserted by that hold upon
+contemporary literature which is so animating an influence in the
+study of what belongs to the past.  Beginning with an elaborate
+notice of Chaucer, full of the minute scholarship of our day, he
+never forgets that his subject is, after all, poetry.  The followers
+of Chaucer, and the precursors of Shakespeare, are alike real persons
+to him--old Langland reminding him of Carlyle's "Gospel of Labour."
+The product of a large store of reading has been here secreted anew
+for the reader who desires to see, in bird's-eye view, the light and
+shade of a long and varied period of poetic literature, by way of
+preparation for Shakespeare, [9] (with a full essay upon whom the
+volume closes,) explaining Shakespeare, so far as he can be explained
+by literary antecedents.
+
+That powerful poetry was twin-brother to a prose, of more varied, but
+certainly of wilder and more irregular power than the admirable, the
+typical, prose of Dryden.  In Dryden, and his followers through the
+eighteenth century, we see the reaction against the exuberance and
+irregularity of that prose, no longer justified by power, but
+cognizable rather as bad taste.  But such reaction was effective only
+because an age had come--the age of a negative, or agnostic
+philosophy--in which men's minds must needs be limited to the
+superficialities of things, with a kind of narrowness amounting to a
+positive gift.  What that mental attitude was capable of, in the way
+of an elegant, yet plain-spoken, and life-like delineation of men's
+moods and manners, as also in the way of determining those moods and
+manners themselves to all that was lively, unaffected, and
+harmonious, can be seen nowhere better than in Mr. Austin Dobson's
+Selections from Steele (Clarendon Press) prefaced by his careful
+"Life."  The well-known qualities of [10] Mr. Dobson's own original
+work are a sufficient guarantee of the taste and discrimination we
+may look for in a collection like this, in which the random
+lightnings of the first of the essayists are grouped under certain
+heads--"Character Sketches," "Tales and Incidents," "Manners and
+Fashions," and the like--so as to diminish, for the general reader,
+the scattered effect of short essays on a hundred various subjects,
+and give a connected, book-like character to the specimens.
+
+Steele, for one, had certainly succeeded in putting himself, and his
+way of taking the world--for this pioneer of an everybody's
+literature had his subjectivities--into books.  What a survival of
+one long-past day, for instance, in "A Ramble from Richmond to
+London"!  What truth to the surface of common things, to their direct
+claim on our interest! yet with what originality of effect in that
+truthfulness, when he writes, for instance:
+
+"I went to my lodgings, led by a light, whom I put into the discourse
+of his private economy, and made him give me an account of the
+charge, hazard, profit, and loss of a family that depended upon a
+link."
+
+[11] It was one of his peculiarities, he tells us, to live by the eye
+far more than by any other sense (a peculiarity, perhaps, in an
+Englishman), and this is what he sees at the early daily service then
+common in some City churches.  Among those who were come only to see
+or be seen, "there were indeed a few in whose looks there appeared a
+heavenly joy and gladness upon the entrance of a new day, as if they
+had gone to sleep with expectation of it."
+
+The industrious reader, indeed, might select out of these specimens
+from Steele, a picture, in minute detail, of the characteristic
+manners of that time.  Still, beside, or only a little way beneath,
+such a picture of passing fashion, what Steele and his fellows really
+deal with is the least transitory aspects of life, though still
+merely aspects--those points in which all human nature, great or
+little, finds what it has in common, and directly shows itself up.
+The natural strength of such literature will, of course, be in the
+line of its tendencies; in transparency, variety, and directness.  To
+the unembarrassing matter, the unembarrassed style!  Steele is,
+perhaps, the most impulsive writer of the school [12] to which he
+belongs; he abounds in felicities of impulse.  Yet who can help
+feeling that his style is regular because the matter he deals with is
+the somewhat uncontentious, even, limited soul, of an age not
+imaginative, and unambitious in its speculative flight?  Even in
+Steele himself we may observe with what sureness of instinct the men
+of that age turned aside at the contact of anything likely to make
+them, in any sense, forget themselves.
+
+No one indicates better than Charles Lamb, to whose memory Mr. Alfred
+Ainger has done such good service, the great and peculiar change
+which was begun at the end of the last century, and dominates our
+own; that sudden increase of the width, the depth, the complexity of
+intellectual interest, which has many times torn and distorted
+literary style, even with those best able to comprehend its laws.  In
+Mrs. Leicester's School, with other Writings in Prose and Verse
+(Macmillan), Mr. Ainger has collected and annotated certain remains
+of Charles and Mary Lamb, too good to lie unknown to the present
+generation, in forgotten periodicals or inaccessible reprints.  The
+story of the Odyssey, abbreviated [13] in very simple prose, for
+children--of all ages--will speak for itself.  But the garland of
+graceful stories which gives name to the volume, told by a party of
+girls on the evening of their assembling at school, are in the
+highest degree characteristic of the brother and sister who were ever
+so successful in imparting to others their own enjoyment of books and
+people.  The tragic circumstance which strengthened and consecrated
+their natural community of interest had, one might think, something
+to do with the far-reaching pensiveness even of their most humorous
+writing, touching often the deepest springs of pity and awe, as the
+way of the highest humour is--a way, however, very different from
+that of the humorists of the eighteenth century.  But one cannot
+forget also that Lamb was early an enthusiastic admirer of
+Wordsworth: of Wordsworth, the first characteristic power of the
+nineteenth century, his essay on whom, in the Quarterly Review, Mr.
+Ainger here reprints.  Would that he could have reprinted it as
+originally composed, and ungarbled by Gifford, the editor!  Lamb,
+like Wordsworth, still kept the charm of a serenity, [14] a
+precision, unsurpassed by the quietest essayist of the preceding age.
+But it might have been foreseen that the rising tide of thought and
+feeling, on the strength of which they too are borne upward, would
+sometimes overflow barriers.  And so it happens that these simple
+stories are touched, much as Wordsworth's verse-stories were, with
+tragic power.  Dealing with the beginnings of imagination in the
+minds of children, they record, with the reality which a very
+delicate touch preserves from anything lugubrious, not those merely
+preventible miseries of childhood over which some writers have been
+apt to gloat, but the contact of childhood with the great and
+inevitable sorrows of life, into which children can enter with depth,
+with dignity, and sometimes with a kind of simple, pathetic
+greatness, to the discipline of the heart.  Let the reader begin with
+the "Sea Voyage," which is by Charles Lamb; and, what Mr. Ainger
+especially recommends, the "Father's Wedding-Day," by his sister
+Mary.
+
+The ever-increasing intellectual burden of our age is hardly likely
+to adapt itself to the exquisite, but perhaps too delicate and
+limited, [15] literary instruments of the age of Queen Anne.  Yet Mr.
+Saintsbury is certainly right in thinking that, as regards style,
+English literature has much to do.  Well, the good quality of an age,
+the defect of which lies in the direction of intellectual anarchy and
+confusion, may well be eclecticism: in style, as in other things, it
+is well always to aim at the combination of as many excellences as
+possible--opposite excellences, it may be--those other beauties of
+prose.  A busy age will hardly educate its writers in correctness.
+Let its writers make time to write English more as a learned
+language; and completing that correction of style which had only gone
+a certain way in the last century, raise the general level of
+language towards their own.  If there be a weakness in Mr.
+Saintsbury's view, it is perhaps in a tendency to regard style a
+little too independently of matter.  And there are still some who
+think that, after all, the style is the man; justified, in very great
+varieties, by the simple consideration of what he himself has to say,
+quite independently of any real or supposed connection with this or
+that literary age or school.  Let us close with the words of a most
+[16] versatile master of English--happily not yet included in Mr.
+Saintsbury's book--a writer who has dealt with all the perturbing
+influences of our century in a manner as classical, as idiomatic, as
+easy and elegant, as Steele's:
+
+"I wish you to observe," says Cardinal Newman, "that the mere dealer
+in words cares little or nothing for the subject which he is
+embellishing, but can paint and gild anything whatever to order;
+whereas the artist, whom I am acknowledging, has his great or rich
+visions before him, and his only aim is to bring out what he thinks
+or what he feels in a way adequate to the thing spoken of, and
+appropriate to the speaker."
+
+17th February 1886
+
+
+
+
+
+II.  AMIEL'S "JOURNAL INTIME"
+
+
+
+
+
+Amiel's Journal.  The Journal Intime of Henri-Frédéric Amiel.
+Translated, with an Introduction and Notes, by Mrs. Humphry Ward.
+Two vols.  Macmillans.
+
+[19] CERTAIN influential expressions of opinion have attracted much
+curiosity to Amiel's Journal Intime, both in France, where the book
+has already made its mark, and in England, where Mrs. Humphry Ward's
+translation is likely to make it widely known among all serious
+lovers of good literature.  Easy, idiomatic, correct, this English
+version reads like an excellent original English work, and gives
+fresh proof that the work of translation, if it is to be done with
+effect, must be done by those who, possessing, like Mrs. Ward,
+original literary gifts, are willing to make a long act of self-
+denial or self-effacement [20] for the benefit of the public.  In
+this case, indeed, the work is not wholly one of self-effacement, for
+the accomplished translator has prefaced Amiel's Journal by an able
+and interesting essay of seventy pages on Amiel's life and
+intellectual position.  And certainly there is much in the book, thus
+effectively presented to the English reader, to attract those who
+interest themselves in the study of the finer types of human nature,
+of literary expression, of metaphysical and practical philosophy; to
+attract, above all, those interested in such philosophy, at points
+where it touches upon questions of religion, and especially at the
+present day.
+
+Henri-Frédéric Amiel was born at Geneva in 1821.  Orphaned of both
+his parents at the age of twelve, his youth was necessarily "a little
+bare and forlorn," and a deep interest in religion became fixed in
+him early.  His student days coming to an end, the years which
+followed, from 1842 to 1848--Wanderjahre, in which he visited
+Holland, Italy, Sicily, and the principal towns of Germany--seem to
+have been the happiest of his life.  In 1849 he became a Professor at
+Geneva, and there is little more to tell of him in [21] the way of
+outward events.  He published some volumes of verse; to the last
+apparently still only feeling after his true literary métier.  Those
+last seven years were a long struggle against the disease which ended
+his life, consumption, at the age of fifty-three.  The first entry in
+his Journal is in 1848.  From that date to his death, a period of
+over twenty-five years, this Journal was the real object of all the
+energies of his richly-endowed nature: and from its voluminous sheets
+his literary executors have selected the deeply interesting volumes
+now presented in English.
+
+With all its gifts and opportunities it was a melancholy life--
+melancholy with something not altogether explained by the somewhat
+pessimistic philosophy exposed in the Journal, nor by the consumptive
+tendency of Amiel's physical constitution, causing him from a very
+early date to be much preoccupied with the effort to reconcile
+himself with the prospect of death, and reinforcing the far from
+sanguine temperament of one intellectually also a poitrinaire.
+
+You might think him at first sight only an admirable specimen of a
+thoroughly well-educated [22] man, full, of course, of the modern
+spirit; stimulated and formed by the influences of the varied
+intellectual world around him; and competing, in his turn, with many
+very various types of contemporary ability.  The use of his book to
+cultivated people might lie in its affording a kind of standard by
+which they might take measure of the maturity and producible quality
+of their own thoughts on a hundred important subjects.  He will write
+a page or two, giving evidence of that accumulated power and
+attainment which, with a more strenuous temperament, might have
+sufficed for an effective volume.  Continually, in the Journal, we
+pause over things that would rank for beauties among widely differing
+models of the best French prose.  He has said some things in Pascal's
+vein not unworthy of Pascal.  He had a right to compose "Thoughts":
+they have the force in them which makes up for their unavoidable want
+of continuity.
+
+But if, as Amiel himself challenges us to do, we look below the
+surface of a very equable and even smoothly accomplished literary
+manner, we discover, in high degree of development, that perplexity
+or complexity of soul, the expression [23] of which, so it be with an
+adequate literary gift, has its legitimate, because inevitable,
+interest for the modern reader.  Senancour and Maurice de Guérin in
+one, seem to have been supplemented here by a larger experience, a
+far greater education, than either of them had attained to.  So
+multiplex is the result that minds of quite opposite type might well
+discover in these pages their own special thought or humour, happily
+expressed at last (they might think) in precisely that just shade of
+language themselves had searched for in vain.  And with a writer so
+vivid and impressive as Amiel, those varieties of tendency are apt to
+present themselves as so many contending persons.  The perplexed
+experience gets the apparent clearness, as it gets also the
+animation, of a long dialogue; only, the disputants never part
+company, and there is no real conclusion.  "This nature," he
+observes, of one of the many phases of character he has discovered in
+himself, "is, as it were, only one of the men which exist in me.  It
+is one of my departments.  It is not the whole of my territory, the
+whole of my inner kingdom"; and again, "there are ten men in me,
+according to time, place, surrounding, [24] and occasion; and, in my
+restless diversity, I am for ever escaping myself."
+
+Yet, in truth, there are but two men in Amiel--two sufficiently
+opposed personalities, which the attentive reader may define for
+himself; compare with, and try by each other--as we think, correct
+also by each other.  There is the man, in him and in these pages, who
+would be "the man of disillusion," only that he has never really been
+"the man of desires"; and who seems, therefore, to have a double
+weariness about him.  He is akin, of course, to Obermann, to René,
+even to Werther, and, on our first introduction to him, we might
+think that we had to do only with one more of the vague
+"renunciants," who in real life followed those creations of fiction,
+and who, however delicate, interesting as a study, and as it were
+picturesque on the stage of life, are themselves, after all,
+essentially passive, uncreative, and therefore necessarily not of
+first-rate importance in literature.  Taken for what it is worth, the
+expression of this mood--the culture of ennui for its own sake--is
+certainly carried to its ideal of negation by Amiel.  But the
+completer, the positive, soul, which will merely take [25] that mood
+into its service (its proper service, as we hold, is in counteraction
+to the vulgarity of purely positive natures) is also certainly in
+evidence in Amiel's "Thoughts"--that other, and far stronger person,
+in the long dialogue; the man, in short, possessed of gifts, not for
+the renunciation, but for the reception and use, of all that is
+puissant, goodly, and effective in life, and for the varied and
+adequate literary reproduction of it; who, under favourable
+circumstances, or even without them, will become critic, or poet, and
+in either case a creative force; and if he be religious (as Amiel was
+deeply religious) will make the most of "evidence," and almost
+certainly find a Church.
+
+The sort of purely poetic tendency in his mind, which made Amiel
+known in his own lifetime chiefly as a writer of verse, seems to be
+represented in these volumes by certain passages of natural
+description, always sincere, and sometimes rising to real
+distinction.  In Switzerland it is easy to be pleased with scenery.
+But the record of such pleasure becomes really worth while when, as
+happens with Amiel, we feel that there has been, and with success, an
+intellectual [26] effort to get at the secret, the precise motive,
+of the pleasure; to define feeling, in this matter.  Here is a good
+description of an effect of fog, which we commend to foreigners
+resident in London:
+
+"Fog has certainly a poetry of its own--a grace, a dreamy charm.  It
+does for the daylight what a lamp does for us at night; it turns the
+mind towards meditation; it throws the soul back on itself.  The sun,
+as it were, sheds us abroad in nature, scatters and disperses us;
+mist draws us together and concentrates us--it is cordial, homely,
+charged with feeling.  The poetry of the sun has something of the
+epic in it; that of fog and mist is elegiac and religious.  Pantheism
+is the child of light; mist engenders faith in near protectors.  When
+the great world is shut off from us, the house becomes itself a small
+universe.  Shrouded in perpetual mist, men love each other better;
+for the only reality then is the family, and, within the family, the
+heart; and the greatest thoughts come from the heart--so says the
+moralist."
+
+It is of Swiss fog, however, that he is speaking, as, in what
+follows, of Swiss frost:
+
+[27] "Three snowstorms this afternoon.  Poor blossoming plum-trees
+and peach-trees!  What a difference from six years ago, when the
+cherry-trees, adorned in their green spring dress and laden with
+their bridal flowers, smiled at my departure along the Vaudois
+fields, and the lilacs of Burgundy threw great gusts of perfume into
+my face!"  The weather is seldom talked of with so much real
+sensitiveness to it as in this:
+
+"The weather is rainy, the whole atmosphere grey; it is a time
+favourable to thought and meditation.  I have a liking for such days
+as these; they revive one's converse with oneself and make it
+possible to live the inner life: they are quiet and peaceful, like a
+song in a minor key.  We are nothing but thought, but we feel our
+life to its very centre.  Our very sensations turn to reverie.  It is
+a strange state of mind; it is like those silences in worship which
+are not the empty moments of devotion, but the full moments, and
+which are so because at such times the soul, instead of being
+polarized, dispersed, localized, in a single impression or thought,
+feels her own totality and is conscious of herself."
+
+[28] "Every landscape," he writes, "is, as it were, a state of the
+soul": and again, "At bottom there is but one subject of study; the
+forms and metamorphoses of mind: all other subjects may be reduced to
+that; all other studies bring us back to this study."  And, in truth,
+if he was occupied with the aspects of nature to such an excellent
+literary result, still, it was with nature only as a phenomenon of
+the moral order.  His interest, after all, is, consistently, that of
+the moralist (in no narrow sense) who deals, from predilection, with
+the sort of literary work which stirs men--stirs their intellect--
+through feeling; and with that literature, especially, as looked at
+through the means by which it became capable of thus commanding men.
+The powers, the culture, of the literary producer: there, is the
+centre of Amiel's curiosity.
+
+And if we take Amiel at his own word, we must suppose that but for
+causes, the chief of which were bad health and a not long life, he
+too would have produced monumental work, whose scope and character he
+would wish us to conjecture from his "Thoughts."  Such indications
+there certainly are in them.  He was [29] meant--we see it in the
+variety, the high level both of matter and style, the animation, the
+gravity, of one after another of these thoughts--on religion, on
+poetry, on politics in the highest sense; on their most abstract
+principles, and on the authors who have given them a personal colour;
+on the genius of those authors, as well as on their concrete works;
+on outlying isolated subjects, such as music, and special musical
+composers--he was meant, if people ever are meant for special lines
+of activity, for the best sort of criticism, the imaginative
+criticism; that criticism which is itself a kind of construction, or
+creation, as it penetrates, through the given literary or artistic
+product, into the mental and inner constitution of the producer,
+shaping his work.  Of such critical skill, cultivated with all the
+resources of Geneva in the nineteenth century, he has given in this
+Journal abundant proofs.  Corneille, Cherbuliez; Rousseau, Sismondi;
+Victor Hugo, and Joubert; Mozart and Wagner--all who are interested
+in these men will find a value in what Amiel has to say of them.
+Often, as for instance in his excellent criticism of Quinet, he has
+to make large exceptions [30]; limitations, skilfully effected by
+the way, in the course of a really appreciative estimate.  Still,
+through all, what we feel is that we have to do with one who
+criticises in this fearlessly equitable manner only because he is
+convinced that his subject is of a real literary importance.  A
+powerful, intellectual analysis of some well-marked subject, in such
+form as makes literature enduring, is indeed what the world might
+have looked for from him: those institutes of aesthetics, for
+instance, which might exist, after Lessing and Hegel, but which
+certainly do not exist yet.  "Construction," he says--artistic or
+literary construction--"rests upon feeling, instinct, and," alas!
+also, "upon will."  The instinct, at all events, was certainly his.
+And over and above that he had possessed himself of the art of
+expressing, in quite natural language, very difficult thoughts; those
+abstract and metaphysical conceptions especially, in which German
+mind has been rich, which are bad masters, but very useful ministers
+towards the understanding, towards an analytical survey, of all that
+the intellect has produced.
+
+But something held him back: not so much [31] a reluctancy of
+temperament, or of physical constitution (common enough cause why men
+of undeniable gifts fail of commensurate production) but a cause
+purely intellectual--the presence in him, namely, of a certain vein
+of opinion; that other, constituent but contending, person, in his
+complex nature.  "The relation of thought to action," he writes,
+"filled my mind on waking, and I found myself carried towards a
+bizarre formula, which seems to have something of the night still
+clinging about it.  Action is but coarsened thought."  That is but an
+ingenious metaphysical point, as he goes on to show.  But, including
+in "action" that literary production in which the line of his own
+proper activity lay, he followed--followed often--that fastidious
+utterance to a cynical and pessimistic conclusion.
+
+Maia, as he calls it, the empty "Absolute" of the Buddhist, the
+"Infinite," the "All," of which those German metaphysicians he loved
+only too well have had so much to say: this was for ever to give the
+go-by to all positive, finite, limited interests whatever.  The vague
+pretensions of an abstract expression acted on him with all the force
+of a prejudice.  "The ideal," he admits, [32] "poisons for me all
+imperfect possession"; and again, "The Buddhist tendency in me blunts
+the faculty of free self-government, and weakens the power of action.
+I feel a terror of action and am only at ease in the impersonal,
+disinterested, and objective line of thought."  But then, again, with
+him "action" meant chiefly literary production.  He quotes with
+approval those admirable words from Goethe, "In der Beschrankung
+zeigt sich erst der Meister"; yet still always finds himself wavering
+between "frittering myself away on the infinitely little, and longing
+after what is unknown and distant."  There is, doubtless, over and
+above the physical consumptive tendency, an instinctive turn of
+sentiment in this touching confession.  Still, what strengthened both
+tendencies was that metaphysical prejudice for the "Absolute," the
+false intellectual conscience.  "I have always avoided what attracted
+me, and turned my back upon the point where secretly I desired to
+be"; and, of course, that is not the way to a free and generous
+productivity, in literature, or in anything else; though in
+literature, with Amiel at all events, it meant the fastidiousness
+which [33] is incompatible with any but the very best sort of
+production.
+
+And as that abstract condition of Maia, to the kind and quantity of
+concrete literary production we hold to have been originally possible
+for him; so was the religion he actually attained, to what might have
+been the development of his profoundly religious spirit, had he been
+able to see that the old-fashioned Christianity is itself but the
+proper historic development of the true "essence" of the New
+Testament.  There, again, is the constitutional shrinking, through a
+kind of metaphysical prejudice, from the concrete--that fear of the
+actual--in this case, of the Church of history; to which the
+admissions, which form so large a part of these volumes, naturally
+lead.  Assenting, on probable evidence, to so many of the judgments
+of the religious sense, he failed to see the equally probable
+evidence there is for the beliefs, the peculiar direction of men's
+hopes, which complete those judgments harmoniously, and bring them
+into connection with the facts, the venerable institutions of the
+past--with the lives of the saints.  By failure, as we think, of that
+historic sense, of [34] which he could speak so well, he got no
+further in this direction than the glacial condition of rationalistic
+Geneva.  "Philosophy," he says, "can never replace religion."  Only,
+one cannot see why it might not replace a religion such as his: a
+religion, after all, much like Seneca's.
+
+"I miss something," he himself confesses, "common worship, a positive
+religion, shared with other people.  Ah!  when will the Church to
+which I belong in heart rise into being?"  To many at least of those
+who can detect the ideal through the disturbing circumstances which
+belong to all actual institutions in the world, it was already there.
+Pascal, from considerations to which Amiel was no stranger, came to
+the large hopes of the Catholic Church; Amiel stopped short at a
+faith almost hopeless; and by stopping short just there he really
+failed, as we think, of intellectual consistency, and missed that
+appeasing influence which his nature demanded as the condition of its
+full activity, as a force, an intellectual force, in the world--in
+the special business of his life.  "Welcome the unforeseen," he says
+again, by way of a counsel of perfection in the matter of culture,
+"but give to [35] your life unity, and bring the unforeseen within
+the lines of your plan."  Bring, we should add, the Great Possibility
+at least within the lines of your plan--your plan of action or
+production; of morality; especially of your conceptions of religion.
+And still, Amiel too, be it remembered (we are not afraid to repeat
+it), has said some things in Pascal's vein not unworthy of Pascal.
+
+And so we get only the Journal.  Watching in it, in the way we have
+suggested, the contention of those two men, those two minds in him,
+and observing how the one might have ascertained and corrected the
+shortcomings of the other, we certainly understand, and can
+sympathize with Amiel's despondency in the retrospect of a life which
+seemed to have been but imperfectly occupied.  But, then, how
+excellent a literary product, after all, the Journal is.  And already
+we have found that it improves also on second reading.  A book of
+"thoughts" should be a book that may be fairly dipped into, and yield
+good quotable sayings.  Here are some of its random offerings:
+
+Look twice, if what you want is a just [36] conception; look once, if
+what you want is a sense of beauty."
+
+"It is not history which teaches conscience to be honest; it is the
+conscience which educates history.  Fact is corrupting--it is we who
+correct it by the persistence of our ideal."
+
+"To do easily what is difficult for others is the mark of talent.  To
+do what is impossible for talent is the mark of genius."
+
+"Duty has the virtue of making us feel the reality of a positive
+world, while at the same time detaching us from it."
+
+"As it is impossible to be outside God, the best is consciously to
+dwell in Him."
+
+"He also (the Son of Man), He above all, is the great Misunderstood,
+the least comprehended."
+
+"The pensée writer is to the philosopher what the dilettante is to
+the artist."
+
+There are some, we know, who hold that genius cannot, in the nature
+of things, be "sterile"; that there are no "mute" Miltons, or the
+like.  Well! genius, or only a very distinguished talent, the gift
+which Amiel nursed so jealously did come into evidence.  And the [37]
+reader, we hope, sees also already how well his English translator
+has done her work.  She may justly feel, as part at least of the
+reward of a labour which must have occupied much time, so many of the
+freshest hours of mind and spirit, that she has done something to
+help her author in the achievement of his, however discouraged still
+irrepressible, desire, by giving additional currency to a book which
+the best sort of readers will recognize as an excellent and certainly
+very versatile companion, not to be forgotten.
+
+17th March 1886
+
+
+
+
+
+III.  BROWNING
+
+
+
+
+
+An Introduction to the Study of Browning.
+By Arthur Symons.  Cassells.
+
+
+[41] WHETHER it be true or not that Mr. Browning is justly chargeable
+with "obscurity"--with a difficulty of manner, that is, beyond the
+intrinsic difficulty of his matter--it is very probable that an
+Introduction to the study of his works, such as this of Mr. Symons,
+will add to the number of his readers.  Mr. Symons's opening essay on
+the general characteristics of Mr. Browning is a just and acceptable
+appreciation of his poetry as a whole, well worth reading, even at
+this late day.  We find in Mr. Symons the thoughtful and practised
+yet enthusiastic student in literature--in intellectual problems;
+always quiet and sane, praising Mr. Browning with tact, with a real
+refinement and grace; saying well many [42] things which every
+competent reader of the great poet must feel to be true; devoting to
+the subject he loves a critical gift so considerable as to make us
+wish for work from his hands of larger scope than this small volume.
+His book is, according to his intention, before all things a useful
+one.  Appreciating Mr. Browning fairly, as we think, in all his
+various efforts, his aim is to point his readers to the best, the
+indisputable, rather than to the dubious portions of his author's
+work.  Not content with his own excellent general criticism of Mr.
+Browning, he guides the reader to his works, or division of work,
+seriatim, making of each a distinct and special study, and giving a
+great deal of welcome information about the poems, the circumstances
+of their composition, and the like, with delightful quotations.
+Incidentally, his Introduction has the interest of a brief but
+effective selection from Mr. Browning's poems; and he has added an
+excellent biography.
+
+Certainly we shall not quarrel with Mr. Symons for reckoning Mr.
+Browning, among English poets, second to Shakespeare alone--"He comes
+very near the gigantic total of [43] Shakespeare."  The quantity of
+his work?  Yes! that too, in spite of a considerable unevenness, is a
+sign of genius.  "So large, indeed, appear to be his natural
+endowments that we cannot feel as if even thirty volumes would have
+come near to exhausting them."  Imaginatively, indeed, Mr. Browning
+has been a multitude of persons; only (as Shakespeare's only untried
+style was the simple one) almost never simple ones; and certainly he
+has controlled them all to profoundly interesting artistic ends by
+his own powerful personality.  The world and all its action, as a
+show of thought, that is the scope of his work.  It makes him pre-
+eminently a modern poet--a poet of the self-pondering, perfectly
+educated, modern world, which, having come to the end of all direct
+and purely external experiences, must necessarily turn for its
+entertainment to the world within:--
+
+"The men and women who live and move in that new world of his
+creation are as varied as life itself; they are kings and beggars,
+saints and lovers, great captains, poets, painters, musicians,
+priests and Popes, Jews, gipsies and dervishes, street-girls,
+princesses, dancers with the wicked [44] witchery of the daughter of
+Herodias, wives with the devotion of the wife of Brutus, joyous girls
+and malevolent grey-beards, statesmen, cavaliers, soldiers of
+humanity, tyrants and bigots, ancient sages and modern spiritualists,
+heretics, scholars, scoundrels, devotees, rabbis, persons of quality
+and men of low estate--men and women as multiform as nature or
+society has made them."
+
+The individual, the personal, the concrete, as distinguished from,
+yet revealing in its fulness, the general, the universal--that is Mr.
+Browning's chosen subject-matter: "Every man is for him an epitome of
+the universe, a centre of creation."  It is always the particular
+soul, and the particular act or episode, as the flower of the
+particular soul--the act or episode by which its quality comes to the
+test--in which he interests us.  With him it is always "a drama of
+the interior, a tragedy or comedy of the soul, to see thereby how
+each soul becomes conscious of itself."  In the Preface to the later
+edition of Sordello, Mr. Browning himself told us that to him little
+else seems worth study except the development of a soul, the
+incidents, the story, of that.  And, [45] in fact, the intellectual
+public generally agrees with him.  It is because he has ministered
+with such marvellous vigour, and variety, and fine skill to this
+interest, that he is the most modern, to modern people the most
+important, of poets.
+
+So much for Mr. Browning's matter; for his manner, we hold Mr. Symons
+right in thinking him a master of all the arts of poetry.  "These
+extraordinary little poems," says Mr. Symons of "Johannes Agricola"
+and "Porphyria's Lover"--
+
+"Reveal not only an imagination of intense fire and heat, but an
+almost finished art--a power of conceiving subtle mental complexities
+with clearness and of expressing them in a picturesque form and in
+perfect lyric language.  Each poem renders a single mood, and renders
+it completely."
+
+Well, after all, that is true of a large portion of Mr. Browning's
+work.  A curious, an erudite artist, certainly, he is to some extent
+an experimenter in rhyme or metre, often hazardous.  But in spite of
+the dramatic rudeness which is sometimes of the idiosyncrasy, the
+true and native colour of his multitudinous dramatis personae, or
+monologists, Mr. Symons is right in [46] laying emphasis on the
+grace, the finished skill, the music, native and ever ready to the
+poet himself--tender, manly, humorous, awe-stricken--when speaking in
+his own proper person.  Music herself, the analysis of the musical
+soul, in the characteristic episodes of its development is a wholly
+new range of poetic subject in which Mr. Browning is simply unique.
+Mr. Symons tells us:--
+
+"When Mr. Browning was a mere boy, it is recorded that he debated
+within himself whether he should not become a painter or a musician
+as well as a poet.  Finally, though not, I believe, for a good many
+years, he decided in the negative.  But the latent qualities of
+painter and musician had developed themselves in his poetry, and much
+of his finest and very much of his most original verse is that which
+speaks the language of painter and musician as it had never before
+been spoken.  No English poet before him has ever excelled his
+utterances on music, none has so much as rivalled his utterances on
+art.  'Abt Vogler' is the richest, deepest, fullest poem on music in
+the language.  It is not the theories of the poet, but the instincts
+of the [47] musician, that it speaks.  'Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha,'
+another special poem on music, is unparalleled for ingenuity of
+technical interpretation: 'A Toccata of Galuppi's' is as rare a
+rendering as can anywhere be found of the impressions and sensations
+caused by a musical piece; but 'Abt Vogler' is a very glimpse into
+the heaven where music is born."
+
+It is true that "when the head has to be exercised before the heart
+there is chilling of sympathy."  Of course, so intellectual a poet
+(and only the intellectual poet, as we have pointed out, can be
+adequate to modern demands) will have his difficulties.  They were a
+part of the poet's choice of vocation, and he was fully aware of
+them:--
+
+"Mr. Browning might say, as his wife said in an early preface, I
+never mistook pleasure for the final cause of poetry, nor leisure for
+the hour of the poet--as indeed he has himself said, to much the same
+effect, in a letter printed many years ago: I never pretended to
+offer such literature as should be a substitute for a cigar or a game
+at dominoes to an idle man."
+
+"Moreover, while a writer who deals with [48] easy themes has no
+excuse if he is not pellucid to a glance, one who employs his
+intellect and imagination on high and hard questions has a right to
+demand a corresponding closeness of attention, and a right to say
+with Bishop Butler, in answer to a similar complaint: 'It must be
+acknowledged that some of the following discourses are very abstruse
+and difficult, or, if you please, obscure; but I must take leave to
+add that those alone are judges whether or no, and how far this is a
+fault, who are judges whether or no, and how far it might have been
+avoided--those only who will be at the trouble to understand what is
+here said, and to see how far the things here insisted upon, and not
+other things, might have been put in a plainer manner.'"
+
+In Mr. Symons's opinion Pippa Passes is Mr. Browning's most perfect
+piece of work, for pregnancy of intellect, combined with faultless
+expression in a perfectly novel yet symmetrical outline: and he is
+very likely right.  He is certainly right in thinking Mas they
+formerly stood, Mr. Browning's most delightful volumes.  It is only
+to be regretted [49] that in the later collected edition of the works
+those two magical old volumes are broken up and scattered under other
+headings.  We think also that Mr. Symons in his high praise does no
+more than justice to The Ring and the Book.  The Ring and the Book is
+at once the largest and the greatest of Mr. Browning's works, the
+culmination of his dramatic method, and the turning-point more
+decisively than Dramatis Personae of his style.  Yet just here he
+rightly marks a change in Mr. Browning's manner:--
+
+"Not merely the manner of presentment, the substance, and also the
+style and versification have undergone a change.  I might point to
+the profound intellectual depth of certain pieces as its
+characteristic, or, equally, to the traces here and there of an
+apparent carelessness of workmanship; or, yet again, to the new and
+very marked partiality for scenes and situations of English and
+modern rather than mediæval and foreign life."
+
+Noble as much of Mr. Browning's later work is, full of intellect,
+alive with excellent passages (in the first volume of the Dramatic
+Idyls [50] perhaps more powerful than in any earlier work);
+notwithstanding all that, we think the change here indicated matter
+of regret.  After all, we have to conjure up ideal poets for
+ourselves out of those who stand in or behind the range of volumes on
+our book-shelves; and our ideal Browning would have for his entire
+structural type those two volumes of Men and Women with Pippa Passes.
+
+Certainly, it is a delightful world to which Mr. Browning has given
+us the key, and those volumes a delightful gift to our age-record of
+so much that is richest in the world of things, and men, and their
+works--all so much the richer by the great intellect, the great
+imagination, which has made the record, transmuted them into
+imperishable things of art:--
+
+"'With souls should souls have place'--this, with Mr. Browning, is
+something more than a mere poetical conceit.  It is the condensed
+expression of an experience, a philosophy, and an art.  Like the
+lovers of his lyric, Mr. Browning has renounced the selfish
+serenities of wild-wood and dream-palace; he has fared up and down
+among men, listening to the music of humanity, [51] observing the
+acts of men, and he has sung what he has heard, and he has painted
+what he has seen.  Will the work live? we ask; and we can answer only
+in his own words--
+
+It lives,
+If precious be the soul of man to man."
+
+9th November 1887
+
+
+
+
+
+IV.  "ROBERT ELSMERE"
+
+
+
+
+[55] THOSE who, in this bustling age, turn to fiction not merely for
+a little passing amusement, but for profit, for the higher sort of
+pleasure, will do well, we think (after a conscientious perusal on
+our own part) to bestow careful reading on Robert Elsmere.  A chef
+d'oeuvre of that kind of quiet evolution of character through
+circumstance, introduced into English literature by Miss Austen, and
+carried to perfection in France by George Sand (who is more to the
+point, because, like Mrs. Ward, she was not afraid to challenge
+novel-readers to an interest in religious questions), it abounds in
+sympathy with people as we find them, in aspiration towards something
+better--towards a certain ideal--in a refreshing sense of second
+thoughts everywhere.  The author clearly has developed a remarkable
+natural aptitude for literature by liberal reading and most patient
+care [56] in composition--composition in that narrower sense which is
+concerned with the building of a good sentence; as also in that wider
+sense, which ensures, in a work like this, with so many joints, so
+many currents of interest, a final unity of impression an the part of
+the reader, and easy transition by him from one to the other.  Well-
+used to works of fiction which tell all they have to tell in one thin
+volume, we have read Mrs. Ward's three volumes with unflagging
+readiness.
+
+For, in truth, that quiet method of evolution, which she pursues
+undismayed to the end, requires a certain lengthiness; and the
+reader's reward will be in a secure sense that he has been in
+intercourse with no mere flighty remnants, but with typical forms, of
+character, firmly and fully conceived.  We are persuaded that the
+author might have written a novel which should have been all shrewd
+impressions of society, or all humorous impressions of country life,
+or all quiet fun and genial caricature.  Actually she has chosen to
+combine something of each of these with a very sincerely felt
+religious interest; and who will deny that to trace the influence of
+religion upon human character is one of the [57] legitimate functions
+of the novel?  In truth, the modern "novel of character" needs some
+such interest, to lift it sufficiently above the humdrum of life; as
+men's horizons are enlarged by religion, of whatever type it may be--
+and we may say at once that the religious type which is dear to Mrs.
+Ward, though avowedly "broad," is not really the broadest.  Having
+conceived her work thus, she has brought a rare instinct for
+probability and nature to the difficult task of combining this
+religious motive and all the learned thought it involves, with a very
+genuine interest in many  varieties of average mundane life.
+
+We should say that the author's special ethical gift lay in a
+delicately intuitive sympathy, not, perhaps, with all phases of
+character, but certainly with the very varied class of persons
+represented in these volumes.  It may be congruous with this,
+perhaps, that her success should be more assured in dealing with the
+characters of women than with those of men.  The men who pass before
+us in her pages, though real and tangible and effective enough, seem,
+nevertheless, from time to time to reveal their joinings.  They are
+composite of many different men we seem to have [58] known, and fancy
+we could detach again from the ensemble and from each other.  And
+their goodness, when they are good, is--well! a little conventional;
+the kind of goodness that men themselves discount rather largely in
+their estimates of each other.  Robert himself is certainly worth
+knowing--a really attractive union of manliness and saintliness, of
+shrewd sense and unworldly aims, and withal with that kindness and
+pity the absence of which so often abates the actual value of those
+other gifts.  Mrs. Ward's literary power is sometimes seen at its
+best (it is a proof of her high cultivation of this power that so it
+should be) in the analysis of minor characters, both male and female.
+Richard Leyburn, deceased before the story begins, but warm in the
+memory of the few who had known him, above all of his great-souled
+daughter Catherine, strikes us, with his religious mysticism, as
+being in this way one of the best things in the book:--
+
+"Poor Richard Leyburn!  Yet where had the defeat lain?
+
+"'Was he happy in his school life?'  Robert asked gently.  'Was
+teaching what he liked?'
+
+[59] "'Oh! yes, only--' and then added hurriedly, as though drawn on
+in spite of herself by the grave sympathy of his look, 'I never knew
+anybody so good who thought himself of so little account.  He always
+believed that he had missed everything, wasted everything, and that
+anybody else would have made infinitely more out of his life.  He vas
+always blaming, scourging himself.  And all the time he was the
+noblest, purest, most devoted--'
+
+"She stopped.  Her voice had passed beyond her control.  Elsmere was
+startled by the feeling she showed.  Evidently he had touched one of
+the few sore places in this pure heart.  It was as though her memory
+of her father had in it elements of almost intolerable pathos, as
+though the child's brooding love and loyalty were in perpetual
+protest even now after this lapse of years against the verdict which
+an over-scrupulous, despondent soul had pronounced upon itself.  Did
+she feel that he had gone uncomforted out of life--even by her--even
+by religion?  Was that the sting?"
+
+A little later she gives the record of his last hours:--
+
+[60] "'Catherine!  Life is harder, the narrower way narrower than
+ever.  I die--and memory caught still the piteous long-drawn breath
+by which the voice was broken--'in much--much perplexity about many
+things.  You have a clear soul, an iron will.  Strengthen the others.
+Bring them safe to the day of account.'"
+
+And then the smaller--some of them, ethically, very small--women;
+Lady Wynnstay, Mrs. Fleming, Mrs. Thornburgh; above all, Robert's
+delightful Irish mother, and Mrs. Darcy; how excellent they are!
+Mrs. Darcy we seem to have known, yet cannot have enough of, rejoiced
+to catch sight of her capital letter on the page, as we read on.  In
+truth, if a high and ideal purpose, really learned in the school of
+Wordsworth and among the Westmorland hills which Mrs. Ward describes
+so sympathetically, with fitting dignity and truth of style, has
+accompanied the author throughout; no less plain, perhaps more
+pleasing to some readers, is the quiet humour which never fails her,
+and tests, while it relieves, the sincerity of her more serious
+thinking:--
+
+"At last Mrs. Darcy fluttered off, only, however, to come hurrying
+back with little, short, [61] scudding steps, to implore them all to
+come to tea with her as soon as possible in the garden that was her
+special hobby, and in her last new summer-house.
+
+"'I build two or three every summer,' she said; 'now there are
+twenty-one!  Roger laughs at me,' and there was a momentary
+bitterness in the little eerie face; 'but how can one live without
+hobbies?  That's one--then I've two more.  My album--oh, you will all
+write in my album, won't you?  When I was young--when I was Maid of
+Honour'--and she drew herself up slightly--'everybody had albums.
+Even the dear Queen herself!  I remember how she made M. Guizot write
+in it; something quite stupid, after all.  Those hobbies--the garden
+and the album--are quite harmless, aren't they?  They hurt nobody, do
+they?'  Her voice dropped a little, with a pathetic expostulating
+intonation in it, as of one accustomed to be rebuked."
+
+Mrs. Ward's women, as we have said, are more organic, sympathetic,
+and really creative, than her men, and make their vitality evident by
+becoming, quite naturally, the centres of very [62] life-like and
+dramatic groups of people, family or social; while her men are the
+very genii of isolation and division.  It is depressing to see so
+really noble a character as Catherine soured, as we feel, and
+lowered, as time goes on, from the happy resignation of the first
+volume (in which solemn, beautiful, and entire, and so very real, she
+is like a poem of Wordsworth) down to the mere passivity of the third
+volume, and the closing scene of Robert Elsmere's days, very
+exquisitely as this episode of unbelieving yet saintly biography has
+been conceived and executed.  Catherine certainly, for one, has no
+profit in the development of Robert's improved gospel.  The "stray
+sheep," we think, has by no means always the best of the argument,
+and her story is really a sadder, more testing one than his.  Though
+both alike, we admit it cordially, have a genuine sense of the
+eternal moral charm of "renunciation," something even of the thirst
+for martyrdom, for those wonderful, inaccessible, cold heights of the
+Imitation, eternal also in their aesthetic charm.
+
+These characters and situations, pleasant or profoundly interesting,
+which it is good to have [63] come across, are worked out, not in
+rapid sketches, nor by hazardous epigram, but more securely by
+patient analysis; and though we have said that Mrs. Ward is most
+successful in female portraiture, her own mind and culture have an
+unmistakable virility and grasp and scientific firmness.  This
+indispensable intellectual process, which will be relished by
+admirers of George Eliot, is relieved constantly by the sense of a
+charming landscape background, for the most part English.  Mrs. Ward
+has been a true disciple in the school of Wordsworth, and really
+undergone its influence.  Her Westmorland scenery is more than a mere
+background; its spiritual and, as it were, personal hold on persons,
+as understood by the great poet of the Lakes, is seen actually at
+work, in the formation, in the refining, of character.  It has been a
+stormy day:--
+
+"Before him the great hollow of High Fell was just coming out from
+the white mists surging round it.  A shaft of sunlight lay across its
+upper end, and he caught a marvellous apparition of a sunlit valley
+hung in air, a pale strip of blue above it, a white thread of stream
+wavering [64] through it, and all around it and below it the rolling
+rain-clouds."
+
+There is surely something of "natural magic" in that!  The wilder
+capacity of the mountains is brought out especially in a weird story
+of a haunted girl, an episode well illustrating the writer's more
+imaginative psychological power; for, in spite of its quiet general
+tenour, the book has its adroitly managed elements of sensation--
+witness the ghost, in which the average human susceptibility to
+supernatural terrors takes revenge on the sceptical Mr. Wendover, and
+the love-scene with Madame de Netteville, which, like those other
+exciting passages, really furthers the development of the proper
+ethical interests of the book.  The Oxford episodes strike us as
+being not the author's strongest work, as being comparatively
+conventional, coming, as they do, in a book whose predominant note is
+reality.  Yet her sympathetic command over, her power of evoking, the
+genius of places, is clearly shown in the touches by which she brings
+out the so well-known grey and green of college and garden--touches
+which bring the real Oxford to the mind's eye better than any
+elaborate description [65] --for the beauty of the place itself
+resides also in delicate touches.  The book passes indeed,
+successively, through distinct, broadly conceived phases of scenery,
+which, becoming veritable parts of its texture, take hold on the
+reader, as if in an actual sojourn in the places described.  Surrey--
+its genuine though almost suburban wildness, with the vicarage and
+the wonderful abode, above all, the ancient library of Mr. Wendover,
+all is admirably done, the landscape naturally counting for a good
+deal in the development of the profoundly meditative, country-loving
+souls of Mrs. Ward's favourite characters.
+
+Well!  Mrs. Ward has chosen to use all these varied gifts and
+accomplishments for a certain purpose.  Briefly, Robert Elsmere, a
+priest of the Anglican Church, marries a very religious woman; there
+is the perfection of "mutual love"; at length he has doubts about
+"historic Christianity"; he gives up his orders; carries his
+learning, his fine intellect, his goodness, nay, his saintliness,
+into a kind of Unitarianism; the wife becomes more intolerant than
+ever; there is a long and faithful effort on both sides, eventually
+successful, on the part of these mentally [66] divided people, to
+hold together; ending with the hero's death, the genuine piety and
+resignation of which is the crowning touch in the author's able,
+learned, and thoroughly sincere apology for Robert Elsmere's
+position.
+
+For good or evil, the sort of doubts which troubled Robert Elsmere
+are no novelty in literature, and we think the main issue of the
+"religious question" is not precisely where Mrs. Ward supposes--that
+it has advanced, in more senses than one, beyond the point raised by
+Renan's Vie de Jésus.  Of course, a man such as Robert Elsmere came
+to be ought not to be a clergyman of the Anglican Church.  The priest
+is still, and will, we think, remain, one of the necessary types of
+humanity; and he is untrue to his type, unless, with whatever
+inevitable doubts in this doubting age, he feels, on the whole, the
+preponderance in it of those influences which make for faith.  It is
+his triumph to achieve as much faith as possible in an age of
+negation.  Doubtless, it is part of the ideal of the Anglican Church
+that, under certain safeguards, it should find room for
+latitudinarians even among its clergy.  Still, with these, as [67]
+with all other genuine priests, it is the positive not the negative
+result that justifies the position.  We have little patience with
+those liberal clergy who dwell on nothing else than the difficulties
+of faith and the propriety of concession to the opposite force.  Yes!
+Robert Elsmere was certainly right in ceasing to be a clergyman.  But
+it strikes us as a blot on his philosophical pretensions that he
+should have been both so late in perceiving the difficulty, and then
+so sudden and trenchant in dealing with so great and complex a
+question.  Had he possessed a perfectly philosophic or scientific
+temper he would have hesitated.  This is not the place to discuss in
+detail the theological position very ably and seriously argued by
+Mrs. Ward.  All we can say is that, one by one, Elsmere's objections
+may be met by considerations of the same genus, and not less equal
+weight, relatively to a world so obscure, in its origin and issues,
+as that in which we live.
+
+Robert Elsmere was a type of a large class of minds which cannot be
+sure that the sacred story is true.  It is philosophical, doubtless,
+and a duty to the intellect to recognize our doubts, [68] to locate
+them, perhaps to give them practical effect.  It may be also a moral
+duty to do this.  But then there is also a large class of minds which
+cannot be sure it is false--minds of very various degrees of
+conscientiousness and intellectual power, up to the highest.  They
+will think those who are quite sure it is false unphilosophical
+through lack of doubt.  For their part, they make allowance in their
+scheme of life for a great possibility, and with some of them that
+bare concession of possibility (the subject of it being what it is)
+becomes the most important fact in the world.
+
+The recognition of it straightway opens wide the door to hope and
+love; and such persons are, as we fancy they always will be, the
+nucleus of a Church.  Their particular phase of doubt, of philosophic
+uncertainty, has been the secret of millions of good Christians,
+multitudes of worthy priests.  They knit themselves to believers, in
+various degrees, of all ages.  As against the purely negative action
+of the scientific spirit, the high-pitched Grey, the theistic
+Elsmere, the "ritualistic priest," the quaint Methodist Fleming, both
+so admirably sketched, present [69] perhaps no unconquerable
+differences.  The question of the day is not between one and another
+of these, but in another sort of opposition, well defined by Mrs.
+Ward herself, between--
+
+"Two estimates of life--the estimate which is the offspring of the
+scientific spirit, and which is for ever making the visible world
+fairer and more desirable in mortal eyes; and the estimate of Saint
+Augustine."
+
+To us, the belief in God, in goodness at all, in the story of
+Bethlehem, does not rest on evidence so diverse in character and
+force as Mrs. Ward supposes.  At his death Elsmere has started what
+to us would be a most unattractive place of worship, where he
+preaches an admirable sermon on the purely human aspect of the life
+of Christ.  But we think there would be very few such sermons in the
+new church or chapel, for the interest of that life could hardly be
+very varied, when all such sayings as that "though He was rich, for
+our sakes He became poor" have ceased to be applicable to it.  It is
+the infinite nature of Christ which has led to such diversities of
+genius in preaching as St. Francis, and Taylor, and Wesley.
+
+[70] And after all we fear we have been unjust to Mrs. Ward's work.
+If so, we should read once more, and advise our readers to read, the
+profoundly thought and delicately felt chapter--chapter forty-three
+in her third volume--in which she describes the final spiritual
+reunion, on a basis of honestly diverse opinion, of the husband and
+wife.  Her view, we think, could hardly have been presented more
+attractively.  For ourselves we can only thank her for pleasure and
+profit in the reading of her book, which has refreshed actually the
+first and deepest springs of feeling, while it has charmed the
+literary sense.
+
+28th March 1888
+
+
+
+
+
+V.  THEIR MAJESTIES' SERVANTS
+
+
+
+
+Annals of the English Stage, from Thomas Betterton to Edmund Kean.
+By Dr. Doran, F.S.A.  Edited and revised by Robert W. Lowe.  John C.
+Nimmo.
+
+[73] THOSE who care for the history of the drama as a branch of
+literature, or for the history of that general development of human
+manners of which the stage has been always an element and a very
+lively measure or index, will be grateful to Mr. Lowe for this
+revised and charmingly illustrated edition of Dr. Doran's pleasant
+old book.  Three hundred years and more of a singularly varied and
+vivacious sort of history!--it was a bold thing to undertake; and Dr.
+Doran did his work well--did it with adequate "love."  These Annals
+of the English Stage, from Thomas Betterton to Edmund [74] Kean, are
+full of the colours of life in their most emphatic and motley
+contrasts, as is natural in proportion as the stage itself
+concentrates and artificially intensifies the character and
+conditions of ordinary life.  The long story of "Their Majesties'
+Servants," treated thus, becomes from age to age an agreeable
+addition to those personal memoirs--Evelyn's, and the like--which
+bring the influence and charm of a visible countenance to the dry
+tenour of ordinary history, and the critic's work upon it naturally
+becomes, in the first place, a mere gathering of some of the flowers
+which lie so abundantly scattered here and there.
+
+A history of the English stage must necessarily be in part a history
+of one of the most delightful of subjects--old London, of which from
+time to time we catch extraordinary glimpses in Dr. Doran's pages.
+From 1682 to 1695, as if the Restoration had not come, there was but
+one theatre in London.  In Charles I.'s time Shoreditch was the
+dramatic quarter of London par excellence.--
+
+"The popular taste was not only there directed towards the stage, but
+it was a district [75] wherein many actors dwelt, and consequently
+died.  The baptismal register of St.  Leonard's, Shoreditch, contains
+Christian names which appear to have been chosen with reference to
+the heroines of Shakespeare; and the record of burials bears the name
+of many an old actor of mark whose remains now lie within the
+churchyard."
+
+Earlier and later, the Surrey side of the Thames was the favourite
+locality for play-houses.  The Globe was there, and the Bear-garden,
+represented in Mr. Lowe's luxurious new edition by delightful
+woodcuts.  For this new edition adds to the original merits of the
+work the very substantial charm of abundant illustrations, first-rate
+in subject and execution, and of three kinds--copper-plate likenesses
+of actors and other personages connected with theatrical history; a
+series of delicate, picturesque, highly detailed woodcuts of
+theatrical topography, chiefly the little old theatres; and, by way
+of tail-pieces to the chapters, a second series of woodcuts of a
+vigour and reality of information, within very limited compass, which
+make one think of Callot and the German [76] "little masters,"
+depicting Garrick and other famous actors in their favourite scenes.
+
+In the vignettes of the Bear-garden and the Swan Theatre, for
+instance, the artist has managed to throw over his minute plate a
+wonderful air of pleasantness, a light which, though very delicate,
+is very theatrical.  The river and its tiny craft, the little gabled
+houses of the neighbourhood, with a garden or two dropped in, tell
+delightfully in the general effect.  They are worthy to rank with
+Cruikshank's illustrations of Jack Sheppard and The Tower of London,
+as mementoes of the little old smokeless London before the century of
+Johnson, though that, too, as Dr. Doran bears witness, knew what fogs
+could be.  Then there is the Fortune Theatre near Cripplegate, and,
+most charming of all, two views--street and river fronts--the Duke's
+Theatre, Dorset Garden, in Fleet Street, designed by Wren, decorated
+by Gibbons--graceful, naïve, dainty, like the work of a very refined
+Palladio, working minutely, perhaps more delicately than at Vicenza,
+in the already crowded city on the Thames side.
+
+[77] The portraits of actors and other theatrical celebrities range
+from Elizabeth, from the melodramatic costumes and faces of the
+contemporaries of Shakespeare, to the conventional costumes, the
+rotund expression, of the age of the Georges, masking a power of
+imaginative impersonation probably unknown in Shakespeare's day.
+Edward Burbage, like Shakespeare's own portrait, is, we venture to
+think, a trifle stolid.  Field--Nathaniel Field, author of The Fatal
+Dowry, and an actor of reputation--in his singular costume, and with
+a face of perhaps not quite reassuring subtlety, might pass for the
+original of those Italian, or Italianized, voluptuaries in sin which
+pleased the fancy of Shakespeare's age.  Mixed up with many striking,
+thoroughly dramatic physiognomies, it must be confessed that some of
+these portraits scarcely help at all to explain the power of the
+players to whom they belonged.  That, perhaps, is what we might
+naturally expect; the more, in proportion as the dramatic art is a
+matter in which many very subtle and indirect channels to men's
+sympathy are called into play.  Edward Alleyn, from the portrait
+preserved at [78] his noble foundation at Dulwich, like a fine
+Holbein, figures, in blent strength and delicacy, as a genial, or
+perhaps jovial, soul, finding time for sentiment,--Prynne (included,
+we suppose, in this company, like the skull at the feast) as a
+likable if somewhat melancholic young man; while Garrick and his wife
+playing cards, after Zoffany, present a pair of just very nice young
+people.  On the other hand, the tail-pieces, chiefly devoted to
+Garrick, prove what a wonderful natural variety there was in
+Garrick's soul, and are well worth comparative study.  Noticeable
+again, among the whole-plate portraits, is the thoroughly reassuring
+countenance of Steele, the singularly fine heads of John, Charles,
+and Fanny Kemble, while the certainly plain, pinched countenance of
+William Davenant reminds one of Charles Kean, and might well have
+lighted up, as did his, when the soul came into it, into power and
+charm, as the speaking eyes assure us even in its repose.
+
+The Renaissance inherited the old foolish prejudice of Roman times,
+when, although the writers of plays were the intimate friends of
+emperors, the actors were thought infamous. [79] Still, on the whole,
+actors fared better in England than in Romanist France, where Molière
+was buried with less ceremony than a favourite dog.  Very different
+was the treatment of the eminent Mrs. Oldfield, who died in 1730:--
+
+"Poor 'Narcissa' after death (says Walpole) was attired in a Holland
+nightdress, with tucker and double ruffles of Brunswick lace, of
+which latter material she also wore a headdress, and a pair of new
+kid gloves.  In this dress the deceased actress received such honour
+as actress never received before, nor has ever received since.  The
+lady lay in state in the Jerusalem Chamber.  Had she been really a
+queen the public could not have thronged more eagerly to the
+spectacle; and after the lying in state there was a funeral of as
+much ceremony as has been observed at the obsequies of many a queen.
+There were anthems and prayers and a sermon; and Dr. Parker, who
+officiated, remarked, when all was over, to a few particular friends,
+and with some equivocation, as it seems to me, that he  'buried her
+very willingly, and with much satisfaction.'"
+
+Yet even in England players had need of [80] powerful protectors.
+"Wit," said Chesterfield, opposing an unjust licensing Act, "Wit, my
+lords! is the property of those who have it, and too often the only
+property they have to depend on."  Wit, indeed, with the other gifts
+that make good company, has largely gone with theatrical talents, too
+often little to the benefit of the gifted persons.  Theatrical
+society, rather than the theatre, has made the lives of actors as we
+see them in these volumes, in many cases so tragic, even sordidly
+tragic.
+
+If misery and madness abound in stage life, so also does an
+indomitable cheerfulness, always at least a cheerful countenance.
+Dr. Doran's book abounds, as might be expected, with admirable
+impromptus and the like; one might collect a large posy of them.
+Foote, seeing a sweep on a blood-horse, remarked, "There goes
+Warburton on Shakespeare!"  When he heard that the Rockingham Cabinet
+was fatigued to death and at its wits' end, he exclaimed that it
+could not have been the length of the journey which had tired it.
+Again, when Lord Carmarthen, at a party, told him his handkerchief
+was hanging from his pocket, Foote replaced [81] it with a "Thank
+you, my lord; you know the company better than I."  Jevon, a century
+earlier, was in the habit of taking great liberties with authors and
+audience.  He made Settle half mad and the house ecstatic when
+having, as Lycurgus, Prince of China, to "fall on his sword," he
+placed it flat on the stage, and, falling over it, "died," according
+to the direction of the acting copy.  Quaint enough, but certainly no
+instance of anybody's wit, is the account of how a French translation
+of a play of Vanbrugh--not architect of Blenheim only, but
+accomplished in many other ways--appeared at the Odéon, in 1862, with
+all fitting raptures, as a posthumous work of Voltaire recently
+discovered.  The Voltairean wit vas found as "delightful in this as
+in the last century."
+
+Of Shakespeare on the stage Dr. Doran has a hundred curious things to
+note:--that Richard the Third, for instance, who has retained a so
+unflattering possession of the stage, was its "first practically
+useful patron."  We see Queen Elizabeth full of misgiving at a
+difficult time at the popularity of Richard the Second:--"The
+deposition and death of King Richard the [82] Second."  "Tongues
+whisper to the Queen that this play is part of a great plot to teach
+her subjects how to murder kings."  It is perhaps not generally known
+that Charles Shakespeare, William's brother, survived till the
+Restoration.
+
+Oldys says, à propos of the restoration of the stage at that time:--
+
+"The actors were greedily inquisitive into every little circumstance,
+more especially in Shakespeare's dramatic character, which his
+brother could relate of him.  But he, it seems, was so stricken in
+years, and possibly his memory so weakened by infirmities, that he
+could give them but little light into their inquiries; and all that
+could be recollected from him of his brother Will in that station was
+the faint, general, and almost lost ideas he had of having once seen
+him act a part in one of his own comedies, wherein being present to
+personate a decrepit old man, he wore a long beard, and appeared so
+weak and drooping and unable to walk, that he was forced to be
+supported and carried by another person to a table, at which he was
+seated among some company who were eating, and one of them sang a
+song."
+
+[83] This description applies to old Adam in As You Like It.  Many
+are the evidences that Shakespeare's reputation had from time to time
+a struggle to maintain itself.  James Howard, in Pepys's day--
+
+"Belonged to the faction which affected to believe that there was no
+popular love for Shakespeare, to render whom palatable he arranged
+Romeo and Juliet for the stage, with a double dénouement--one
+serious, the other hilarious.  If your heart were too sensitive to
+bear the deaths of the loving pair, you had only to go on the
+succeeding afternoon to see them wedded, and set upon the way of a
+well-assured domestic felicity."
+
+In 1678 Rymer asserted (was it undesignedly a true testimony to the
+acting of his time?) that Shakespeare had depicted Brutus and Cassius
+as "Jack Puddins."
+
+Here, as in many another detail, we are reminded, of course, of the
+difference between our own and past times in mimic as in real life.
+For Prynne one of the great horrors of the stage was the introduction
+of actresses from France by Henrietta Maria, to take the place of
+young [84] male actors of whom Dr. Doran has some interesting
+notices.  Who the lady was who first trod the stage as a professional
+actress is not known, but her part was Desdemona.  And yet it was
+long after that--
+
+"Edward Kynaston died (in 1712).  He lies buried in the churchyard of
+St. Paul's, Covent Garden.  If not the greatest actor of his day,
+Kynaston was the greatest of the 'boy-actresses.'  So exalted was his
+reputation 'that,' says Downes, 'it has since been disputable among
+the judicious, whether any woman that succeeded him so sensibly
+touched the audience as he.'"
+
+In Charles II.'s time it was a custom to return the price of
+admission to all persons who left the theatre before the close of the
+first act.  Consequently, many shabby persons were wont to force
+their way in without paying, on the plea that they did not intend to
+remain beyond the time limited.  Hence much noisy contention, to the
+great discomfort even of Royalty.  The brawling, drinking habits of
+the time were even more discomforting.  An angry word, passed one
+April evening of 1682 between the son of Sir Edward Dering and a hot-
+blooded young [85] Welshman, led to recrimination and sword-drawing.
+The two young fellows not having elbow-room in the pit, clambered on
+to the stage, and fought there, to the greater comfort of the
+audience, and with a more excited fury on the part of the combatants.
+The mingling of the public with the players was a practice which so
+annoyed the haughty French actor, Baron, that to suggest to the
+audience the absurdity of it, he would turn his back on them for a
+whole act, and play to the audience on the stage.  Sometimes the
+noise was so loud that an actor's voice would scarcely be heard.  It
+was about 1710 that the word encore was introduced at the operatic
+performances in the Haymarket, and very much objected to by plain-
+going Englishmen.  It was also the custom of some who desired the
+repetition of a song to cry Altra volta!  Altra volta!
+
+Even indirectly the history of the stage illustrates life, and
+affords many unexpected lights on historical characters.  Oliver
+Cromwell, though he despised the stage, could condescend to laugh at,
+and with, men of less dignity than actors.  Buffoonery was not
+entirely expelled [86] from his otherwise grave court.  Oxford and
+Drury Lane itself dispute the dignity of giving birth to Nell Gwynne
+with Hereford, where a mean house is still pointed out as the first
+home of this mother of a line of dukes, whose great-grandson was to
+occupy the neighbouring palace as Bishop of Hereford for forty years.
+At her burial in St.  Martin's-in-the-Fields, Archbishop Tenison
+preached the sermon.  When this was subsequently made the ground of
+exposing him to the reproof of Queen Mary, she remarked that the good
+doctor, no doubt, had said nothing but what the facts authorized.
+
+"Who should act genteel comedy perfectly," asks Walpole, "but people
+of fashion, that have sense?"  And, in truth, the seventeenth century
+gave many ladies to the stage, Mrs. Barry being the most famous of
+them.  Like many eminent actors, she was famous for the way in which
+she would utter one single expression in a play.  Dr. Doran gives
+some curious instances from later actors.  "What mean my grieving
+subjects?" uttered in the character of Queen Elizabeth, was invested
+by her with such emphatic grace and dignity as to call up murmurs of
+approbation [87] which swelled into thunders of applause.  Her noble
+head is here engraved after Kneller, like the head of a magnificent
+visionary man.
+
+Should we really care for the greatest actors of the past could we
+have them before us?  Should we find them too different from our
+accent of thought, of feeling, of speech, in a thousand minute
+particulars which are of the essence of all three?  Dr. Doran's long
+and interesting records of the triumphs of Garrick, and other less
+familiar, but in their day hardly less astonishing, players, do not
+relieve one of the doubt.  Garrick himself, as sometimes happens with
+people who have been the subject of much anecdote and other
+conversation, here as elsewhere, bears no very distinct figure.  One
+hardly sees the wood for the trees.  On the other hand, the account
+of Betterton, "perhaps the greatest of English actors," is
+delightfully fresh.  That intimate friend of Dryden, Tillatson, Pope,
+who executed a copy of the actor's portrait by Kneller which is still
+extant, was worthy of their friendship; his career brings out the
+best elements in stage life.  The stage in these volumes presents
+itself indeed not merely [88] as a mirror of life, but as an
+illustration of the utmost intensity of life, in the fortunes and
+characters of the players.  Ups and downs, generosity, dark fates,
+the most delicate goodness, have nowhere been more prominent than in
+the private existence of those devoted to the public mimicry of men
+and women.  Contact with the stage, almost throughout its history,
+presents itself as a kind of touchstone, to bring out the bizarrerie,
+the theatrical tricks and contrasts, of the actual world.
+
+27th June 1888
+
+
+
+
+
+VI.  WORDSWORTH
+
+
+
+
+The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth.  With an
+Introduction by John Morley.  Macmillans.
+
+The Recluse.  By William Wordsworth.  Macmillans.
+
+Selections from Wordsworth.  By William Knight and other Members of
+the Wordsworth Society.  With Preface and Notes.  Kegan Paul.
+
+[91] THE appearance, so close to each other, of Professor Knight's
+careful and elaborately annotated Selections from William Wordsworth,
+of Messrs. Macmillan's collected edition of the poet's works, with the
+first book of The Recluse, now published for the first time, and of
+an excellent introductory essay by Mr. John Morley, forms a welcome
+proof that the study of the [92] most philosophic of English poets is
+increasing among us.  Surely nothing could be better, hardly anything
+more directly fitted than careful reading of Wordsworth, to counter
+the faults and offences of our busy generation, in regard both to
+thought and taste, and to remind people, amid the enormous expansion,
+at the present time, of all that is material and mechanical in life,
+of the essential value, the permanent ends, of life itself.  In the
+collected edition the poems are printed with the dates, so far as can
+be ascertained, in the order of their composition--an arrangement
+which has indisputable recommendations for the student of
+Wordsworth's genius; though the former method of distributing his
+work into large groups of subject had its value, as throwing light
+upon his poetic motives, and more especially as coming from himself.
+
+In his introductory essay Mr. Morley has dwelt strongly on the
+circumstance of Wordsworth's remarkable personal happiness, as having
+had much to do with the physiognomy of his poetic creation--a calm,
+irresistible, well-being--almost mystic in character, and yet
+doubtless [93] connected with physical conditions.  Long ago De
+Quincey noted it as a strongly determinant fact in Wordsworth's
+literary career, pointing, at the same time, to his remarkable good
+luck also, on the material side of life.  The poet's own flawless
+temperament, his fine mountain atmosphere of mind (so to express it),
+had no doubt a good deal to do with that.  What a store of good
+fortune, what a goodly contribution to happiness, in the very best
+sense of that term, is really involved in a cheerful, grateful,
+physical temperament; especially, in the case of a poet--a great
+poet--who will, of course, have to face the appropriate trials of a
+great poet.
+
+Coleridge and other English critics at the beginning of the present
+century had a great deal to say concerning a psychological
+distinction of much importance (as it appeared to them) between the
+fancy and the imagination.  Stripped of a great deal of somewhat
+obscure metaphysical theory, this distinction reduced itself to the
+certainly vital one, with which all true criticism more or less
+directly has to do, between the lower and higher degrees of intensity
+in the [94] poet's conception of his subject, and his concentration
+of himself upon his work.  It was Wordsworth who made most of this
+distinction, assuming it as the basis for the final classification
+(abandoned, as we said, in the new edition) of his poetical writings.
+And nowhere is the distinction more realizable than in Wordsworth's
+own work.  For though what may be called professed Wordsworthians,
+including Matthew Arnold, found a value in all that remains of him--
+could read anything he wrote, "even the 'Thanksgiving Ode,'--
+everything, I think, except 'Vaudracour and Julia,'"--yet still the
+decisiveness of such selections as those made by Arnold himself, and
+now by Professor Knight, hint at a certain very obvious difference of
+level in his poetic work.
+
+This perpetual suggestion of an absolute duality between his lower
+and higher moods, and the poetic work produced in them, stimulating
+the reader to look below the immediate surface of his poetry, makes
+the study of Wordsworth an excellent exercise for the training of
+those mental powers in us, which partake both of thought and
+imagination.  It begets in those [95] who fall in with him at the
+right moment of their spiritual development, a habit of reading
+between the lines, a faith in the effect of concentration and
+collectedness of mind on the right appreciation of poetry, the
+expectation that what is really worth having in the poetic order will
+involve, on their part, a certain discipline of the temper not less
+than of the intellect.  Wordsworth meets them with the assurance that
+he has much to give them, and of a very peculiar kind, if they will
+follow a certain difficult way, and seems to possess the secret of
+some special mental illumination.  To follow that way is an
+initiation, by which they will become able to distinguish, in art,
+speech, feeling, manners, in men and life generally, what is genuine,
+animated, and expressive from what is only conventional and
+derivative, and therefore inexpressive.
+
+A very intimate sense of the expressiveness of outward things, which
+ponders, listens, penetrates, where the earlier, less developed
+consciousness passed lightly by, is an important element in the
+general temper of our modern poetry.  Critics of literary history
+have again [96] and again remarked upon it; it is a characteristic
+which reveals itself in many different forms, but is strongest and
+most sympathetic in what is strongest and most serious in modern
+literature; it is exemplified by writers as unlike Wordsworth as the
+French romanticist poets.  As a curious chapter in the history of the
+human mind, its growth might be traced from Rousseau and St. Pierre
+to Chateaubriand, from Chateaubriand to Victor Hugo; it has no doubt
+some obscure relationship to those pantheistic theories which have
+greatly occupied people's minds in many modern readings of
+philosophy; it makes as much difference between the modern and the
+earlier landscape art as there is between the roughly outlined masks
+of a Byzantine mosaic and a portrait by Reynolds or Romney.  Of this
+new landscape sense the poetry of Wordsworth is the elementary and
+central exposition; he is more exclusively occupied with its
+development than any other poet.  Wordsworth's own character, as we
+have already observed, was dominated by a certain contentment, a sort
+of naturally religious placidity, not often found in union with a
+poetic sensibility so [97] active as his; and this gentle sense of
+well-being was favourable to the quiet, habitual observation of the
+inanimate, or imperfectly animate, world.  His life of eighty placid
+years was almost without what, with most human beings, count for
+incidents.  His flight from the active world, so genially celebrated
+in this newly published poem of The Recluse; his flight to the Vale
+of Grasmere, like that of some pious youth to the Chartreuse, is the
+most marked event of his existence.  His life's changes are almost
+entirely inward ones; it falls into broad, untroubled, perhaps
+somewhat monotonous, spaces; his biographers have very little to
+tell.  What it really most resembles, different as its superficies
+may look, is the career of those early mediaeval religious artists,
+who, precisely because their souls swarmed with heavenly visions,
+passed their fifty or sixty years in tranquil, systematic industry,
+seemingly with no thoughts beyond it.  This placid life developed in
+Wordsworth, to an extraordinary degree, an innate sensibility to
+natural sights and sounds--the flower and its shadow on the stone,
+the cuckoo and its echo.  The poem of [98] "Resolution and
+Independence" is a storehouse of such records; for its fulness of
+lovely imagery it may be compared to Keats's "Saint Agnes' Eve."  To
+read one of his greater pastoral poems for the first time is like a
+day spent in a new country; the memory is crowded for a while with
+its precise and vivid incidents:--
+
+The pliant harebell swinging in the breeze,
+On some grey rock:
+The single sheep, and the one blasted tree,
+And the bleak music from that old stone wall:--
+In the meadows and the lower ground,
+Was all the sweetness of a common dawn:--
+And that green corn all day is rustling in thine ears!
+
+Clear and delicate at once as he is in the outlining of visible
+imagery, he is more finely scrupulous still in the noting of sounds;
+he conceives of noble sound as even moulding the human countenance to
+nobler types, and as something actually "profaned" by visible form or
+colour.  He has a power likewise of realizing and conveying to the
+consciousness of his reader abstract and elementary impressions,
+silence, darkness, absolute motionlessness, or, again, the whole
+complex sentiment of a particular place, the abstract expression of
+desolation in the long [99] white road, of peacefulness in a
+particular folding of the hills.
+
+That sense of a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but
+a rhetorical artifice, was, then, in Wordsworth the assertion of what
+was for him almost literal fact.  To him every natural object seemed
+to possess something of moral or spiritual life, to be really capable
+of a companionship with man, full of fine intimacies.  An emanation,
+a particular spirit, belonged not to the moving leaves or water only,
+but to the distant peak arising suddenly, by some change of
+perspective, above the nearer horizon of the hills, to the passing
+space of light across the plain, to the lichened Druidic stone even,
+for a certain weird fellowship in it with the moods of men.  That he
+awakened "a sort of thought in sense" is Shelley's just estimate of
+this element in Wordsworth's poetry.
+
+It was through nature, ennobled in this way by the semblance of
+passion and thought, that the poet approached the spectacle of human
+life.  For him, indeed, human life is, in the first instance, only an
+additional, and as it were incidental grace, upon this expressive
+landscape.
+
+[100] When he thought of men and women, it was of men and women as in
+the presence and under the influence of those effective natural
+objects, and linked to them by many associations.  Such influences
+have sometimes seemed to belittle those who are the subject of them,
+at the least to be likely to narrow the range of their sympathies.
+To Wordsworth, on the contrary, they seemed directly to dignify human
+nature, as tending to tranquillize it.  He raises physical nature to
+the level of human thought, giving it thereby a mystic power and
+expression; he subdues man to the level of nature, but gives him
+therewith a certain breadth and vastness and solemnity.
+
+Religious sentiment, consecrating the natural affections and rights
+of the human heart, above all that pitiful care and awe for the
+perishing human clay of which relic-worship is but the corruption,
+has always had much to do with localities, with the thoughts which
+attach themselves to definite scenes and places.  And what is true of
+it everywhere is truest in those secluded valleys, where one
+generation after another maintains the same abiding-place; and [101]
+it was on this side that Wordsworth apprehended religion most
+strongly.  Having so much to do with the recognition of local
+sanctities, the habit of connecting the very trees and stones of a
+particular spot of earth with the great events of life, till the low
+walls, the green mounds, the half-obliterated epitaphs, seemed full
+of oracular voices, even the religion of those people of the dales
+appeared but as another link between them and the solemn imageries of
+the natural world.  And, again, this too tranquillized them, by
+bringing them under the rule of traditional, narrowly localized
+observances.  "Grave livers," they seemed to him under this aspect,
+of stately speech, and something of that natural dignity of manners
+which underlies the highest courtesy.
+
+And, seeing man thus as a part of nature, elevated and solemnized in
+proportion as his daily life and occupations brought him into
+companionship with permanent natural objects, he was able to
+appreciate passion in the lowly.  He chooses to depict people from
+humble life, because, being nearer to nature than others, they are on
+the whole more impassioned, certainly [102] more direct in their
+expression of passion, than other men; it is for this direct
+expression of passion that he values their humble words.  In much
+that he said in exaltation of rural life he was but pleading
+indirectly for that sincerity, that perfect fidelity to one's own
+inward presentations, to the precise features of the picture within,
+without which any profound poetry is impossible.  It was not for
+their tameness, but for their impassioned sincerity, that he chose
+incidents and situations from common life, "related in a selection of
+language really used by men."  He constantly endeavours to bring his
+language nearer to the real language of men; but it is to the real
+language of men, not on the dead level of their ordinary intercourse,
+but in certain select moments of vivid sensation, when this language
+is winnowed and ennobled by sentiment.  There are poets who have
+chosen rural life for their subject for the sake of its passionless
+repose; and there are times when Wordsworth himself extols the mere
+calm and dispassionate survey of things as the highest aim of
+poetical culture.  But it was not for such passionless calm that he
+preferred the scenes of [103] pastoral life; and the meditative poet,
+sheltering himself from the agitations of the outward world, is in
+reality only clearing the scene for the exhibition of great emotions,
+and what he values most is the almost elementary expression of
+elementary feelings.
+
+In Wordsworth's prefatory advertisement to the first edition of The
+Prelude, published in 1850, it is stated that that work was intended
+to be introductory to The Recluse: and that The Recluse, if
+completed, would have consisted of three parts.  The second part is
+The Excursion.  The third part was only planned; but the first book
+of the first part was left in manuscript by Wordsworth--though in
+manuscript, it is said, in no great condition of forwardness for the
+printers.  This book, now for the first time printed in extenso (a
+very noble passage from it found place in that prose advertisement to
+The Excursion), is the great novelty of this latest edition of
+Wordsworth's poetic works.  It was well worth adding to the poet's
+great bequest to English literature.  The true student of his work,
+who has formulated for himself what he supposes to be the leading
+characteristics [104] of Wordsworth's genius, will feel, we think, a
+lively interest in putting them to test by the many and various
+striking passages in what is there presented for the first time.
+
+17th February 1889
+
+
+
+
+
+VII.  MR. GOSSE'S POEMS
+
+
+
+
+On Viol and Flute.  By Edmund Gosse.
+
+[107] PERHAPS no age of literature, certainly no age of literature in
+England, has been so rich as ours in excellent secondary poetry; and
+it is with our poetry (in a measure) as with our architecture,
+constrained by the nature of the case to be imitative.  Our
+generation, quite reasonably, is not very proud of its architectural
+creations; confesses that it knows too much--knows, but cannot do.
+And yet we could name certain modern churches in London, for
+instance, to which posterity may well look back puzzled.--Could these
+exquisitely pondered buildings have been indeed works of the
+nineteenth century?  Were they not the subtlest creations of the age
+in which Gothic art was spontaneous?  In truth, we have had instances
+of workmen, who, through long, large, [108] devoted study of the
+handiwork of the past, have done the thing better, with a more fully
+enlightened consciousness, with full intelligence of what those early
+workmen only guessed at.  And something like this is true of some of
+our best secondary poetry.  It is the least that is true--the least
+that can fairly be said in praise of the poetic work of Mr. Edmund
+Gosse.
+
+Of course there can be no exact parallel between arts so different as
+architecture and poetic composition: But certainly in the poetry of
+our day also, though it has been in some instances powerfully
+initiative and original, there is great scholarship, a large
+comparative acquaintance with the poetic methods of earlier workmen,
+and a very subtle intelligence of their charm.  Of that fine
+scholarship in this matter there is no truer example than Mr. Gosse.
+It is manifested especially in the even finish of his varied work, in
+the equality of his level--a high level--in species of composition so
+varied as the three specimens which follow.
+
+Far away, in late spring, "by the sea in the south," the swallows are
+still lingering around "white Algiers."  In Mr. Gosse's "Return of
+[109] the Swallows," the northern birds--lark and thrush--have long
+been calling to them:--
+
+And something awoke in the slumbering heart
+Of the alien birds in their African air,
+And they paused, and alighted, and twittered apart,
+And met in the broad white dreamy square,
+And the sad slave woman, who lifted up
+From the fountain her broad-lipped earthen cup,
+Said to herself, with a weary sigh,
+"To-morrow the swallows will northward fly."
+
+Compare the following stanzas, from a kind of palinode, "1870-1871,"
+years of the Franco-German war and the Parisian Commune:--
+
+The men who sang that pain was sweet
+Shuddered to see the mask of death
+Storm by with myriad thundering feet;
+The sudden truth caught up our breath
+Our throats like pulses beat.
+
+The songs of pale emaciate hours,
+The fungus-growth of years of peace,
+Withered before us like mown flowers;
+We found no pleasure more in these
+When bullets fell in showers.
+
+For men whose robes are dashed with blood,
+What joy to dream of gorgeous stairs,
+Stained with the torturing interlude
+That soothed a Sultan's midday prayers,
+In old days harsh and rude?
+
+[110]
+
+For men whose lips are blanched and white,
+With aching wounds and torturing thirst,
+What charm in canvas shot with light,
+And pale with faces cleft and curst,
+Past life and life's delight?
+
+And then Mr. Gosse's purely descriptive power, his aptitude for
+still-life and landscape, is unmistakably vivid and sound.  Take, for
+an instance, this description of high-northern summer:--
+
+The ice-white mountains clustered all around us,
+But arctic summer blossomed at our feet;
+The perfume of the creeping sallows found us,
+The cranberry-flowers were sweet.
+
+Below us through the valley crept a river,
+Cleft round an island where the Lap-men lay;
+Its sluggish water dragged with slow endeavour
+The mountain snows away.
+
+There is no night-time in the northern summer,
+But golden shimmer fills the hours of sleep,
+And sunset fades not, till the bright new-comer,
+Red sunrise, smites the deep.
+
+But when the blue snow-shadows grew intenser
+Across the peaks against the golden sky,
+And on the hills the knots of deer grew denser,
+And raised their tender cry,
+
+[111]
+
+And wandered downward to the Lap-men's dwelling,
+We knew our long sweet day was nearly spent,
+And slowly, with our hearts within us swelling,
+Our homeward steps we bent.
+
+"Sunshine before Sunrise!"  There's a novelty in that, for poetic use
+at least, so far as we know, though we remember one fine paragraph
+about it in Sartor Resartus.  The grim poetic sage of Chelsea,
+however, had never seen what he describes: not so Mr. Gosse, whose
+acquaintance with northern lands and northern literature is special.
+We have indeed picked out those stanzas from a quiet personal record
+of certain amorous hours of early youth in that quaint arctic land,
+Mr. Gosse's description of which, like his pretty poem on Lübeck,
+made one think that what the accomplished group of poets to which he
+belongs requires is, above all, novelty of motive, of subject.
+
+He takes, indeed, the old themes, and manages them better than their
+old masters, with more delicate cadences, more delicate transitions
+of thought, through long dwelling on earlier practice.  He seems to
+possess complete command of the technique of poetry--every form of
+what may be called skill of hand in it; and what marks in [112] him
+the final achievement of poetic scholarship is the perfect balance
+his work presents of so many and varied effects, as regards both
+matter and form.  The memories of a large range of poetic reading are
+blent into one methodical music so perfectly that at times the notes
+seem almost simple.  Sounding almost all the harmonies of the modern
+lyre, he has, perhaps as a matter of course, some of the faults also,
+the "spasmodic" and other lapses, which from age to age, in
+successive changes of taste, have been the "defects" of excellent
+good "qualities."  He is certainly not the--
+
+Pathetic singer, with no strength to sing,
+
+as he says of the white-throat on the tulip-tree,
+
+Whose leaves unfinished ape her faulty song.
+
+In effect, a large compass of beautiful thought and expression, from
+poetry old and new, have become to him matter malleable anew for a
+further and finer reach of literary art.  And with the perfect grace
+of an intaglio, he shows, as in truth the minute intaglio may do, the
+faculty of structure, the logic of poetry.  "The New Endymion" is a
+good instance of such sustained [113] power.  Poetic scholar!--If we
+must reserve the sacred name of "poet" to a very small number, that
+humbler but perhaps still rarer title is due indisputably to Mr.
+Gosse.  His work is like exquisite modern Latin verse, into the
+academic shape of which, discreet and coy, comes a sincere, deeply
+felt consciousness of modern life, of the modern world as it is.  His
+poetry, according with the best intellectual instincts of our
+critical age, is as pointed out recently by a clever writer in the
+Nineteenth Century, itself a kind of exquisite, finally revised
+criticism.
+
+Not that he fails in originality; only, the graces, inborn certainly,
+but so carefully educated, strike one more.  The sense of his
+originality comes to one as but an after-thought; and certainly one
+sign of his vocation is that he has made no conscious effort to be
+original.  In his beautiful opening poem of the "White-throat,"
+giving his book its key-note, he seems, indeed, to accept that
+position, reasons on and justifies it.  Yet there is a clear note of
+originality (so it seems to us) in the peculiar charm of his strictly
+personal compositions; and, generally, in such touches as he gives us
+of the soul, the life, of the [114] nineteenth century.  Far greater,
+we think, than the charm of poems strictly classic in interest, such
+as the "Praise of Dionysus," exquisite as that is, is the charm of
+those pieces in which, so to speak, he transforms, by a kind of
+colour-change, classic forms and associations into those--say! of
+Thames-side--pieces which, though in manner or subject promising a
+classic entertainment, almost unaware bring you home.--No! after all,
+it is not imagined Greece, dreamy, antique Sicily, but the present
+world about us, though mistakable for a moment, delightfully, for the
+land, the age, of Sappho, of Theocritus:--
+
+There is no amaranth, no pomegranate here,
+But can your heart forget the Christmas rose,
+The crocuses and snowdrops once so dear?
+
+Quite congruously with the placid, erudite, quality of his culture,
+although, like other poets, he sings much of youth, he is often most
+successful in the forecast, the expression, of the humours, the
+considerations, that in truth are more proper to old age:--
+
+When age comes by and lays his frosty hands
+So lightly on mine eyes, that, scarce aware
+
+[115]
+
+Of what an endless weight of gloom they bear,
+I pause, unstirred, and wait for his commands.
+When time has bound these limbs of mine with bands,
+And hushed mine ears, and silvered all my hair,
+May sorrow come not, nor a vain despair
+Trouble my soul that meekly girdled stands.
+
+As silent rivers into silent lakes,
+Through hush of reeds that not a murmur breaks,
+Wind, mindful of the poppies whence they came,
+So may my life, and calmly burn away,
+As ceases in a lamp at break of day
+The flagrant remnant of memorial flame.
+
+Euthanasia!--Yet Mr. Gosse, with all his accomplishment, is still a
+young man.  His youthful confidence in the perpetuity of poetry, of
+the poetical interests in life, creed-less as he may otherwise seem
+to be, is, we think, a token, though certainly an unconscious token,
+of the spontaneous originality of his muse.  For a writer of his
+peculiar philosophic tenets, at all events, the world itself, in
+truth, must seem irretrievably old or even decadent.
+
+Old, decadent, indeed, it would seem with Mr. Gosse to be also
+returning to the thoughts, the fears, the consolations, of its youth
+in Greece, in Italy:--
+
+[116]
+
+Nor seems it strange indeed
+To hold the happy creed
+That all fair things that bloom and die
+Have conscious life as well as I.
+
+Then let me joy to be
+Alive with bird and tree,
+And have no haughtier aim than this,
+To be a partner in their bliss.
+
+Convinced, eloquent,--again and again the notes of Epicurean
+philosophy fall almost unconsciously from his lips.  With poetry at
+hand, he appears to feel no misgivings.  A large faith he might seem
+to have in what is called "natural optimism," the beauty and
+benignity of nature, if let alone, in her mechanical round of changes
+with man and beast and flower.  Her method, however, certainly
+involves forgetfulness for the individual; and to this, to the
+prospect of oblivion, poetry, too, may help to brace us, if, unlike
+so genial and cheerful a poet as Mr. Gosse, we need bracing thereto:-
+-
+
+Now, giant-like, the tall young ploughmen go
+Between me and the sunset, footing slow;
+My spirit, as an uninvited guest,
+Goes with them, wondering what desire, what aim,
+May stir their hearts and mine with common flame,
+Or, thoughtless, do their hands suffice their soul?
+
+[117]
+
+I know not, care not, for I deem no shame
+To hold men, flowers, and trees and stars the same,
+Myself, as these, one atom in the whole.
+
+That is from one of those half-Greek, half-English idylls, reminding
+one of Frederick Walker's "Ploughman," of Mason's "Evening Hymn," in
+which Mr. Gosse is at his best.  A favourite motive, he has treated
+it even more melodiously in "Lying in the Grass":--
+
+I do not hunger for a well-stored mind,
+I only wish to live my life, and find
+My heart in unison with all mankind.
+
+My life is like the single dewy star
+That trembles on the horizon's primrose-bar,--
+A microcosm where all things living are.
+
+And if, among the noiseless grasses, Death
+Should come behind and take away my breath,
+I should not rise as one who sorroweth;
+
+For I should pass, but all the world would be
+Full of desire and young delight and glee,
+And why should men be sad through loss of me?
+
+The light is flying; in the silver-blue
+The young moon shines from her bright window through:
+The mowers are all gone, and I go too.
+
+A vein of thought as modern as it is old!  More not less depressing,
+certainly, to our over-meditative [118], susceptible, nervous,
+modern age, than to that antiquity which was indeed the genial youth
+of the world, but, sweetly attuned by his skill of touch, it is the
+sum of what Mr. Gosse has to tell us of the experience of life.  Or
+is it, after all, to quote him once more, that beyond those ever-
+recurring pagan misgivings, those pale pagan consolations, our
+generation feels yet cannot adequately express--
+
+The passion and the stress
+Of thoughts too tender and too sad to be
+Enshrined in any melody she knows?
+
+29th October 1890
+
+
+
+
+
+VIII.  FERDINAND FABRE
+
+
+
+
+[NORINE]: AN IDYLL OF THE CEVENNES
+
+
+[121] A FRENCH novelist who, with much of Zola's undoubted power,
+writes always in the interest of that high type of Catholicism which
+still prevails in the remote provinces of France, of that high type of
+morality of which the French clergy have nobly maintained the ideal,
+is worth recommending to the more serious class of English readers.
+Something of the gift of François Millet, whose peasants are
+veritable priests, of those older religious painters who could
+portray saintly heads so sweetly and their merely human protégés so
+truly, seems indeed to have descended to M. Ferdinand Fabre.  In the
+Abbé Tigrane, in Lucifer, and elsewhere, he has delineated, with
+wonderful power and patience, a strictly ecclesiastical portraiture--
+[122] shrewd, passionate, somewhat melancholy heads, which, though
+they are often of peasant origin, are never by any chance
+undignified.  The passions he treats of in priests are, indeed,
+strictly clerical, most often their ambitions--not the errant humours
+of the mere man in the priest, but movements of spirit properly
+incidental to the clerical type itself.  Turning to the secular
+brothers and sisters of these peasant ecclesiastics, at first sight
+so strongly contrasted with them, M. Fabre shows a great acquaintance
+with the sources, the effects, of average human feeling; but still in
+contact--in contact, as its conscience, its better mind, its ideal--
+with the institutions of religion.  What constitutes his
+distinguishing note as a writer is the recognition of the religious,
+the Catholic, ideal, intervening masterfully throughout the picture
+he presents of life, as the only mode of poetry realizable by the
+poor; and although, of course, it does a great deal more beside,
+certainly doing the high work of poetry effectively.  For his
+background he has chosen, has made his own and conveys very vividly
+to his readers, a district of France, gloomy, in spite of its
+almonds, its [123] oil and wine, but certainly grandiose.  The large
+towns, the sparse hamlets, the wide landscape of the Cevennes, are
+for his books what the Rhineland is to those delightful authors,
+Messrs. Erckmann-Chatrian.  In Les Courbezon, the French Vicar of
+Wakefield, as Sainte-Beuve declared, with this imposing background,
+the Church and the world, as they shape themselves in the Cevennes,
+the priest and the peasant, occupy about an equal share of interest.
+Sometimes, as in the charming little book we wish now to introduce,
+unclerical human nature occupies the foreground almost exclusively;
+though priestly faces will still be found gazing upon us from time to
+time.
+
+In form, the book is a bundle of letters from a Parisian littérateur
+to the friend of his boyhood, now the curé of one of those mountain
+villages.  He is refreshing himself, in the midst of dusty,
+sophisticated Paris, with memories of their old, delightful
+existence--vagabonde, libre, agreste, pastorale--in their upland
+valley.  He can appeal safely to the aged curé's friendly justice,
+even in exposing delicacies of sentiment which most men conceal:--
+
+[124] "As for you, frank, certain of your own mind, joyous of heart,
+methinks scarce understanding those whose religion makes their souls
+tremble instead of fortifying them--you, I am sure, take things by
+the large and kindly side of human life."
+
+The story our Parisian has to tell is simple enough, and we have no
+intention of betraying it, but only to note some of the faces, the
+scenes, that peep out in the course of it.
+
+The gloom of the Cevennes is the impression M. Fabre most commonly
+conveys.  In this book it is rather the cheerful aspect of summer,
+those upland valleys of the Cevennes presenting then a symphony in
+red, so to call it--as in a land of cherries and goldfinches; and he
+has a genial power certainly of making you really feel the sun on the
+backs of the two boys out early for a long ramble, of old peasants
+resting themselves a little, with spare enjoyment, ere the end:--
+
+"As we turned a sharp elbow of the stream the aspect of the country
+changed.  It seemed to me entirely red.  Cherries in enormous bunches
+were hanging everywhere over our heads....
+
+[125] "It was a hut, rather low, rather dark.  A log of chestnut was
+smouldering in a heap of ashes.  Every object was in its place: the
+table, the chairs, the plates ranged on the dresser.  A fairy, in
+truth, reigned there, and, by the touch of her wand, brought
+cleanliness and order on every side.
+
+"'Is it you, Norine?' asked a voice from a dark corner, three steps
+from the fireplace.
+
+"'Yes, mon grand, it is I!  The heat was growing greater every
+moment, and I have taken in the goats.'
+
+"Norine unclosed the window.  A broad light spread over the floor of
+beaten earth, like a white cloth.  The cottage was illuminated.  I
+saw an old man seated on a wooden stool in a recess, where an ample
+serge curtain concealed a bed.  He held himself slightly bent, the
+two hands held forth, one over the other, on the knob of a knotty
+staff, highly polished.  In spite of eighty years, Norine's
+grandfather--le grand, as they say up there--had not lost a hair:
+beautiful white locks fell over his shoulders--crisp, thick,
+outspread.  I thought of those fine wigs of tow or hemp with which
+the distaff of [126] our Prudence was always entangled.  He was close
+shaved, after the manner of our peasants; and the entire mask was to
+be seen disengaged, all its admirable lines free, commanded by a
+full-sized nose, below which the good, thick lips were smiling, full
+of kindness.  The eyes, however, though still clear and soft in
+expression, had a certain fixity which startled me.  He raised
+himself.  His stature seemed to me beyond proportion.  He was really
+beautiful, with the contentment of his face, straight as the trunk of
+a chestnut, his old velvet coat thrown back, his shirt of coarse
+cloth open at the breast, so that one saw the play of the ribs.
+
+"'Monsieur le neveu!' he cried; 'where are you? Come to me!  I am
+blind.'
+
+"I approached.  He felt me, with ten fingers, laying aside his staff.
+
+"'And you would not take offence if a poor peasant like me embraced
+you?'
+
+"'Quick, Jalaguier!'  I cried, throwing myself into his arms.
+'Quick!'  He pressed me till the joints started.  Leaned upon his
+broad chest, I heard the beating of his heart.  It beat under my ears
+with a burden like our bell at [126] Camplong.  What powerful
+vitality in Norine's grand!  'It does an old man good:--a good hug!'
+he said, letting me go."
+
+The boyish visitors are quite ready to sit down there to dinner:--
+
+"With the peasant of the Cevennes (M. Fabre tells us) the meal is
+what nature meant it to be--a few moments for self-recovery after
+fatigue, a short space of silence of a quite elevated character,
+almost sacred.  The poor human creature has given the sweat of his
+brow to extort from an ungrateful soil his daily bread; and now he
+eats that well-savoured bread in silent self-respect.
+
+"'It is a weary thing to be thinking always of one's work (says the
+grand to the somewhat sparing Norine).  We must also think of our
+sustenance.  You are too enduring, my child! it is a mistake to
+demand so much of your arms.  In truth, le bon Dieu has cut you out
+after the pattern of your dead father.  Every morning, in my prayers,
+I put in my complaint thereanent.  My poor boy died from going too
+fast.  He could never sit still when it was a question of gathering a
+few sous from the [128] fields; and those fields took and consumed
+him.'"
+
+The boy fancies that the blind eyes are turned towards a particular
+spot in the landscape, as if they saw:--
+
+"'I often turn my eyes in that direction (the old man explains) from
+habit.  One might suppose that a peasant had the scent of the earth
+on which he has laboured.  I have given so much of the sweat of my
+brow--there--towards Rocaillet!  Angélique, my dead wife, was of
+Rocaillet; and when she married me, brought a few morsels of land in
+her apron.  What a state they're in now!--those poor morsels of land
+we used to weed and rake and hoe, my boy and I!  What superb crops of
+vetches we mowed then, for feeding, in due time, our lambs, our
+calves!  All is gone to ruin since my blindness, and especially since
+Angélique left me for the churchyard, never to come back.'  He paused
+to my great relief.  For every one of those phrases he modulated
+under the fig-trees more sadly than the Lamentations of Jeremiah on
+Jeudi Saint overset me--was like death."
+
+[129] That is good drawing, in its simple and quiet way!  The actual
+scene, however, is cheerful enough on this early summer day--a
+symphony, as we said, in cherries and goldfinches, in which the
+higher valleys of the Cevennes abound.  In fact, the boys witness the
+accordailles, the engagement, of Norine and Justin Lebasset.  The
+latter is calling the birds to sing good luck to the event:--
+
+"He had a long steady look towards the fruit-trees, and then
+whistled, on a note at once extremely clear and extremely soft.  He
+paused, watched awhile, recommenced.  The note became more rapid,
+more sonorous.  What an astounding man he was, this Justin Lebasset!
+Upright, his red beard forward, his forehead thrown back, his eyes on
+the thick foliage of the cherry-trees, his hands on his haunches, in
+an attitude of repose, easy, superb, he was like some youthful pagan
+god, gilded with red gold, on his way across the country--like Pan,
+if he chose to amuse himself by charming birds.  You should have seen
+the enthusiastic glances with which Norine watched him.  Upright--she
+too, slim, at full height, inclining from [130] time to time towards
+Justin with a movement of irresistible fascination, she followed the
+notes of her mate; and sometimes, her, lips half opening, added
+thereto a sigh--something of a sigh, an aspiration, a prayer, towards
+the goldfinch, withdrawn into the shadows.
+
+"The leaves were shaken in the clear, burning green; and, on a
+sudden, a multitude of goldfinches, the heads red in the wind, the
+wings half spread, were fluttering from branch to branch.  I could
+have fancied, amid the quivering of the great bunches of fruit, that
+they were cherries on the wing.  Justin suffered his pipe to die
+away: the birds were come at his invitation, and performed their
+prelude."
+
+It is forty years afterwards that the narrator, now a man of letters
+in Paris, writes to his old friend, with tidings of Justin and
+Norine:--
+
+"In 1842 (he observes) you were close on fifteen; I scarcely twelve.
+In my eyes your age made you my superior.  And then, you were so
+strong, so tender, so amiteux, to use a word from up there--a
+charming word.  And so God, Who had His designs for you, whereas I,
+in spite of my pious childhood, wandered on [131] my way as chance
+bade me, led you by the hand, attached, ended by keeping you for
+Himself.  He did well truly when He chose you and rejected me!"
+
+His finding the pair in the wilds of Paris is an adventure, in which,
+in fact, a goldfinch again takes an important part--a goldfinch who
+is found to understand the Cevenol dialect:--
+
+"The goldfinch (escaped from its cage somewhere, into the dreary
+court of the Institute) has seen me: is looking at me.  If he chose
+to make his way into my apartment, he would be very welcome.  I feel
+a strong impulse to try him with that unique patois word, which,
+whistled after a peculiar manner, when I was a boy never failed to
+succeed in the mountains of Orb--Béni!  Béni!  Viens!  Viens!  I dare
+not!  He might take fright and fly away altogether."
+
+In effect, the Cevenol bird, true to call, introduces Norine, his
+rightful owner, whose husband Justin is slowly dying.  Towards the
+end of a hard life, faithful to their mountain ideal, they have not
+lost their dignity, though in a comparatively sordid medium: [132]
+
+"As for me, my dear Arribas, I remained in deep agitation, an
+attentive spectator of the scene; and while Justin and Norine, set
+both alike in the winepress of sorrow, le pressoir de la douleur, as
+your good books express it, murmured to each other their broken
+consoling words, I saw them again, in thought, young, handsome, in
+the full flower of life, under the cherry-trees, the swarming
+goldfinches, of blind Barthélemy Jalaguier.  Ah me!  It was thus
+that, five-and-forty years after, in this dark street of Paris, that
+festive day was finishing, blessed, in the plenitude of nature, by
+that august old man, celebrated by the alternate song of all the
+birds of Rocaillet."
+
+Justin's one remaining hope is to go home to those native mountains,
+if it may be, with the dead body of his boy, dead "the very morning
+on which he should have received the tonsure from the hands of Mgr.
+l'Archevêque," and buried now temporarily at the cemetery of
+Montparnasse:--
+
+Theodore calls me.  I saw him distinctly to-night.  He gave me a
+sign.  After all said, life is heavy, sans le fillot, and but [133]
+for you it were well to be released from it....'
+
+"I have seen Justin Lebasset die, dear Arribas, and was touched,
+edified, to the bottom of my soul.  God grant, when my hour comes, I
+may find that calm, that force, in the last struggle with life.  Not
+a complaint!  not a sigh!  Once only he gave Norine a sorrowful,
+heartrending look; then, from lips already cold, breathed that one
+word, 'Theodore!'  Marcus Aurelius used to say: 'A man should leave
+the world as a ripe olive falls from the tree that bore it, and with
+a kiss for the earth that nourished it.'  Well! the peasant of
+Rocaillet had the beautiful, noble, simple death of the fruit of the
+earth, going to the common receptacle of all mortal beings, with no
+sense that he was torn away.  Pardon, I pray, my quotation from
+Marcus Aurelius, who persecuted the Christians.  I give it with the
+same respect with which you would quote some holy writer.  Ah! my
+dear Arribas! not all the saints have received canonization."
+
+It is to the priestly character, in truth, that M. Fabre always comes
+back for tranquillizing [134] effect; and if his peasants have
+something akin to Wordsworth's, his priests may remind one of those
+solemn ecclesiastical heads familiar in the paintings and etchings of
+M. Alphonse Legros.  The reader travelling in Italy, or Belgium
+perhaps, has doubtless visited one or more of those spacious
+sacristies, introduced to which for the inspection of some more than
+usually recherché work of art, one is presently dominated by their
+reverend quiet: simple people coming and going there, devout, or at
+least on devout business, with half-pitched voices, not without
+touches of kindly humour, in what seems to express like a picture the
+most genial side, midway between the altar and the home, of the
+ecclesiastical life.  Just such interiors we seem to visit under the
+magic of M. Fabre's well-trained pen.  He has a real power of taking
+one from Paris, or from London, to places and people certainly very
+different from either, to the satisfaction of those who seek in
+fiction an escape.
+
+12th June 1889
+
+
+
+
+
+IX.  THE "CONTES" OF M. AUGUSTIN FILON
+
+
+
+
+TALES OF A HUNDRED YEARS SINCE
+["CONTES DU CENTENAIRE."  PAR AUGUSTIN FILON.  PARIS: HACHETTE ET
+CIE. ]
+
+
+[137] IT was a happy thought of M. Filon to put into the mouth of an
+imaginary centenarian a series of delightfully picturesque studies
+which aim at the minute presentment of life in France under the old
+régime, and end for the most part with the Revolution.  A genial
+centenarian, whose years have told happily on him, he appreciates not
+only those humanities of feeling and habit which were peculiar to the
+last century and passed away with it, but also that permanent
+humanity which has but undergone a change of surface in the new world
+of our own, wholly different though it may look.  With a sympathetic
+sense of life as it is always, [138] M. Filon has transplanted the
+creations of his fancy into an age certainly at a greater distance
+from ourselves than can be estimated by mere lapse of time, and where
+a fully detailed antiquarian knowledge, used with admirable tact and
+economy, is indeed serviceable in giving reality of effect to scene
+and character.  In truth, M. Filon's very lively antiquarianism
+carries with it a genuine air of personal memory.  With him, as
+happens so rarely, an intimate knowledge of historic detail is the
+secret of life, of the impression of life; puts his own imagination
+on the wing; secures the imaginative cooperation of the reader.  A
+stately age--to us, perhaps, in the company of the historic muse,
+seeming even more stately than it actually was--it is pleasant to
+find it, as we do now and again on these pages, in graceful
+déshabille.  With perfect lightness of touch, M. Filon seems to have
+a complete command of all the physiognomic details of old France, of
+old Paris and its people--how they made a holiday; how they got at
+the news; the fashions.  Did the English reader ever hear before of
+the beautifully dressed doll which came once a month [139] from Paris
+to Soho to teach an expectant world of fashion how to dress itself?
+Old Paris!  For young lovers at their windows; for every one
+fortunate enough to have seen it: "Qu'il est joli ce paysage du Paris
+nocturne d'il y a cent ans!"  We think we shall best do justice to an
+unusually pretty book by taking one of M. Filon's stories (not
+because we are quite sure it is the cleverest of them) with a view to
+the more definite illustration of his method, therein.
+
+Christopher Marteau was a warden of the corporation of Luthiers.  He
+dealt in musical instruments, as his father and grandfather had done
+before him, at the sign of Saint Cecilia.  With his wife, his only
+child Phlipote, and Claude his apprentice, who was to marry Phlipote,
+he occupied a good house of his own.  Of course the disposition of
+the young people, bred together from their childhood, does not at
+first entirely concur with the parental arrangements.  But the story
+tells, reassuringly, how--to some extent how sadly--they came
+heartily to do so.  M. Marteau was no ordinary shopkeeper.  The
+various distinguished people who had fingered his clavecins, and
+turned over the [140] folios of music, for half a century past, had
+left their memories behind them; M. de Voltaire, for instance, who
+had caressed the head of Phlipote with an aged, skeleton hand,
+leaving, apparently, no very agreeable impression on the child,
+though her father delighted to recall the incident, being himself a
+demi-philosophe.  He went to church, that is to say, only twice a
+year, on the Feast of St. Cecilia and on the Sunday when the Luthiers
+offered the pain bénit.  It was his opinion that everything in the
+State needed reform except the Corporations.  The relations of the
+husband to his affectionate, satiric, pleasure-seeking wife, who knew
+so well all the eighteen theatres which then existed in Paris, are
+treated with much quiet humour.  On Sundays the four set forth
+together for a country holiday.  At such times Phlipote would walk
+half-a-dozen paces in advance of her father and mother, side by side
+with her intended.  But they never talked to each other: the hands,
+the eyes, never met.  Of what was Phlipote dreaming? and what was in
+the thoughts of Claude?
+
+It happened one day that, like sister and brother, the lovers
+exchanged confidences.  "It [141] is not always," observes Phlipote,
+whom every one excepting Claude on those occasions sought with
+admiring eyes--
+
+"'It is not always one loves those one is told to love.'
+
+"'What, have you, too, a secret, my little Phlipote?'
+
+"'I too, Claude!  Then what may be yours?'
+
+"'Listen, Phlipote!' he answered.  'We don't wish to be husband and
+wife, but we can be friends--good and faithful friends, helping each
+other to change the decision of our parents.'
+
+"'Were I but sure you would not betray me--'
+
+"'Would you like me to confess first?  The woman I love--Ah! but you
+will laugh at my folly!'
+
+"'No, Claude!  I shall not laugh.  I know too well what one suffers.'
+
+"'Especially when love is hopeless.'
+
+"'Hopeless?'
+
+"'Alas!  I have never spoken to her.  Perhaps never shall!'
+
+[142] "'Well! as for me, I don't even know the name of him to whom my
+heart is given!'
+
+"'Ah! poor Phlipote!'
+
+"'Poor Claude!'
+
+"They had approached each other.  The young man took the tiny hand of
+his friend, pressing it in his own.
+
+"'The woman I adore is Mademoiselle Guimard!'
+
+"'What!  Guimard of the Opera?--the fiancée of Despréaux?'"
+
+Claude still held the hands of Phlipote, who was trembling now, and
+almost on fire at the story of this ambitious love.  In return she
+reveals her own.  It was Good Friday.  She had come with her mother
+to the Sainte Chapelle to hear Mademoiselle Coupain play the organ
+and witness the extraordinary spectacle of the convulsionnaires,
+brought thither to be touched by the relic of the True Cross.  In the
+press of the crowd at this exciting scene Phlipote faints, or nearly
+faints, when a young man comes kindly to their aid.  "She is so
+young!" he explains to the mother, "she seems so delicate!"  "He
+looked at me," she tells Claude--"he looked at [143] me, through his
+half-closed eyelids; and his words were like a caress."--
+
+"'And have you seen him no More?' asks Claude, full of sympathy.
+
+"'Yes! once again.  He pretended to be looking at the window of the
+Little Dunkirk, over the way, but with cautious glances towards our
+house.  Only, as he did not know what storey we live on, he failed to
+discover me behind my curtain, where I was but half visible.'
+
+"'You should have shown yourself.'
+
+"'Oh, Claude!' she cried, with a delicious gesture of timidity, of
+shame.
+
+"So they prattled for a long time; he talking of the great Guimard,
+she of her unknown lover, scarce listening to, but completely
+understanding each other.
+
+"'Holloa!'cries the loud voice of Christopher Marteau.  'What are you
+doing out there?'
+
+"The young people arose.  Phlipote linked her arm gaily in that of
+Claude.  'How contented I feel!' she says; 'how good it is to have a
+friend--to have you whom I used to detest, because I thought you were
+in love with me.  Now, when I know you can't bear me, I [144] shall
+be nicely in love with you.'  The soft warmth of her arm seemed to
+pass through Claude, and gave him strange sensations.  He resumed
+naïvely, 'Yes! and how odd it is after all that I am not in love with
+you.  You are so pretty!'  Phlipote raised her finger coquettishly,
+'No compliments, monsieur.  Since we are not to marry each other, it
+is forbidden to pay court to me!'"
+
+From that day a close intimacy established itself between the
+formerly affianced pair, now become accomplices in defeating the good
+intentions of their elders.  In long conversations, they talked in
+turn, or both together, of their respective loves.  Phlipote allows
+Claude entrance to her chamber, full of admiration for its graceful
+arrangements, its virgin cleanliness.  He inspects slowly all the
+familiar objects daily touched by her, her books, her girlish
+ornaments.  One day she cried with an air of mischief, "If she were
+here in my place, what would you do?" and no sooner were the words
+uttered than his arms were round her neck.  "'Tis but to teach you
+what I would do were she here."  They were a little troubled by this
+adventure.
+
+[145] And the next day was a memorable one.  By the kind contrivance
+of Phlipote herself, Claude gains the much-desired access to the
+object of his affections, but to his immense disillusion.  If he
+could but speak to her, he fancies he should find the courage, the
+skill, to bend her.  Breathless, Phlipote comes in secret with the
+good news.  The great actress desires some one to tune her clavecin:-
+-
+
+"'Papa would have gone; but I begged him so earnestly to take me to
+the Théâtre Français that he could not refuse; and it is yourself
+will go this evening to tune the clavecin of your beloved.'
+
+"'Phlipote, you've a better heart than I!  This morning I saw a
+gentleman, who resembled point by point your description of the
+unknown at the Sainte Chapelle, prowling about our shop.'
+
+"'And you didn't tell me!'
+
+"Claude hung his head.
+
+"'But why not?' the young girl asks imperiously.  'Why not?'
+
+"'In truth I could hardly say, hardly understand, myself.  Do you
+forgive me, Phlipote?'
+
+"'I suppose I must.  So make yourself as smart as you can, to please
+your goddess.'"
+
+[146] Next day she hears the story of Claude's grievous
+disappointment on seeing the great actress at home--plain, five-and-
+forty, ill-tempered.  He had tuned the clavecin and taken flight.
+
+And now for Phlipote's idol!  It was agreed that Whitsunday should be
+spent at Versailles.  On that day the royal apartments were open to
+the public, and at the hour of High Mass the crowd flowed back
+towards the vestibule of the chapel to witness what was called the
+procession of the Cordons Bleus.  The "Blue Ribbons" were the knights
+of the Order Du Saint-Esprit in their robes of ceremony, who came to
+range themselves in the choir according to the date of their
+creation.  The press was so great that the parents were separated
+from the young people.  Claude, however, at the side of Phlipote,
+realized the ideal of a faithful and jealous guardian.  The
+hallebardes of the Suisses rang on the marble pavement of the
+gallery.  Royalty, now unconsciously presenting its ceremonies for
+the last time, advanced through a cloud of splendour; but before the
+Queen appeared it was necessary that all the knights of the order
+down to the youngest should pass by, slow, solemn, majestic.
+
+[147] They wore, besides their ribbons of blue moiré, the silver dove
+on the shoulder, and the long mantle of sombre blue velvet lined with
+yellow satin.  Phlipote watched mechanically the double file of
+haughty figures passing before them: then, on a sudden, with a feeble
+cry, falls fainting into the arms of Claude.
+
+Recovered after a while, under shelter of the great staircase, she
+wept as those weep whose heart is broken by a great blow.  Claude,
+without a word, sustained, soothed her.  A sentiment of gratitude
+mingled itself with her distress.  "How good he is!" she thought.
+
+"It was a pity," says her mother a little later "a pity you did not
+see the Cordons Bleus.  Fancy!  You will laugh at me!  But in one of
+the handsomest of the Chevaliers I felt sure I recognized the
+stranger who helped us at the Sainte Chapelle, and was so gallant
+with you."
+
+Phlipote did not laugh.  "You are deceived, mother!" she said in a
+faint voice.  "Pardi!" cries the father.  "'Tis what I always say.
+Your stranger was some young fellow from a shop."
+
+Two months later the young people receive [148] the nuptial
+benediction, and continue the musical business when the elders retire
+to the country.  At first a passionate lover, Claude was afterwards a
+good and devoted husband.  Phlipote never again opened her lips
+regarding the vague love which for a moment had flowered in her
+heart: only sometimes, a cloud of reverie veiled her eyes, which
+seemed to seek sadly, beyond the circle of her slow, calm life, a
+brilliant but chimeric image visible for her alone.
+
+And once again she saw him.  It was in the terrible year 1794.  She
+knew the hour at which the tumbril with those condemned to die passed
+the windows; and at the first signal would close them and draw the
+curtain.  But on this day some invincible fascination nailed her to
+her place.  There were ten faces; but she had eyes for one alone.
+She had not forgotten, could not mistake, him--that pale head, so
+proud and fine, but now thin with suffering; the beautiful mobile
+eyes, now encircled with the signs of sorrow and watching.  The
+convict's shirt, open in large, broad folds, left bare the neck,
+delicate as a woman's, and made for that youthful face an aureole, of
+innocence, of martyrdom.  His looks [149] met hers.  Did he recognize
+her?  She could not have said.  She remained there, paralyzed with
+emotion, till the moment when the vision disappeared.
+
+Then she flung herself into her chamber, fell on her knees, lost
+herself in prayer.  There was a distant roll of drums.  The man to
+whom she had given her maiden soul was gone.
+
+"Cursed be their anger, for it was cruel!" says the reader.  But
+Monsieur Filon's stories sometimes end as merrily as they begin; and
+always he is all delicacy--a delicacy which keeps his large yet
+minute antiquarian knowledge of that vanished time ever in service to
+a direct interest in humanity as it is permanently, alike before and
+after '93.  His book is certainly one well worth possessing.
+
+THE END
+
+16th July 1890
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Essays From 'The Guardian'
+by Walter Horatio Pater
+
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