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-The Project Gutenberg EBook of Ignorant Essays, by Richard Dowling

-

-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/license

-

-

-Title: Ignorant Essays

-

-Author: Richard Dowling

-

-Release Date: September 29, 2016 [EBook #53169]

-

-Language: English

-

-Character set encoding: UTF-8

-

-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IGNORANT ESSAYS ***

-

-

-

-

-Produced by Chuck Greif, MFR and the Online Distributed

-Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was

-produced from images generously made available by The

-Internet Archive)

-

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-

-                           IGNORANT ESSAYS.

-

-

-

-

-                         _IGNORANT_

-

-                                 _ESSAYS._

-

-                    [Illustration: text decoration]

-

-                                LONDON:

-

-                           WARD AND DOWNEY,

-

-                 12, YORK STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C.

-

-                                 1887.

-

-                       [_All Rights Reserved._]

-

-                        RICHARD CLAY AND SONS,

-

-                          LONDON AND BUNGAY.

-

-

-

-

-CONTENTS.

-

-

-                                PAGE

-

-THE ONLY REAL GHOST IN FICTION     1

-

-THE BEST TWO BOOKS                30

-

-LIES OF FABLE AND ALLEGORY        55

-

-MY COPY OF KEATS                  83

-

-DECAY OF THE SUBLIME             117

-

-A BORROWED POET                  132

-

-THE ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER          160

-

-A GUIDE TO IGNORANCE             175

-

-

-

-

-

-IGNORANT ESSAYS.

-

-

-

-

-THE ONLY REAL GHOST IN FICTION.

-

-

-My most ingenious friend met me one day, and asked me whether I

-considered I should be richer if I had the ghost of sixpence or if I had

-not the ghost of sixpence.

-

-“What side do you take?” I inquired, for I knew his disputatious turn.

-

-“I am ready to take either,” he answered; “but I give preference to the

-ghost.”

-

-“What!” I said. “Give preference to the ghost!”

-

-“Yes. You see, if I haven’t the ghost of sixpence I have nothing at

-all; but if I have the ghost of a sixpence----”

-

-“Well?”

-

-“Well, I am the richer by having the ghost of a sixpence.”

-

-“And do you think when you add one more delusion to those under which

-you already labour”--he and I could never agree about the difference

-between infinity and zero--“that you will be the better off?”

-

-“I have not admitted a ghost is a delusion; and even if I had I am not

-prepared to grant that a delusion may not be a source of wealth. Look at

-the South Sea Bubble.”

-

-I was willing, so there and then we fell to and were at the question--or

-rather, the questions to which it led--for hours, until we finally

-emerged upon the crystallization of cast-iron, the possibility of a

-Napoleonic restoration, or some other kindred matter. How we wandered

-about and writhed in that talk I can no more remember than I can recall

-the first articulate words that fell into my life. I know we handled

-ghosts (it was broad day and in a public street) with a freedom and

-familiarity that must have been painful to spirits of refinement and

-reserve. I know we said much about dreams, and compared the phantoms of

-the open lids with the phantoms of the closed eyes, and pitted them one

-against another like cocks in a main, and I remember that the case of

-the dreamer in Boswell’s Johnson came up between us. The case in Boswell

-submitted to Johnson as an argument in favour of a man’s reason being

-more acute in sleep than in waking, showed the phantom antagonistic able

-to floor the dreamer in his proper person. Johnson laughed at such a

-delusion, for, he pointed out, only the dreamer was besotted with sleep

-he would have perceived that he himself had furnished the confounding

-arguments to the shadowy disputant. That is very good, and seems quite

-conclusive as far as it goes; but is there nothing beyond what Johnson

-saw? Was there no ghostly prompter in the scene? No _suggeritore_

-invisible and inaudible to the dreamer, who put words and notes into the

-mouth of the opponent? No thinner shade than the spectral being visible

-in the dream? If in our waking hours we are subject to phantoms which

-sometimes can be seen and sometimes cannot, why not in our sleeping

-hours also? Are all ghosts of like grossness, or do some exist so fine

-as to be beyond our carnal apprehension, and within the ken only of the

-people of our sleep? If we ponderable mortals are haunted, who can say

-that our insubstantial midnight visitors may not know wraiths finer and

-subtler than we, may not be haunted as we are? In physical life

-parasites have parasites. Why in phantom life should not ghosts have

-ghosts?

-

-The firm, familiar earth--our earth of this time, the earth upon which

-we each of us stand at this moment--is thickly peopled with living

-tangible folk who can eat, and drink, and talk, and sing, and walk, and

-draw cheques, and perform a number of other useful, and hateful, and

-amusing actions. In the course of a day a man meets, let us say, forty

-people, with whom he exchanges speech. If a man is a busy dreamer, with

-how many people in the course of one night does he exchange speech? Ten,

-a hundred, a thousand? In the dreaming of one minute by the clock a man

-may converse with half the children of Adam since the Fall! The command

-of the greatest general alive would not furnish sentries and vedettes

-for the army of spirits that might visit one man in the interval between

-one beat of the pendulum of Big Ben and another!

-

-Shortly after that talk with my friend about the ghost of the sixpence,

-I was walking alone through one of the narrow lanes in the tangle of

-ways between Holborn and Fleet Street, when my eye was caught by the

-staring white word “Dreams” on a black ground. The word is, so to speak,

-printed in white on the black cover of a paper-bound book, and under the

-word “Dreams” are three faces, also printed in white on a black ground.

-Two of the faces are those of women: one of a young woman, purporting to

-be beautiful, with a star close to her forehead, and the other of a

-witch with the long hair and disordered eyes becoming to a person of her

-occupation. I dare say these two women are capable not only of

-justification, but of the simplest explanation. For all I know to the

-contrary, the composition may be taken wholly, or in part, from a

-well-known picture, or perhaps some canon of ghostly lore would be

-violated if any other design appeared on the cover. About such matters I

-know absolutely nothing. The word “Dreams” and the two female faces are

-now much less prominent than when I saw the book first, for, Goth that I

-am, long ago I dipped a brush in ink and ran a thin wash over the

-letters and the two faces; as they were, to use artist’s phrases, in

-front of the third face, and killing it.

-

-The third face is that of a man, a young man clean shaven and handsome,

-with no ghastliness or look of austerity. His arms are resting on a

-ledge, and extend from one side of the picture to the other. The left

-arm lies partly under the right, and the left hand is clenched softly

-and retired in half shadow. The right arm rises slightly as it crosses

-the picture, and the right wrist and hand ride on the left. The fore and

-middle fingers are apart, and point forward and a little downward,

-following the sleeve of the other arm. The third finger droops still

-more downward, and the little finger, with a ring on it, lies directly

-perpendicular along the cuff of the sleeve beneath. The hand is not well

-drawn, and yet there is some weird suggestiveness in the purposeless

-dispersion of the fingers.

-

-Fortunately upon my coming across the book, the original cost of which

-was one shilling, I had more than the ghost of a sixpence, and for

-two-thirds of that sum the book became mine. It is the only art purchase

-I ever made on the spur of the moment; I knew nothing of the book then,

-and know little of it now. It says it is the cut-down edition of a much

-larger work, and what I have read of it is foolish. The worst of the

-book is that it does not afford subject for a laugh. Thomas Carlyle is

-reported to have said in conversation respecting one of George Eliot’s

-latest stories that “it was not amusing, and it was not instructive; it

-was only dull--dull.” This book of dreams is only dull. However, there

-are some points in it that may be referred to, as this is an idle time.

-

-“To dream you see an angel or angels is very good, and to dream that you

-yourself are one is much better.” The noteworthy thing in connection

-with this passage being that nothing is said of the complexion of the

-angel or angels! Black or white it is all the same. You have only to

-dream of them and be happy. “To dream that you play upon bagpipes,

-signifies trouble, contention, and being overthrown at law.” Doubtless

-from the certainty, in civilised parts, of being prosecuted by your

-neighbours as a public nuisance. I would give a trifle to know a man who

-did dream that he played upon the bagpipes. Of course, it is quite

-possible he might be an amiable man in other ways.

-

-“To dream you have a beard long, thick, and unhandsome is of a good

-signification to an orator, or an ambassador, lawyer, philosopher or any

-who desires to speak well or to learn arts and sciences.” That

-“ambassador” gleams like a jewel among the other homely folk. I remember

-once seeing a newspaper contents-bill after a dreadful accident with the

-words “Death of fifty-seven people and a peer.” “To dream that you have

-a brow of brass, copper, marble, or iron signifies irreconcilable hatred

-against your enemies.” The man capable of such a dream I should like to

-see--but through bars of metal made from his own sleep-zoned forehead.

-“If any one dreams that he hath encountered a cat or killed one, he will

-commit a thief to prison and prosecute him to the death; for the cat

-signifies a common thief.” Mercy on us! Does the magistrate who commits

-usually prosecute, and is thieving a hanging matter now? This is

-necromancy or nothing; prophecy, inspiration, or something out of the

-common indeed.

-

-“To dream one plays or sees another play on a clavicord, shows the death

-of relations, or funeral obsequies.” I now say with feelings of the most

-profound gratitude that I never to my knowledge even saw a clavicord. I

-do not know what the beastly, ill-omened contrivance is like. The most

-recondite musical instrument I ever remember to have performed on is the

-Jew’s harp; and although there seems to be something weak, uncandid and

-treacherous in the spelling of “clavicord,” I presume the two are not

-identical. In any case I am safe, for I have never dreamed of playing

-even on the Jew’s harp. Here however is a cheerful promise from a

-painful experience--one wants something encouraging after that

-terrifying “clavicord.” “For a man to dream that his flesh is full of

-corns, shows that a man will grow rich proportionately to his corns.” I

-can breathe freely once more, having got away from outlandish musical

-instruments and within the influence of the familiar horn.

-

-As might be expected, it is not useful to dream about the devil. Let

-sleeping dogs lie. “To dream of eating human flesh” is also a bad way of

-spending the hours of darkness. It is lucky to dream you are a fool. You

-see, even in sleep, the virtue of candour brings reward. “To dream that

-you lose your keys signifies anger.” And very naturally too. “To dream

-you kill your father is a bad sign.” I had made up my mind not to go

-beyond the parricide, but I am lured on to quote this, “To dream of

-eating mallows, signifies exemption from trouble and dispatch of

-business, because this herb renders the body soluble.” I will not say

-that Nebuchadnezzar may not at one time have eaten mallows among other

-unusual herbs, but I never did. That however is not where the wonder

-creeps in. It is at the reason. If you eat mallows you will have no

-trouble _because_ this herb renders the body _soluble_. Why is it good

-to render the body soluble, and what is the body soluble in? One more

-and I am done. “To dream one plays, or sees another play, upon the

-virginals, signifies the death of relations, or funeral obsequies.” From

-bagpipes, clavicords, and virginals, we hope we may be protected. And

-yet if these are the only instruments banned, a person having an

-extensive acquaintance with wind and string instruments of the orchestra

-may be musical in slumber without harm to himself or threat to his

-friends.

-

-In the interpretation of dreams Artemidorus was the most learned man

-that ever lived. He gave the best part of his life to collecting matter

-about dreams, and this he afterwards put together in five books. He

-might better have spent his time in bottling shadows of the moon.

-

-It was however for the face of the man on the cover that I bought and

-have kept the book. The face is that of a man between thirty and

-thirty-five years of age. It is regular and handsome. The forehead leans

-slightly forward, and the lower part of the face is therefore a little

-foreshortened. It is looking straight out of the picture; the shadows

-fall on the left of the face, on the right as it fronts you. The nose is

-as long and broad-backed as the nose of the Antinous. The mouth is large

-and firm and well-shaping with lips neither thick nor thin. The interval

-between the nostrils and verge of the upper lip is short. The chin is

-gently pointed and prominent. The outline of the jaws square. The

-modelling of the left cheek is defectively emphasised at the line from

-above the hollow of the nostrils downward and backward. The brows are

-straight, the left one being slightly more arched than the right. The

-forehead is low, broad, compact, hard, with clear lines. The lower line

-of the temples projects beyond the perpendicular. The hair is thick and

-wavy and divided at the left side, depressed rather than divided, for

-the parting is visible no further up the head than a splay letter V.

-

-The eyes are wide open, and notwithstanding the obtuse angle made by the

-facial line in the forward pose of the head, they are looking out level

-with their own height upon the horizon. There is no curiosity or

-speculation in the eyes. There is no wonder or doubt; no fear or joy.

-The gaze is heavy. There is a faint smile, the faintest smile the human

-face is capable of displaying, about the mouth. There is no light in the

-eyes. The expression of the whole face is infinitely removed from

-sinister. In it there is kindliness with a touch of wisdom and pity. It

-asks no question; desires to say no word. It is the face of one who

-beyond all doubt knows things we do not know, things which can scarcely

-be shaped into words, things we are in ignorance of. It is not the face

-of a charlatan, a seer, or a prophet.

-

-It is the face of a man once ardent and hopeful, to whom everything that

-is to be known has lately been revealed, and who has come away from the

-revelation with feelings of unassuageable regret and sorrow for Man. It

-says with terrible calmness, “I have seen all, and there is nothing in

-it. For your own sakes let me be mute. Live you your lives. _Miserere

-nobis!_”

-

-My belief is that the extraordinary expression of that face is an

-accident, a happy chance, a result that the artist never foresaw. Who

-drew the cover I cannot tell. No initials appear on it and I have never

-made inquiries. Remember that in pictures and poems (I know nothing of

-music), what is a miracle to you, has in most cases been a miracle to

-the painter or poet also. Any poet can explain how he makes a poem, but

-no poet can explain how he makes poetry. He is simply writing a poem and

-the poetry glides or rushes in. When it comes he is as much astonished

-by it as you are. The poem may cost him infinite trouble, the poetry he

-gets as a free gift. He begins a poem to prepare himself for the

-reception of poetry or to induce its flow. His poem is only a

-lightning-rod to attract a fluid over which he has no control before it

-comes to him. There may be a poetic art, such as verse-making, but to

-talk about the art of poetry is to talk nonsense. It is men of genteel

-intellects who speak of the art of poetry. The man who wrote the _Art of

-Poetry_ knew better than to credit the possible existence of any such

-art. He himself says the poet is born, not made.

-

-I am very bad at dates, but I think Le Fanu wrote _Green Tea_ before a

-whole community of Canadian nuns were thrown into the most horrible

-state of nervous misery by excessive indulgence in that drug. Of all the

-horrible tales that are not revolting, _Green Tea_ is I think the most

-horrible. The bare statement that an estimable and pious man is haunted

-by the ghost of a monkey is at the first blush funny. But if you have

-not read the story read it, and see how little of fun is in it. The

-horror of the tale lies in the fact that this apparition of a monkey is

-the only _probable_ ghost in fiction. I have not the book by me as I

-write, and I cannot recall the victim’s name, but he is a clergyman,

-and, as far as we know to the contrary, a saint. There is no reason _on

-earth_ why he should be pursued by this malignant spectre. He has

-committed no crime, no sin even. He labours with all the sincerity of a

-holy man to regain his health and exorcise his foe. He is as crimeless

-as you or I and infinitely more faultless. He has not deserved his fate,

-yet he is driven in the end to cut his throat, and you excuse _that_

-crime by saying he is mad.

-

-I do not think any additional force is gained in the course of this

-unique story by the importation of malignant irreverence to Christianity

-in the latter manifestations of the ape. I think the apparition is at

-its best and most terrible when it is simply an indifferent pagan,

-before it assumes the _rôle_ of antichrist. This ape is at his best as a

-mind-destroyer when the clergyman, going down the avenue in the

-twilight, raised his eyes and finds the awful presence preceding him

-along the top of the wall. There the clergyman reaches the acme of

-piteous, unsupportable horror. In the pulpit with the brute, the priest

-is fighting against the devil. In the avenue he has not the

-strengthening or consoling reflection that he is defending a cause,

-struggling against hell. The instant motive enters into the story the

-situation ceases to be dramatic and becomes merely theatrical. Every

-“converted” tinker will tell you stirring stories of his wrestling with

-Satan, forgetting that it takes two to fight, and what a loathsome

-creature he himself is. But the conflict between a good man and the

-unnecessary apparition of this ape is pathetic, horribly pathetic, and

-full of the dramatic despair of the finest tragedy.

-

-It is desirable at this point to focus some scattered words that have

-been set down above. The reason this apparition of the ape appears

-probable is _because_ it is unnecessary. Any one can understand why

-Macbeth should see that awful vision at the banquet. The apparition of

-the murdered dead is little more than was to be expected, and can be

-explained in an easy fashion. You or I never committed murder,

-therefore we are not liable to be troubled by the ghost of Banquo. In

-your life or mine Nemesis is not likely to take heroic dimensions. The

-spectres of books, as a rule, only excite our imaginative fears, not our

-personal terrors. The spectres of books have and can have nothing to do

-with us any more than the sufferings of the Israelites in the desert.

-When a person of our acquaintance dies, we inquire the particulars of

-his disease, and then discover the predisposing causes, so that we may

-prove to ourselves we are not in the same category with him. We do not

-deny our liability to contract the disease, we deny our likelihood to

-supply the predisposing causes. He died of aneurysm of the aorta: Ah, we

-say, induced by the violent exercise he took--we never take violent

-exercise. If not of aneurysm of the aorta, but fatty degeneration of the

-heart: Ah, induced by the sedentary habits of his latter years--we take

-care to secure plenty of exercise. If a man has been careful of his

-health and dies, we allege that he took all the robustness out of his

-constitution by over-heedfulness; if he has been careless, we say he

-took no precautions at all; and from either of these extremes we are

-exempt, and therefore we shall live for ever.

-

-Now here in this story of _Green Tea_ is a ghost which is possible,

-probable, almost familiar. It is a ghost without genesis or

-justification. The gods have nothing to do with it. Something, an

-accident due partly to excessive tea-drinking, has happened to the

-clergyman’s nerves, and the ghost of this ape glides into his life and

-sits down and abides with him. There is no reason why the ghost should

-be an ape. When the victim sees the apparition first he does not know it

-to be an ape. He is coming home in an omnibus one night and descries two

-gleaming spots of fire in the dark, and from that moment the life of the

-poor gentleman becomes a ruin. It is a thing that may happen to you or

-me any day, any hour. That is why Le Fanu’s ghost is so horrible. You

-and I might drink green tea to the end of our days and suffer from

-nothing more than ordinary impaired digestion. But you or I may get a

-fall, or a sunstroke, and ever afterwards have some hideous familiar.

-To say there can be no such things as ghosts is a paltry blasphemy. It

-is a theory of the smug, comfortable kind. A ghost need not wear a white

-sheet and have intelligible designs on personal property. A ghost need

-not be the spirit of a dead person. A ghost need have no moral mission

-whatever.

-

-I once met a haunted man, a man who had seen a real ghost; a ghost that

-had, as the ape, no ascertainable moral mission but to drive his victim

-mad. In this case too the victim was a clergyman. He is, I believe,

-alive and well now. He has shaken off the incubus and walks a free man.

-I was travelling at the time, and accidentally got into chat with him on

-the deck of a steamboat by night. We were quite alone in the darkness

-and far from land when he told me his extraordinary story. I do not of

-course intend retailing it here. I look on it as a private

-communication. I asked him what brought him to the mental plight in

-which he had found himself, and he answered briefly, “Overwork.” He was

-then convalescent, and had been assured by his physicians that with

-care the ghost which had been laid would appear no more. The spectre he

-saw threatened physical harm, and while he was haunted by it he went in

-constant dread of death by violence. It had nothing good or bad to do

-with his ordinary life or his sacred calling. It had no foundation on

-fact, no basis on justice. He had been for months pursued by the figure

-of a man threatening to take away his life. He did not believe this man

-had any corporeal existence. He did not know whether the creature had

-the power to kill him or not. The figure was there in the attitude of

-menace and would not be banished. He knew that no one but himself could

-see the murderous being. That ghost was there for him, and there for him

-alone.

-

-Respecting the Canadian nuns whose convent was beleaguered and infested

-by ghostly enemies that came not by ones or twos but in battalions, I

-had a fancy at the time. I do not intend using the terminologies or

-theories of the dissecting room, or the language of physiology found in

-books. I am not sure the fancy is wholly my own, but some of it is

-original. I shall suppose that the nerves are not only capable of

-various conditions of health and disease, but of large structural

-alteration in life; structural alteration not yet recorded or observed

-in fact; structural alteration which, if you will, exists in life but

-disappears instantly at death. In fine, I mean rather to illustrate my

-fancy than to describe anything that exists or could exist. Before

-letting go the last strand of sense, let me say that talking of nerves

-being highly strung is sheer nonsense, and not good nonsense either. The

-muscles it is that are highly strung. The poor nerves are merely

-insulated wires from the battery in the head. Their tension is no more

-affected by the messages that go over them, than an Atlantic cable is

-tightened or loosened by the signals indicating fluctuations in the

-Stock Exchanges of London and New York.

-

-The nerves, let us suppose, in their normal condition of health have

-three skins over the absolute sentient tissue. In the ideal man in

-perfect health, let us say Hodge, the man whose privilege it is to “draw

-nutrition, propagate, and rot,” the three skins are always at their

-thickest and toughest. Now genius is a disease, and it falls, as ladies

-of Mrs. Gamp’s degree say, “on the nerves.” That is, the first of these

-skins having been worn away or never supplied by nature, the patient

-“sees visions and dreams dreams.” The man of genius is not exactly under

-delusions. He does not think he is in China because he is writing of

-Canton in London, but his optic nerve, wanting the outer coating, can

-build up images out of statistics until the images are as full of line

-and colour and as incapable of change at will as the image of a barrel

-of cider which occupies Hodge’s retina when it is imminent to his

-desires, present to his touch. The sensibility of the nerves of genius

-is greater than the sensibility of the nerves of Hodge. Not all the

-eloquence of an unabridged dictionary could create an image in Hodge’s

-mind of a thing he had never seen. From a brief description a painter of

-genius could make a picture--not a likeness of course--of Canton,

-although he had never been outside the four corners of these kingdoms.

-The painting would not, in all likelihood, be in the least like Canton,

-but it would be very like the image formed in the painter’s mind of that

-city. In the painter such an image comes and goes at will. He can either

-see it or not see it as he pleases. It is the result of the brain

-reacting on the nerve. It relies on data and combination. It is his

-slave, not his master. Before it can be formed there must be great

-increase of sensibility. Hodge is crude silver, the painter is the

-polished mirror. The painter can see things which are not, things which

-he himself makes in his mind. His invention is at least as vivid as his

-memory.

-

-I suppose then that the man of genius, the painter or poet, is one who,

-having lost the first skin, or portion of the first skin of his nerves,

-can create and see in his mind’s eye things never seen by the eye of any

-other man, and see them as vividly as men of no genius can see objects

-of memory.

-

-Now peel off the second skin. The more exquisitely sensitive or the

-innermost skin of the nerve is exposed. Things which the eye of genius

-could not invent or even dream of are revealed. A drop of putrid water

-under the microscope becomes a lake full of terrifying monsters large

-enough to destroy man. Heard through the microphone the sap ascending a

-tree becomes loud as a torrent. Seen through a telescope nebulous spots

-in the sky become clusters of constellations. Divested of its second

-skin the nerve becomes sensitive to influences too rare and fine for the

-perception of the optic nerve in a more protected state. Beings that

-bear no relation whatever to weight or the law of impenetrability, float

-about and flash hither and thither swifter than lightning. The air and

-other ponderable matter are nothing to them. They are no more than the

-shadows or reflections of action, the imperishable progeny of thought.

-Here lies disclosed to the partly emancipated nerve the Canton of the

-painter’s vision. Here the city he made to himself is as firm and sturdy

-and solid and full of life as the Canton of this day on the southern

-coast of China. Here throng the unrecorded visions of all the poets.

-Here are the counterfeits of all the dead in all their phases. Here

-float the dreams of men, the unbroken scrolls of life and action and

-thought complete of all beings, man and beast, that have lived since

-time began. In the world of matter nothing is lost; in the world of

-spirit nothing is lost either.

-

-If instead of taking the whole of this imaginary skin off the optic

-nerve, we simply injure it ever so slightly, the nerve may become alive

-to some of these spirits; and this premature perception of what is

-around all of us, but perceived by few, we call seeing ghosts. It may be

-objected that all space is not vast enough to afford room for such a

-stupendous panorama. When we begin to talk of limits of space to

-anything beyond our knowledge and the touch of our inch-tape, we talk

-like fools. There is no good in allotting space with a two-foot rule. It

-is all the same whether we divide zero into infinity or infinity into

-zero. The answer is the same; “I don’t know how many times it goes.”

-Take a cubic inch of air outside your window and see the things packed

-into it. Here interblent we find all together resistance and light and

-sound and odour and flavour. We must stop there, for we have got to the

-end, not of what _is_ packed into that cubic inch of air, but to the end

-of the things in it revealed to our senses. If we had five more senses

-we should find five more qualities; if we had five thousand senses, five

-thousand qualities. But even if we had only our own senses in higher

-form we should see ghosts.

-

-If the third skin were removed from the optic nerve all things we now

-call opaque would become transparent, owing to the naked nerve being

-sensitive to the latent light in every body. The whole round world would

-become a crystal ball, the different degrees of what we now call opacity

-being indicated merely by a faint chromatic modification. What we now

-regard as brilliant sunlight would then be dense shadow. Apocalyptic

-ranges of colour would be disclosed, beginning with what is in our

-present condition the least faint trace of tint and ascending through a

-thousand grades to white, white brighter far than the sun our present

-eyes blink upon. Burnished brass flaming in our present sun would then

-be the beginning of the chromatic scale descending in the shadow of

-yellow, burnished copper of red, burnished tin of black, burnished steel

-of blue. So intense then would the sensibility of the optic nerve become

-that the satellites attendant on the planets in the system of the suns,

-called fixed stars, would blaze brighter than our own moon reflected in

-the sea. To the eye matter would cease to be matter in its present,

-gross obstructive sense. It would be no more than a delicate transparent

-pigment in the wash of a water-colour artist. The gross rotundity of the

-earth would be, in the field of the human eye, a variegated transparent

-globe of reduced luminousness and enormous scales and chords of colour.

-The Milky Way would then be a concave measureless ocean of prismatic

-light with pendulous opaline spheres.

-

-The figures of dreams and ghosts may be as real as we are pleased to

-consider ourselves. What arrogance of us to say they are our own

-creation! They may look upon themselves as superior to us, as we look

-upon ourselves as superior to the jelly-fish. No doubt we are to ghosts

-the baser order, the spirits stained with the woad of earth, low

-creatures who give much heed to heat and cold, and food and motion. They

-are the sky-children, the chosen people. They are nothing but

-circumscribed will wedded to incorporeal reasons of the nobler kind, and

-with scopes the contemplation of which would split our tenement of clay.

-They are the arch-angelic hierarchs of man, the ultimate condition of

-the race, the spirit of this planet distilled by the sun.

-

-

-

-

-THE BEST TWO BOOKS.

-

-

-In no list I met of the best hundred books, when that craze took the

-place of spelling-bees and the fifteen puzzle, do I recollect seeing

-mention made of my two favourite works. These two books stand completely

-apart in my esteem, and if I were asked to name the volume that comes

-third, I should have to make a speech of explanation. The first of them

-is not in prose or verse, it is not a work of theology or philosophy or

-science or art or history or fiction or general literature. It is at

-once the most comprehensive and impartial book I know. This paragraph is

-assuming the aspect of a riddle. Being in a mild and passionless way a

-lover of my species, I am a loather of riddles. So I will go no further

-on the downward way, but declare the name, title, and style of my book

-to be Nuttall’s _Standard Dictionary_.

-

-I am well aware there is a great deal to be said against Nuttall’s

-_Dictionary_ as a dictionary, but I am not speaking of it in that sense.

-I am treating it as a dear companion, a true friend, a _vade mecum_. Let

-those who have a liking for discovering spots in the sun glare at the

-orb until they have a taste for nothing else but spots in the sun. I

-find Nuttall so close to my affections that I can perceive no defects in

-him. I cannot bear to hold him at arm’s length, for critical

-examination. I hug him close to me, and feel that while I have him I am

-almost independent of all other books printed in the English language.

-

-Cast your eyes along your own bookshelves of English authors; every

-word, liberally speaking, that is in each and every volume on your

-shelves is in my Nuttall! Here is the juice of the language, from

-Shakespeare to Huxley, in a concentrated solution. Here is a book that

-starts by telling you that A is a vowel, and does not desert you until

-it informs you that zythum is a beverage, a liquor made from malt and

-wheat; a fact, I will wager, you never dreamed of before! And between A

-and zythum, what a boundless store of learning is disclosed! This is the

-only single-volume book I know of which no man living is or ever can be

-the master. Charles Lamb would not allow that dictionaries are books at

-all. In his days they were white-livered charlatans compared with the

-full-blooded enthusiast, Nuttall.

-

-If such an unkind thing were desirable as to diminish the conceit of a

-man of average reading and intelligence, there is no book could be used

-with such paralysing effect upon him as this one. It is almost

-impossible for any student to realise the infinite capacity for

-ignorance with which man is gifted until he is brought face to face with

-such a book as Nuttall. The list of words whose meanings are given

-occupies 771 very closely printed pages of small type in double column.

-The letter A takes up from 1 to 52. How many words unfamiliar to the

-ordinary man are to be found in this fifteenth part of the dictionary!

-On the top of every folio there occur four words, one at the head of

-each column. Barring the right of the candidates in ignorance to guess

-from the roots how many well-informed people know or would use any of

-the following words--absciss, acidimeter, acroteleutic, adminicular,

-adminiculator, adustion, aerie, agrestic, allignment, allision,

-ambreine, ampulla, ampullaceous, android, antiphonary, antiphony,

-apanthropy, aponeurosis, appellor, aramaic, aretology, armilla,

-armillary, asiarch, assentation, asymptote, asymptotical, aurate,

-averruncator, aversant, axotomous, or axunge? And yet all these are at

-the heads of columns under A alone! Take, now, one column haphazard

-perpendicularly, and with the same reservation as before, who would use

-antimaniac, antimask, antimasonic, antimeter, antimonite, antinephritic,

-antinomian, antinomy, antipathous, antipedobaptist, antiperistaltic,

-antiperistasis, or antiphlogistic? The letter A taken along the top of

-the pages or down one column is not a good letter for the confusion of

-the conceited; because viewed across the top of the page it is pitifully

-the prey of prefixes which lead to large families of words, and viewed

-down the column (honestly selected at haphazard), it is the bondslave of

-one prefix. When, however, one starts a theory, it is not fair to pick

-and choose. I have, of course, eschewed derivatives in coming down the

-column; across the column I did not do so, as the chance of a prime word

-being at the bottom of one column and its derivate at the top of the

-next ought to count two in my favour. I am aware this claim may be

-disputed; I have disputed it with myself at much too great length to

-record here, and I have decided in my own favour.

-

-Of course the mere reading of the dictionary in a mechanical way would

-produce no more effect than the repetition of numerals abstracted from

-things. There is no greater suggestiveness in saying a million than in

-saying one. But what an enlargement of the human capacity takes place

-when a person passes from the idea of one man to the idea of a million

-men. Take the first word quoted from the head of the column. I had

-wholly forgotten the meaning of absciss. I cannot even now remember

-that I ever knew the meaning of it, though of course I must, for I was

-supposed to have learned conic sections once. Why any one should be

-expected to learn conic sections I cannot guess. As far as I can now

-recall, they are the study of certain possible systems and schemes of

-lines in a wholly unnecessary figure. I believe the cone was invented by

-some one who had conic sections up his sleeve, and devised the miserable

-spinning of the triangle merely to gratify his lust of cruelty to the

-young. The only one use to which cones are put, as far as I am aware, is

-for a weather signal on the sea coast. The only section of a cone put to

-any pleasant use is a frustum when it appears in the bark of the cork

-tree; and even this conic section is not of much use to pleasure until

-it is removed from the bottle. Conic sections are reprehensible in

-another way. They are, in the matter of difficulty, nothing better than

-impostors. They are really “childlike and bland,” and will, when you

-have conquered your schoolboy terror of them, be found agreeable

-after-dinner reading.

-

-But I must return to Nuttall. The systematic study of the book is to be

-deplored. It is, like the Essays of Elia, not to be read through at a

-sitting, but to be dipped into curiously when one is in the vein. The

-charm of Lamb is in the flavour; and one cannot reach the more remote

-and finer joys of taste if one eats quickly. There is no cohesion, and

-but little thought in Nuttall. It is as a spur, an incentive, to thought

-I worship the book, and as a storehouse for elemental lore. You have

-known a thing all your life, let us say, and have called it by a

-makeshift name. You feel in your heart and soul there must be a more

-close-fitting appellation than you employ for it, and you endure a sense

-of feebleness and dispersion of mind. One day you are idly glancing

-through your Nuttall, and suddenly the clouds, the nebulous mists of a

-generalized term, roll away, and out shines, clear and sharply defined,

-the particular definition of the thing. From childhood I have, for

-example, known a pile-driver, and called it a pile-driver for years and

-years. All along something told me pile-driver was no better than a

-loose and off-hand way of describing the machine. It partook of the

-barbarous nature of a hieroglyphic. You drew, as it were, the figure of

-a post, and of a weight descending upon it. The device was much too

-pictorial and crude. Moreover, it was, so described, a thing without a

-history. To call a pile-driver a pile-driver is no more than to describe

-a barn-door cock onomatopoetically as cock-a-doodle-doo--a thing

-repellent to a pensive mind. But in looking over Nuttall I accidentally

-alighted on this: “Fistuca, fis’--tu-ka, _s._ A machine which is raised

-to a given height by pulleys, and then allowed suddenly to fall on the

-head of a pile; a monkey (L. a rammer).” Henceforth there is, in my

-mind, no need of a picture for the machine. So to speak, the abstract

-has become concrete. I would not, of course, dream of using the word

-fistuca, but it is a great source of internal consolation to me.

-Besides, I attain with it to other eminences of curiosity, which show me

-fields of inquiry I never dreamed of before.

-

-I have not met the word monkey in this sense until now. I look out

-monkey in my book, and find one of the meanings “a pile-driver,” and

-that the word is derived from the Italian “_monna_, contraction for

-_madonna_.” Up to this moment I did not know from what monkey was

-derived, although I had heard that from monkey man was derived. All this

-sets one off into a delicious doze of thought and keeps one carefully

-apart from his work. For “who would fardels bear to groan and sweat

-under a weary” load of even pens, when he might lie back and close his

-eyes, and drift off to the Rome of Augustus or the Venice of to-day?

-Philology as mere philology is colourless, but if one uses the records

-of verbal changes as glasses to the past and present, what panchromatic

-hues sweep into the pale field of the dictionary! What myriads of dead

-men stand up out of their graves, and move once more through scenes of

-their former activities! What reimpositions of old times on old earth

-take place! What bravery of arms and beauty of women are renewed; what

-glowing argosies, long mouldered, sparkle once more in the sun! What

-brazen trumpets blare of conquest, and dust of battle roll along the

-plain! What plenitude of life, of movement, of man is revealed! A

-dictionary is to me the key-note in the orchestra where mankind sit

-tuning their reeds for the overture to the final cataclysm of the world.

-

-My second book would be Whitaker’s _Almanack_. Owing to miserable

-ill-luck I have not been able to get a copy of the almanac for this

-year. I offered fair round coin of the realm for it before the Jubilee

-plague of ugliness fell upon the broad pieces of her most gracious

-Majesty. But, alas! no copy was to be had. I was too late in the race.

-All the issue had been sold. The last edition of which I have a copy is

-that for 1886. I have one for each year of the ten preceding, and I

-cannot tell how crippled and humiliated I feel in being without one for

-1887.

-

-This is another of the books that Charles Lamb classes among the

-no-books. As in the case of Nuttall, there was no Whitaker in his day,

-and certainly no almanac at all as good. At first glance this book may

-seem dry and sapless as the elm ready sawn for conversion into parish

-coffins. But how can anything be considered dry or dead when two hundred

-thousand of its own brothers are at this moment dwelling in useful amity

-among our fellowmen? It in one way contrasts unfavourably with almanacs

-which can claim a longer life, there are no vaticinations in it. But if

-the gift of prophecy were possessed by other almanacs, why did they not

-foretell that they would be in the end known as humbugs, and cut their

-conceited throats? I freely own I am a bigot in this matter; I have

-never given any other almanac a fair chance, and, what is worse, I have

-firmly made up my mind not to give any other one any chance at all. What

-is the good of being loyal to one’s friends if one’s loyalty is at the

-beck of every upstart acquaintance, no matter how great his merits or

-how long his purse? I place my faith in Whitaker, and am ready to go to

-the stake (provided it is understood that nothing unpleasant takes place

-there) chaunting my belief and glorying in my doom.

-

-If you took away Whitaker’s _Almanack_ from me I do not know how I

-should get on. It is a book for diurnal use and permanent reference. One

-edition of it ought to be printed on bank note paper for the pocket, and

-another on bronze for friezes for the temple of history. It is worth all

-the Livys and Tacituses that ever breathed and lied. It is more truthful

-than the sun, for that luminary is always eight minutes in advance of

-where it seems to be. It is as impartial and veracious as fossilising

-mud. It contains infinitely more figures than Madame Tussaud’s, and

-teaches of everything above and under the sun, from stellar influences

-to sewage.

-

-How is the daily paper to be understood lacking the aid of Whitaker? Who

-is the honourable member for Berborough, of whom the Chanceller of the

-Exchequer spoke in such sarcastic terms last night? For what place sits

-Mr. Snivel, who made that most edifying speech yesterday? How old is

-the Earl of Champagne, who has been appointed Governor of Labuan? Where

-is Labuan? What is the value in English money of £T97,000, and 2,784,000

-roubles? What are the chances of a man of forty (yourself) living to be

-a hundred? and what is the chance of a woman of sixty-four (your

-mother-in-law) dying next year? How much may one deduct from one’s

-income with a view to income tax before one needs begin to lie? What

-annuity ought a man of your age be able to get for the five thousand

-pounds you expect on the death of your mother-in-law? How much will you

-have to pay to the state if you article your son to a solicitor or give

-him a little capital and start him in an honest business as a

-pawnbroker? How old is the judge that charged dead against the prisoner

-whom the jury acquitted without leaving the box? What railway company

-spends the most money in coal? legal charges? palm oil? Is there

-anything now worth a gentleman’s while to smuggle on his return from the

-Continent? What is the tonnage of the ironclad rammed yesterday morning

-by another ironclad of the Channel squadron? When may one begin to eat

-oysters? What was the most remarkable event last year? How much longer

-is it likely to pay to breed farmers in England?

-

-These are only a few, very few, of the queries Whitaker will answer

-cheerfully for you. Indeed, you can scarcely frame any questions to

-which it will not make a reply of some kind or other. It contains,

-moreover, either direct or indirect reference to every man in the United

-Kingdoms of Great Britain and Ireland. If you occupy a prominent

-official position in any walk in life, you will find yourself herein

-mentioned by name. If you are a simple and prudent trader, you will have

-your name and your goods described elaborately among the advertisements.

-If you come under neither of these heads you are sure to be included,

-not distinguished perhaps personally, under the statistics of the Insane

-or Criminal classes.

-

-All the information on the points indicated may be said to lie within

-the parochial domain of the book. But it has a larger, a universal

-scope, and takes into view all the civilized and half civilized nations

-of all the earth. It contains multitudinous facts and figures about

-Abyssinia, Afghanistan, Annam, Argentine Republic, Austro-Hungary,

-Baluchistan, Belgium, Bokhara, Bolivia, Borneo, Brazil, Bulgaria,

-Eastern Roumelia, Burmah, Corea, Central America, Chili, China, Cochin

-China, Colombia, Congo State, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador,

-Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Hawaiian Islands, Hayti, Italy, Japan,

-Liberia, Madagascar, Mexico, Montenegro, Morocco, Nepal, Netherlands,

-Oman, Orange Free State, Paraguay, Persia, Peru, Portugal, Roumania,

-Russia, Sarawak, Servia, Siam, Sokoto, Spain, Sweden and Norway,

-Switzerland, Tibet, Transvaal, Tripoli, Tunis, Turkey, United States,

-Uruguay, Venezuela, and Zanzibar!

-

-The list takes away one’s breath. The mere recital of it leaves one

-faint and exhausted. Passing the most elementary knowledge of these

-nations and countries through the mind is like looking at a varying

-rainbow while the ears are solicited by a thousand tunes. The names, the

-mere names, of Mexico and Brazil stop my heart with amazement. The

-Aztecs and the Amazon call up such visions of man in decay and nature in

-naked strength that I pause like one in a gorgeous wood held in fear by

-its unfamiliarity. What has the Amazon done in the ages of its

-unlettered history? What did the Aztecs know before they began to revert

-to birds? Then Morocco and Tripoli, what memories and mysteries of man!

-And Sokoto--of which little is known but the name; and that man was here

-before England was dissevered from the mainland of Europe. Turkey, as it

-even now lies crippled and shorn, embraces within its stupendous arms

-the tombs of the greatest empire of antiquity. Only to think of China is

-to grow old beyond the reach of chroniclers. Compared with China,

-Turkey, India, and Russia, even Greece and Rome are mushroom states, and

-Germany and France virgin soil.

-

-But when I am in no humour for contemplation and alarms of eld I take up

-my Whitaker for 1886, and open it at page 285. There begins the most

-incredible romance ever written by man, and what increases its

-incredibility is that it happens to be all true.

-

-At page 285 opens an account of the British Empire. The first article is

-on India, and as one reads, taking in history and statistics with

-alternate breaths, the heart grows afraid to beat in the breast lest its

-motion and sound might dispel the enchantment and bring this “miracle of

-rare device” down about one’s head. The opening statement forbids

-further progress for a time. When one hears that “the British Empire in

-India extends over a territory as large as the continent of Europe

-without Russia,” it is necessary to pause and let the capacity of the

-mind enlarge in order to take in this stupendous fact with its

-stupendous significances.

-

-Here are 254 millions of people living under the flag of Britain! Here

-is a vast country of the East whose history goes back for a thousand

-years from this era, which knew Alexander the Great and was the scene of

-Tamerlane’s exploits, subject to the little island on the western verge

-of modern Europe. Here, paraded in the directest and most prosaic

-fashion, are facts and figures that swell out the fancy almost

-intolerably. Here is one feudatory state, one dependent province, almost

-as populous as the whole empire over which Don Pedro II. reigns in South

-America. Here is a public revenue of eighty millions sterling a year,

-and Calcutta, including suburbs, with a population close upon a million.

-Here are no fewer than fifty-three towns and cities of more than fifty

-thousand people each. Here is a gross number of seven hundred and

-fourteen thousand towns and villages! Is not this one item incredible?

-Just three quarters of a million, not of people or even houses, but of

-“towns and villages!” The population of Madras alone is five-sixths of

-that of the United Kingdom, that of the North-West Provinces and Oudh

-considerably more, and that of Bengal nearly twice as much as England,

-Ireland, Scotland, and Wales together. The Native States have many more

-inhabitants than any country in Europe, except Russia. Bombay equals

-Spain. The Punjaub exceeds Turkey in Asia. Assam exceeds Turkey in

-Europe. The Central Provinces about equal Belgium and Holland together;

-British Burmah, Switzerland. Berar exceeds Denmark, and all taken

-together contain more than the combined populations of the United States

-of America, Austria, Germany, France, Turkey, Italy, Spain, Portugal,

-Holland, and Belgium! All ours absolutely, or in the feudatory leash;

-with more Mohammedans than are to be found in the Sultan’s dominions,

-and a larger revenue than is enjoyed by any country on earth except

-England, France, United States of America, Austria, and Russia!

-

-These are facts and figures enough to set one dreaming for a month. This

-is not an age for epic poetry. It is exceedingly unlikely any poet in

-the present age will seek the framework for his great work in the past.

-The past was all very well in its own day until it was found out.

-Certitudes in bygone centuries have been shaken. The present time is

-wildly volcanic. Now the hidden, throbbing, mad, fierce, upheaving fires

-bulge out the crust of earth under fabrics whilom regarded as

-indestructible, and split their walls, and warp their pillars, and

-choke their domes. It was a good thing for Milton and Dante they lived

-and wrote long ago, for the iconoclasts of to-day are trying to build a

-great wall across heaven and tear up the sacred pavement of hell. They

-tell us the Greek armies were a mob of disorderly and timid cits, and

-that speculations as to the reported dealings of Dr. Faustus with any

-folk but respectable druggists are too childish for the nursery or

-Kaffirs. The golden age is no longer the time that will never come

-again. The past is a fire that has burnt out, a flame that has vanished.

-To kneel before what has been is to worship impotent shadows. Up to this

-man has been wandering in the desert, and until now there have not been

-even trustworthy rumours of the land of promise. But to us has come a

-voice prophesying good things. The Canaan of the ages is in the future

-of time. Taking this age at its own estimate I have long thought the

-subject for the finest epic lying within possibility in our era is the

-building of the railway to India. Into a history of that undertaking

-would flow all the affluents of the ancient world. The stories of

-Baalbec and Nineveh that are finished, and of Aleppo and Damascus that

-survive, would fall into this prodigious tale of peaceful conquest. The

-line would have for marge Assyria on one hand, Egypt on the other; it

-would reach from the land of the Buddhist through the land of the

-Mohammedan to the land of the Christian. It would be a work undertaken

-in honour of the modern god, Progress, through the graves of the oldest

-peoples, to link the three great forms of faith. All the action of the

-epic would take place on earth, and all the actors would be men. There

-would be no need for evolving the god from the machine, for the machine

-itself would be the god. It would be the history of man from his birth

-till this hour. It would be most fitly written in English, for English

-is the most capacious and virile language yet invented by man.

-

-But a mere mortal, such as I, cannot stay in India always, or even abide

-for ever by the way. Although I have _Whitaker’s Almanack_ before me

-all the time, I have strayed a little from it. In thinking of the lands

-through which that heroic line of railway would pass, I have almost

-forgotten the modest volume at my elbow. Yet fragile as it looks, one

-volume similar to it will last as long as the Pyramids, will come in

-time to be as old as the oldest memory is now; that is, if the ruins of

-England endure as long as those of Egypt, for a copy of it lies built up

-under Cleopatra’s Needle.

-

-I turn over the last page of “British India” in my _Almanack_. We are

-not yet done with orient lands and seas. The article over-leaf is headed

-“Other British Possessions in the East.” Here, if one wants incitement

-towards prose or verse, dreaming or doing, commerce or pillage, is

-matter to his hand. The places one may read of are--Aden, Socotra,

-Ceylon, Hong-Kong, Labuan, British North Borneo, and Cyprus. Then in my

-book comes “The Dominion of Canada,” with its territory “about as large

-as Europe”! and a revenue equal to Portugal, which discovered and once

-held India. After Canada come “Other American Possessions,” including

-British Guiana, which, except for the sugar of Demerara, is little heard

-of; it occupies a space of earth as large as all Great Britain. So

-little do people of inferior education know of this dependency, that

-once, when a speaker in the House of Commons spoke of the “island of

-Demerara,” there was not a single member present who knew that Demerara

-was not an island, but part of the mainland of South America. Last in

-the list comes British Honduras, about as big as Wales.

-

-After America, we have our enormous outlying farm in the southern

-hemisphere, “British Possessions in Australasia.” There the land owned

-by England is again about the size of Europe! Then follow “British

-Possessions in the West Indies,” small in mileage, great in fertility

-and richness of produce, and with a population twice that of Eastern

-Roumelia. The “British Possessions in Africa” are considerably larger

-than France, with about half as many inhabitants as Denmark. The

-territories owned in the Southern Atlantic are Ascension, the Falkland

-Islands, South Georgia, and St. Helena. This prodigious list ends with

-the European Possessions, namely, Malta, Gibraltar, Heligoland, the

-Channel Islands, and Isle of Man.

-

-By this time the hand is tired writing down the mere names of the riches

-belonging to Great Britain. Towards the close of my list from Whitaker

-my energy drooped, and a feeling of enervating satiety came upon me. I

-am surfeited with splendours, and, like a tiger filled with flesh, I

-must sleep. But in that sleep what dreams may come! How the imagination

-expands and aspires under the stimulus of a page of tabulated figures!

-How the fancy is excited, provoked, by the spectacle of an endless sea

-in which every quarter of the globe affords a bower for Britannia when

-it pleases her aquatic highness to adventure abroad upon the deep, into

-the farthest realms of the morning, into the regions of the dropping

-sun. Here, in my best two books, are the words of the most copious

-language that man ever spoke, and the facts and figures of the greatest

-realm over which man ever ruled. _Civis Romanus sum!_ I will sleep. I

-will dream that I am alone with my two books. I will speak in this

-imperial, this dominant dialect, as I move by sea and land among the

-peoples who live under the flag flying above me now. Who would encumber

-himself with finite poetry or romance when he may take with him the

-uncombined vocabulary, with its infinite possibilities of affinities,

-and the history of the countries and the peoples that lie beneath this

-flag, and bear in his heart the astounding and exalting

-consciousness--_Civis Romanus sum!_

-

-

-

-

-LIES OF FABLE AND ALLEGORY.

-

-

-Some little while ago the battered and shattered remains of an old

-bookcase with the sedimentary deposit of my own books, reached me after

-a journey of many hundred miles from its former resting place. The front

-of the bookcase is twisted wirework, which, when I remember it first,

-was lined with pink silk. Not a vestige, not a shred of the silk remains

-and the half dozen shelves now depend for preservation in position on a

-frame as crazy as Her Majesty’s ship _Victory_, and certainly older. The

-bookcase had belonged to my grandfather before Trafalgar, and some of

-the books I found in it among the sediment were printed before the Great

-Fire of London. In all there were about a couple or three hundred books,

-none of which would be highly valued by a bibliophile. Owing to my

-being in a very modest way a wanderer on the face of the realm, these

-books had been out of my possession for nearly twenty years, and dusty

-and dilapidated as they were when they reached me I took them in my arms

-as long-lost friends. I had finished the last sentence with the word

-children, but that would not do for two reasons. These books were not

-mine as this one I am now writing is, and long-lost children change more

-than they have changed, or more than friends change. Children grow and

-outpace us and leave us behind and are not so full of companionable

-memories as friends. There is hardly time to make friends of our adult

-children before we are beckoned away. The friends we make and keep when

-we are young have always twenty years’ start of our children in

-friendship. A man may be friendly with his son of five but a father and

-son cannot be full friends until the son is twenty years older.

-

-Again, as to the impropriety of speaking of the books as long-lost

-children I have another scruple. I am in great doubt as to whether the

-recovery of a long-lost child is at all desirable. A long-lost child

-means a young girl or boy of our own who is lost when under ten years of

-age and recovered years afterwards. I do not know that the recovery of

-the missing one is a cause of gratitude. Remember it is not at all the

-child we lost. It is a child alleged or alleging itself to be the child

-we lost. It is more correctly not a child at all, but a lad or lass whom

-we knew when young, and whose acquaintance we have to make over again.

-Our personality has become dim to it, and we have to occupy ourselves

-seriously in trying to identify the unwieldy bulk of the stranger with

-our memory of the wanderer. When the boy went from us we mourned for him

-as dead, and now he comes back to us from the tomb altered all out of

-memory. He is not wholly our child. There is an interregnum in our reign

-over him and we do not know what manner of king has held sway in our

-stead, or, if knowing the usurper, we cannot measure the extent or force

-of his influence. How much of this young person is really our very own?

-how much the development of untoward fate? Is the memory of our lost one

-dearer than the presence of this lad who is half stranger? What we lost

-and mourned was ours surely; how much of what we have regained belongs

-to us?

-

-With books no such question arises. They are our very own. They have

-suffered no increment, but rather loss. What we remember of them and

-find again in them fills us with joy; what we have forgotten and recall

-excites a surprise which makes us feel rich. We reproach ourselves with

-not having loved them sufficiently well, and swear upon them to endow

-them with warmer affection henceforth. In turning over the books in the

-old case I lighted upon one which I believe to be the volume that came

-earliest into my possession. It is Cobbett’s _Spelling-Book_, and by the

-writing on the title page I see it was given to me by my father on the

-second of February, 1854. It is in a very battered and tattered

-condition. I find a youthful autograph of my own on the fly-leaf, the

-Christian name occupying one line, the surname the second; on a third

-line is the name of the town, and on a fourth the number of the street

-and part of the name of the street, the last being, I blush to say,

-ill-spelt. Surely there never was a book hated as I hated this one! At

-that time I had declared my unalterable determination of never learning

-to read. I possessed, until recently, a copy of Valpy’s Latin Grammar of

-about the same date, and I remember I worshipped the Latin Grammar

-compared with the Spelling-Book. I knew _rosa_ before I could read words

-of two syllables, and at this moment I do not know much more Latin than

-I did then. The Spelling-Book was published by Anne Cobbett, at 137,

-Strand, in 1849. It is almost incredible that so short a time ago the

-atrocious woodcuts could be got in England for love or money. There is

-no attempt whatever at overlaying in the printing; the cut pages are all

-what are called “flat pulls.” Here and there through the pages of

-chilling columns of words of one, two, three or more syllables are

-pencil marks indicating the limits of a day’s lesson. What a ruthless

-way they had with us children in those days! When I look at those

-appalling columns of arid words I applaud my childish determination of

-never learning to read if the art were to be acquired only by traversing

-those fearful deserts of unintelligible verbiage. Fancy a child of

-tender years confronted with antitrinitarian, consubstantiality,

-discontinuation, excommunication, extraordinarily, immateriality,

-impenetrability, indivisibility, naturalization, plenipotentiary,

-recapitulation, supererogation, transubstantiation, valetudinarian, and

-volatilization, not one of which is as difficult to spell as one quarter

-the words of one syllable, and not one of which could be understood by a

-child or would be used by a single man out of a thousand in all his

-life. The country had penal settlements then, why in the name of mercy

-did they not send children to the settlements and give them a chance to

-keep their reason and become useful citizens when their time of

-punishment had expired? I am happy to say I find no pencil marks among

-those leviathan words above. I suppose I never got into the deep waters

-where they “wallowing unwieldy in their gait tempest the ocean.”

-

-I wonder was the foundation of a lifelong dislike to Cobbett’s writings

-laid in me at that early time of my existence? Anyway I do not remember

-the day when I did not dislike everything I read of Cobbett’s, and I

-dislike everything of his I read now. I wonder, also, was it at that

-early date the seed of my hatred of fable or allegory was sown? To me

-the fables in the back of that Spelling-Book were always odious, now

-they are loathsome. With the cold-blooded “morals” attendant upon them

-they are the worst form of literary torture I know. I am aware that the

-bulk of them are not original, but Cobbett inserted them in his book,

-and I give him full credit for evil intention. Yet in later years it was

-not his taste for fable that repelled me but his intense combativeness.

-He is never comfortable unless he is mangling some one. It was a pity he

-ever left the army. He would have been a credit to his corps at close

-quarters with a clubbed musket. Even in the Spelling-Book, intended for

-young children, his “Stepping-Stone to Cobbett’s English Grammar” takes

-the form of a dialogue, in which he, the “Teacher,” smashes the

-unfortunate Scholar and Mr. William. Cobbett sprang from the people and

-was a Saxon pure and simple, and the Saxon is the element in the English

-people which has been most undistinguished when unmingled with other

-blood. The Saxon of fifteen hundred years ago is the yokel of to-day,

-and he never was more than a yokel intellectually. The enormous

-intellectual fertility of England is owing to successive invasions, and

-chiefly to the Norman Conquest. All the great and noble and sweet faces

-in English history are Norman, or largely Norman. The awful faces of the

-Gibbon type make periods of English history like a night spectral with

-evil dreams.

-

-Does any one past the condition of childhood really like fables? Mind, I

-do not say past the years of childhood. But does any one of fully mature

-intellect like fables or pleasantly endure allegories? I think not. In

-the vigour of all lives there must be _lacunæ_ of intense indolence,

-backwaters of the mind, where one is willing to float effortless and

-take the things that come as though they were good things rather than

-work at the oars in pursuit of novelties. At such times it is easier to

-persuade ourselves we are amused by books that we admired when we lacked

-experience and discernment than to break new ground and encounter fresh

-obstacles. I am leaving out of account the dull worthy people who say

-they like a book because other people say they like it. These good

-people live in a continual state of self-justification. They are much

-more serenely secure in what they imagine to be their opinions than

-those travailing souls that really have opinions of their own. Their

-life is easy, and in lazy moments one sighs for the repose they enjoy.

-But do not the people with active minds often adhere to childish likings

-merely from indolence? A certain question they settled in their own

-minds when they were ten; it is too much trouble to treat it as an open

-matter at thirty. Consistency in a politician is invariably a sign of

-stupidity, because no man (outside fundamental questions of morals) can

-with credit to his sense remain stationary in opinion for thirty years

-where all is change. The very data on which he based an opinion in the

-year one are vapourized in the year thirty. The foundation of all

-political theories is first principles of some kind, and the only

-support a philosophic mind rejects with disdain is a first principle of

-any kind. Now, the fables we tolerate, nay, admire as children, are in

-imaginative literature what first principles are in that branch of

-imaginary philanthropy called politics. It is much easier to say every

-man has a right to eight shillings a day than to find out what each

-particular man has a right to, or if man has a right to anything at all.

-It is much easier to say one does like Fontaine than at thirty years of

-age to acquire a disgust of him and his fables.

-

-The lying insincerity of fables and their morals always shocks me, and

-the gross blindness of the fabulist to any view of transactions but that

-adopted by him to point his precept, fills me with contempt for him as

-an artist. In the Spelling-Book I do not feel myself at liberty to

-select the fables as I choose. I will take only one, the first that

-comes. It is about the swallow and the sparrow. It is a very bad

-specimen for my contention, but as I am the challenger I have not the

-choice of weapons, and I accept the first presented by Cobbett.

-

-A swallow coming back to her old nest in the spring finds it occupied by

-a sparrow and his brood of young ones. The swallow demands possession on

-the grounds of having built the nest and brought up three broods in it.

-The sparrow will not budge. The swallow summons a number of swallows,

-and they wall up the sparrow and he and his brood die of hunger.

-

-The first notice of bias the reader gets is that the swallow is called

-she, and the sparrow he. Why? For the dishonest purpose of enlisting

-sympathy with the swallow. There is no evidence or statement the sparrow

-was aware when taking possession of the nest that it would be reclaimed

-by the swallow. How was the sparrow to know that the swallow was not

-dead and buried by the mole? The nest was derelict. Again, when the

-swallow returned the sparrow had young ones, which it would be dangerous

-to remove from the nest. How was the sparrow to know the swallow was

-telling the truth, and that the nest was hers? Then, even supposing the

-sparrow to be all in the wrong, the punishment was out of all proportion

-to the offence. The sparrow had done no harm beyond intruding. He had

-not injured the furniture, or burned any of the swallow’s gas, or broken

-into the wine-cellar. Justice would have been vindicated by the

-expulsion of the intruder and his brood. But what takes place instead?

-The door is built up, and the sparrow with his innocent young is

-murdered! Surely if this is a fruitful fable, the moral is immoral. This

-is the old Mosaic theory of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,

-and a little, or rather a great deal more. It is hideously un-Christian.

-I believe Cobbett professed Christianity. Why did he put this odious

-vengeful story in the forefront of his exemplars of righteous doing?

-

-But the worst part of the story is in the Moral. “Thus it always is with

-the unjust,” says the Chorus of the fabulist. He means that the unjust

-are always nailed up in their houses with their blameless children and

-starved to death. Now neither Cobbett nor any other sane preacher

-believes anything of the kind. This is a lie, pure and simple; a lie no

-doubt told with a good object, but a lie all the same. Cobbett had too

-much common-sense not to know that it is not always “thus” with the

-“unjust.” As a rule, the unjust go scot free when they stop short of

-crime. The people who say otherwise are yielding to a feminine,

-sentimental weakness. Poetic justice no doubt does exist--in poetry.

-Most men are as unjust as they dare be, and most men get on comfortably

-from their cradles to their graves. It is only the fools, the men of

-ungovernable passions and impulses and the blunderers who suffer. Man is

-at heart a rapacious brute. All his centuries of civilization have not

-quelled the predatory spirit in him. Any man will become a thief if he

-only be sufficiently tempted when he is sufficiently desperate. The

-crime of the sparrow in appropriating the swallow’s nest is

-intelligible, the crime of the swallow in murdering the sparrow and his

-brood is intelligible, the crime of lying committed by the moralist is

-abominable. When the child to whom Cobbett lied grows up, he will know

-the lie, despise the liar, and have nothing left of the precious fable

-but a shaken faith in the words of all men, whether they be liars like

-Cobbett and the other moralists, or truth-tellers like the ordinary

-everyday folk, who do not pose as teachers and latter-day prophets. It

-is very improving to reflect on the freedom these teachers give

-themselves in act when enforcing their theories in writing. In order

-that Cobbett might exemplify his principles against the credit system,

-he signed his name across the face of acceptances for seventy thousand

-pounds!

-

-Cobbett’s Grammar was written for sailors and soldiers and such men. I

-gave the only copy of it I ever had to a sailor who had abandoned living

-on the sea to live by the sea, who had eschewed the paint-pot and the

-stage aboard the merchant service for the palette and stool of the

-studio. It is years since I have seen the book, but I remember the

-contemptuous way in which the ex-soldier disposes of prosody. He says to

-his pupil in effect: You need pay no attention to this branch of

-grammar, as it deals only with the _noise_ made by words. Cobbett’s

-treatment of prosody does not occupy more than one line or one line and

-a half of print. It is briefer than Dr. Johnson’s Syntax:

-

-     “The established practice of grammarians requires that I should

-     here treat of the Syntax; but our language has so little inflexion,

-     or variety of terminations, that its construction neither requires

-     nor admits many rules. Wallis, therefore, has totally neglected it;

-     and Jonson, whose desire of following the writers upon the learned

-     languages made him think a syntax indispensably necessary, has

-     published such petty observations as were better omitted.

-

-     “The verb, as in other languages, agrees with the nominative in

-     number and person; as _Thou fliest from good; He runs to death_.

-

-     “Our adjectives are invariable.

-

-     “Of two substantives the noun possessive is the genitive; as _His

-     father’s glory; the sun’s heat_.

-

-     “Verbs transitive require an oblique case; as _He loves me; You

-     fear him_.

-

-     “All prepositions require an oblique case: _He gave this to me; He

-     took this from me; He says this of me; He came with me_.”

-

-That is all the merciful Dr. Samuel Johnson has to say about syntax. Oh,

-Lindley Murray! Oh, memories of youth! Does it seem possible that

-Johnson could have enjoyed the luxury of speaking in this light and airy

-and debonair way of English grammar in his day, and that Lindley Murray

-could have matured his awful Grammar in so few years afterwards?

-Recollect there were not forty years between the lexicographer and the

-grammarian. Could not Lindley Murray have left the unfortunate English

-language alone? Johnson says no one need bother about syntax, and

-Cobbett says no one need bother about prosody. Thus we have only

-orthography and etymology to look after, when in comes Murray and spoils

-all! It is doubtful if the language will ever recover the interference

-of that Yankee merchant who invented syntax and made the life of dull

-school boys and girls a path of thorns and agony.

-

-An allegory is a fable for fools of larger growth. I am writing in an

-off-hand way, and I will not pause to examine the question nicely; but

-is there any such thing as a successful allegory? I have no experience

-of one. I seem to hear a loud shout of “_The Pilgrim’s Progress_.” Well,

-I never could read the book through, and I have tried at least twenty

-times. I have put the reading of that book before myself in the most

-solemn manner. I have told myself over and over again that I ought to

-read it as an educational exercise. In vain. How any man with

-imagination can bear the book I do not know. Bunyan had inexhaustible

-invention, but no imagination. He saw a reason for things, not the

-things themselves. No creation of the imagination can lack consequence

-or verisimilitude. On almost every page of the _Progress_ there is

-violation of sequence, outrage against verisimilitude. Christian has a

-great burden on his back and is in rags. He cannot remove the burden.

-(Why?) He is put to bed (with the burden on his back), then he is

-troubled in his mind (the burden is forgotten, and the vision altered

-completely and fatally); again we are reminded that he has the burden

-on his back when he tells Evangelist of it. Why can he not loose the

-burden on his back? How is it secured so that he cannot remove it? He

-cannot see a wicket gate across a very wide field, but he sees a shining

-light (where?), and then he begins to run (burden and all) away from his

-wife and children (which is immoral and abhorrent to the laws of God and

-man). For the mere selfish ease of his body he deserts his wife and

-children, who must be left miserably poor, for is he not in rags? The

-neighbours come out and mock at him for running across a field. Why? How

-do they know why he runs, and what neighbours are there to come out and

-mock at one when one is running across a large field? The Slough of

-Despond is in this field (for he has not passed through the wicket

-gate), and he does not seem to know of the Slough, or think of avoiding

-it. Fancy any man not knowing of such a filthy hole within a field of

-his home! How is it that Pliable and Obstinate have no burdens on their

-backs? It is not the will of the King that the Slough should be

-dangerous to wayfarers: this surely is blasphemy. The whole thing is

-grotesquely absurd and impossible to imagine. There is no sobriety in

-it, no sobriety of keeping in it; and no matter how wild the effort or

-vision of imagination may be there must always be sobriety of keeping in

-it or it is delirium not imagination, disease not inspiration. As far as

-I can see there is no trace of imagination, or even fancy, in the

-_Pilgrim’s Progress_. The story never happened at all. It is a horrible

-attempt to tinkerise the Bible.

-

-One of the things I cannot understand about Macaulay is that he stands

-by Bunyan’s silly book. Macaulay was a man of vast reading and

-acquirements and of common-sense tastes. He was not a poet, but he was

-very nearly one, and ought to have responded in sympathy with poets. In

-politics he belonged to that most melancholy of all sects, the Whigs,

-and it may be that the spirit of political compromise to which he had

-familiarised himself in public life had slipped unknown to him into his

-literary briefs. Anyway, he himself says that the _Pilgrim’s Progress_

-is the only book which was promoted from the kitchen to the

-drawing-room. There is no difficulty in accounting for the fact that the

-book was popular among scullions and cooks, but how it ever gained

-currency among people of moderate education and taste cannot be

-explained. It is the most dull and tedious and monstrous book of any

-note in the English language, and how any man with a gleam of

-imagination can like it is more than I can understand. If one has been

-familiar with it when young, one may tolerate it on the score of

-tenderness--tenderness for memories and laziness in new enterprises; but

-I never yet knew any one with even fancy who, meeting it for the first

-time after the dawn of adolescence, could even endure it.

-

-It is like celebrating one’s own apotheosis to drop Bunyan and take up

-Spenser. Here we share the air with an immortal god and not a bilious

-enthusiast. When I have laid aside the _Spelling-Book_ and the

-_Pilgrim’s Progress_, and opened the _Faerie Queen_, I feel as though

-the leaden clouds of the north had rolled away, disclosing the blue of

-Ægean skies; as though for squalid porridge and buttermilk had been

-substituted ambrosia and nectar; as though for fallow and stubble had

-drifted under my feet soft meadow-grass dense with flowers; as though

-the moist and clayey crags had changed into purple hills, the

-green-mantled pools to azure lakes, the narrow waters of a stagnant mere

-to the free imperial waves and tides of the ocean. It is better than

-escaping out of an East-end slum into the green lanes and roads of

-Warwickshire.

-

-And yet, melancholy truth! the _Faerie Queen_ is most unpopular and most

-unreadable. It has with justice, I think, been said that of ten thousand

-people who begin the _Faerie Queen_, not ten read half way through it,

-and only one arrives at the end. I find by a mark in my copy that I have

-got a good deal more than half through it, but that I have not reached

-the last line of this most colossal fragment of a poem. What a mercy the

-rest of it was drowned in the Irish sea! My _Faerie Queen_ occupies 792

-pages of five stanzas to the page; that is, between thirty-five and

-thirty-six thousand verses, two hundred and sixty to seventy thousand

-words, or equal in length to a couple of ordinary three-volume novels!

-And still it is _unperfite_! I find that although I have owned the book

-for twenty years, I have got no further than page 472, so that I have

-read only three-fifths of the fragment of this stupendous poem.

-

-It is not the length alone that defeats the reader. In all the field of

-English verse there is no poem of great length that comes upon the mind

-with more full and easy flow. The stanza after a long while becomes, no

-doubt, monotonous, but it is the monotony of a vast and freightful river

-that moves majestically, bearing interminable argosies of infinite

-beauty and variety and significance. After one hundred pages one might

-put down the book, wearied by the melodious monotony of the imperial

-chords. I have never been able to read anything like a hundred, anything

-like fifty pages at a time. I think I have rarely exceeded as many

-stanzas. Spenser is the poets’ poet, and the _Faerie Queen_ the poets’

-poem, and yet even the poets cannot read it freely and fully, as one

-reads Milton or Shakespeare or Shelley or Keats or the readable parts of

-Coleridge, all of whom are poets’ poets also.

-

-The allegory bars the way. One reads on smoothly and joyously about a

-wood or a nymph, or a knight or a lady, or a castle or a dragon, and is

-half drunk on the wealthy poet’s mead (is not Spenser the wealthiest of

-English poets?), when suddenly Dan Allegory comes along and assures you

-that it is not a wood or a nymph, or a knight or lady, or a castle or

-dragon, but a virtue or a vice posing in property clothes; that in fact

-things are not what they seem, but visions are about. Cobbett intended

-his fables for little children, and Bunyan his allegory for the company

-of the stewpans, but Spenser’s story is for the ears of ladies and of

-knights; why then does he try to spoon-feed them with virtuous

-sentiment? There is not, as far as I know, a trace of dyspepsia in all

-the _Faerie Queen_, and yet he has sicklied it over “with the pale cast

-of thought.” In this Vale of Tears there are quite as many virtuous

-persons as any reasonable man can desire. Why should our poets--those

-rare and exquisite manifestations of our possibilities--turn themselves

-into moralists, who are, bless you, as common as grocers, as plentiful

-as mediocrity. In fact, nine-tenths of the civilised race of man are

-moralists. But poets ought not to be theorists. They are not sent to us

-for the purpose of converting us, but for the purpose of delighting us.

-They ought to be catholic and pagan. They are among the settled property

-of joy to which all mankind are heirs. They come in among the flowers

-and colours of the sky and earth, and the vocal rapture of the birds,

-and the perfumes of the breeze, and the love of woman and children and

-friends and kind. They are sent to us for our mere delight. They never

-grow less or fade away or change. They have nothing to do with dynasties

-or creeds or codes of manners. They are apart from all bias and strife.

-The will of Heaven itself is against poets preaching, for no poet has

-ever written hymns that were not a burden upon his reputation as a

-singer, and did not weigh him to the ground, compared with his flight

-when free and catholic and pagan.

-

-After entertaining the nightmares of dulness born of Cobbett and Bunyan,

-how one’s shoulders swing back, one’s chest opens, and one’s breath

-comes with large and ample coolness and joy as one reads--

-

-    “The ioyous day gan early to appeare;

-     And fayre Aurora from the deawy bed

-     Of aged Tithone gan herselfe to reare

-     With rosy cheekes, for shame as blushing red:

-     Her golden locks, for hast, were loosely shed

-     About her eares, when Una her did marke

-     Clymbe to her charet, all with flowers spred,

-     From heven high to chace the chearelesse darke;

-     With mery note her lowd salutes the mountain larke.”

-

-Or again here--

-

-    “Then forth he called that his daughter fayre,

-     The fairest Un’, his onely daughter deare,

-     His onely daughter and his onely hayre;

-     Who forth proceeding with sad sober cheare,

-     As bright as doth the morning starre appeare

-     Out of the east with flaming lockes bedight,

-     To tell that dawning day is drawing neare

-     And to the world does bring long wished light:

-     So fair and fresh that lady shewd herselfe in sight.”

-

-Is it not a miserable destiny to be obliged to read stanza after stanza

-redolent of such rich perfumed words about the lady, and then to find

-that Una is not a mortal or a spirit even--but Truth! An abstraction! A

-whim of degrading reason! A figment of a moralist’s heated and

-disordered brain. Any Lie of a poet is better than any Truth of a

-moralist. Why did Spenser stoop to run on the same intellectual plain as

-the accidental teacher? The teacher would have done admirably for Truth,

-but all the worthy essayists of England in the “spacious days of Queen

-Elizabeth,” put together, could not have written the stanzas about Una

-as Spenser saw her. This poaching of poets on the preserves of moralists

-is one of the most shameful things in the history of art.

-

-There are few poets it is harder to select quotations from than Spenser.

-The fact is, all the _Faerie Queen_ ought to be quoted except the

-blinding allegory. I find that in years of my movement from the opening

-of the poem to page 472, the limit I have reached, I have marked a

-hundred passages at least, some of them running through pages. In no

-other poem--except Shelley’s _Alastor_--do I notice such grievous,

-continuous pencil scores. What is one to do? Whither is one to turn? As

-I handle the book I am lost in a deeper forest of delight than ever

-knight of Gloriana’s trod. Here I find a passage of several stanzas

-marked. I am much too lazy to copy them, and the spelling is troublesome

-often. But who can resist this?--

-

-                        “---- And, when she spake,

-    Sweete wordes, like dropping honny, she did shed,

-    And twixt the perles and rubins softly brake

-    A silver sound, that heavenly musicke seemed to make.

-

-        *       *       *       *       *

-

-    Upon her eyelids many graces sate

-    Under the shadow of her even browes.”

-

-I have quoted the three lines and a half of the earlier stanza merely

-that they may act as an overture to the last two lines. Surely there are

-no two lovelier lines in the language! In the last line the words seem

-to melt together of their own propinquity.

-

-Here is an alexandrine that haunts me night and day--

-

-    “Sweete is the love that comes alone with willingnesse.”

-

-As a rule, I hate writing with the books I am speaking of near me; they

-fetter one cruelly when they are at hand. There is a tendency to verify

-one’s memory, and read up the context of favourite lines. This is

-checking to the speed and chilling to the spirits. When I was saying

-something about the _Spelling-Book_ and the _Pilgrim’s Progress_, I had

-the copies within arm’s length, for I did not know either well enough to

-trust to memory. Since I got done with them I have placed them in

-distant safety. But one likes to handle Spenser--to have it nigh. My

-copy is lying at my left elbow in the blazing sun as I write now. It

-seems to me I shall never again look into the _Spelling-Book_ or the

-_Pilgrim’s Progress_. Fables and allegories are only foolishnesses fit

-for people of weak intellect and children. Well, when I put down this

-pen, and before this ink is dry, I shall have resumed my interrupted

-reading of the _Faerie Queen_ at page 473. My intellect is too weak and

-my heart too childish to resist the seduction of Spenser’s verse. So

-much for my own theory of allegory and my respect for my own theory.

-

-

-

-

-MY COPY OF KEATS.

-

-

-The only copy of Keats I ever owned is a modest volume published by

-Edward Moxon and Co. in the year 1861. By writing on its yellow fly-leaf

-I find it was given to me four years later, in September 1865. At that

-time it was clean and bright, opened with strict impartiality when set

-upon its back, and had not learned to respond with alacrity to hasty

-searches for favourite passages.

-

-The binding is now racked and feeble from use; and if, as in army

-regulations, service under warm suns is to be taken for longer service

-in cooler climes, it may be said that to the exhaustion following

-overwork have been added the prejudices of premature age.

-

-It is not bound as books were bound once upon a time, when they

-outlasted the tables and chairs, even the walls; ay, the very races and

-names of their owners. The cover is simple plain blue cloth; on the back

-is a little patch of printing in gold, with the words Keats’s _Poetical

-Works_ in the centre of a twined gilt ribbon and twisted gilt flowers.

-The welt at the back is bleached and frayed; the corners of the cover

-are battered and turned in. There is a chink between the cover and the

-arched back; and the once proud Norman line of that arc is flattened and

-degraded, retaining no more of its pristine look of sturdy strength than

-a wheaten straw after the threshing.

-

-In a list of new books preceding the biography of the poet I find the

-volume I speak of under the head “POETRY--_Pocket Editions_;” described

-as “Keats’s _Poetical Works_. With a Memoir by R. M. Milnes. Price 3_s._

-6_d._ cloth.” It was from no desire to look my gift-horse in the mouth I

-alighted upon the penultimate fact disclosed in the description. When I

-become owner of any volume my first delight in it is to read the

-catalogue of new books annexed, if there be any, before breaking my fast

-upon the subject-matter of the writer in my hand--as a poor gentleman

-in a spacious restaurant, who, having ordered luncheon, consisting of

-bread and cheese, butter, and a half-pint of bitter ale, takes up the

-bill of fare and the list of wines, and designs for his imagination a

-feast his purse denies to his lips.

-

-If any owner of a cart of old books in Farringdon Street asked you a

-shilling for such a copy of Keats as mine, you would smile at him. You

-would think he had acquired the books merely to satisfy his own taste,

-and now displayed them to gratify a vanity that was intelligible; you

-would feel assured no motive towards commerce could underlie ever so

-deeply such a preposterous demand.

-

-My copy will, I think, last my time. Already it has been in my hands

-more than half the years of a generation; and I feel that its severest

-trials are over. In days gone by it made journeys with me by sea and

-land, and paid long visits to some friends, both when I went myself, and

-when I did not go. Change of air and scene have had no beneficial effect

-upon it. Journey after journey, and visit after visit, the full cobalt

-of the cloth grew darker and dingier, the boards of the cover became

-limper and limper, and the stitching at the back more apparent between

-the sheets, like the bones and sinews growing outward through the flesh

-of a hand waxing old.

-

-Once, when the book had been on a prolonged excursion away from me, it

-returned sadly out of sorts. Had it been a dear friend come back from

-India on sick-leave, after an absence from temperate skies of twenty

-years, I could not have observed a more disquieting change. The cover

-was darkened so that the original hue had almost wholly disappeared,

-save at the edges, that, like the Indian veteran’s forehead, were of

-startling and unwholesome pallor. Its presence in such guise aroused a

-gnawing solicitude which undermined all peace. I could not endure the

-symptoms of its speedy decline, the prospect of its dissolution; and to

-shield its case from harm and my sensibilities from continual assault, I

-wrapped it with sighs and travail of heart in a gritty cover of

-substantial brown paper.

-

-For a while, the consciousness that my book was safe compensated for

-the unfamiliarity of its appearance and my constitutional antipathy to

-contact with brown paper, even a lively image of which makes me cringe.

-

-But as days went on the brown paper entered into my soul and rankled.

-What! was my Keats to be clad in that wretched union garb, that livery

-of poverty acknowledged, that corduroy of the bookshelf? Intolerable!

-Should I, who had, like other men, only my time to live, be denied all

-friendly sight of the natural seeming of my prime friend? My Keats would

-last my time; and why should I hide my friend in an unparticularised

-garb, the uniform of the mean or the needy, merely that those who came

-after me might enjoy a privilege of which senseless timidity sought to

-rob me? No; that should not be. I would cast away the badge of beggary,

-and, like a man, face the daily decay of my old companion. I tore the

-paper off, threw it upon the fire, and set my disenthralled Keats in its

-own proper vesture on the shelf among its comrades and its peers.

-

-There is no man, how poor soever, who has not some taste which, for his

-circumstances, must be regarded as expensive; and in that “sweet

-unreasonableness” of human nature, not at all limited to “the Celt,” men

-take a kind of foolish pride in their particular extravagances. You know

-a man that declares he would sooner go without his dinner than a clean

-shirt; another who would prefer one good cigar to a pound of cavendish;

-one who would rather travel to the City of winter mornings by train

-without an overcoat than by vulgar tramcar in fur and pilot cloth; a

-fourth who would more gladly give his right hand than forget his Greek;

-a fifth who pays the hire of a piano and does without the beer which as

-a Briton is his birthright; a sixth who starves himself and stints his

-family for the love of a garden. For my own part, I felt the using of my

-Keats without protection of any kind to be beyond my means, but I

-gloried in this extravagance. It seemed rich to be thus hand and glove

-with the book: to touch it when and where I would, and as much as ever I

-liked: to feel assured that even with free using and free lending it

-would outlast my short stay here, as the blossoms of the roses in a

-friend’s hedge outlast your summer visit. Was it not fine, did it not

-strike a chord of kingly generosity, to be able to say to a friend,

-“Here is my copy of Keats. Take it, use it, read it. There is plenty of

-it for you and me”? I would rather have the lending of my Keats than the

-bidding to a banquet.

-

-So it fell out that my favourite went more among my friends than ever,

-and accumulated at a usurious rate all manner of marks and stains, and

-defacements, and dog-ears, and other unworded comments, as well as

-verbal comments expressed in pencil and ink. It is true that a rolling

-stone gathers no moss, but a rolling snowball gathers more snow, and

-moss and snow are of about equal value. Oliver Wendell Holmes says, if I

-may trust my memory, that only three things improve with years: violins,

-wine, and meerschaum pipes. He loves books, and knows books as well as

-any man now living--almost as well as Charles Lamb did when he was with

-us; and yet Dr. Holmes does not think books worthy of being included in

-the list of things that time ripens. Is this ingratitude or

-carelessness, or does it mean that books dwell apart, and are no more to

-be classed with mere tangible things than angels, or mathematical

-points, or the winds of last winter? Is a book to him an ethereal record

-of a divine trance? an insubstantial painting of a splendid dream? the

-music of a yesterday fruitful in heavenly melody? the echo of a syren’s

-song haunting a sea shell?

-

-Does not De Quincey tell us that, having lent some books to Coleridge,

-the poet not only wrote the lender’s name in them, but enriched the

-margins with observations and comments on the texts? Who would not give

-a tithe of the books he has for one volume so gloriously illuminated? I

-remember when I was a lad, among lads, a friend of ours picked up

-secondhand Cary’s Dante, in which was written the name of a poet still

-living, but who is almost unknown. We loved the living poet for his

-work, and when the buyer told us that the Dante bore not only the poet’s

-name, but numerous marginal notes and hints in his handwriting, we all

-looked upon the happy possessor with eyes of envious respect. The

-precious volume was shown to us, not in groups, for in gatherings there

-is peril of a profaning laugh, or an unsympathetic sneer. One by one we

-were handed the book, on still country roads, upon the tranquil heights

-of hills, where we were alone with the brown heather and the plover, or

-on some barren cliff above the summer sea. The familiar printed text

-sank into insignificance beside the blurred pencil lines. Any one might

-buy a fair uncut copy for a crown piece. The text was common

-property--“’twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands.” But

-here before us lay revealed the private workings of a poetic

-imagination, fired by contact with a master of the craft. To us this

-volume disclosed one of our heroes, clad in the homely garb of prose,

-speaking in his own everyday speech, and lifting up his voice in

-admiration, wonder, awe, to the colossal demi-god, in whose presence we

-had stood humiliated and afeard.

-

-My Keats has suffered from many pipes, many thumbs, many pencils, many

-quills, many pockets. Not one stain, one gape, one blot of these would

-I forego for a spick and span copy in all the gorgeous pomp of the

-bookbinder’s millinery. These blemishes are aureolæ to me. They are

-nimbi around the brows of the gods and demi-gods, who walk in the

-triumph of their paternal despot on the clouds metropolitan that

-embattle the heights of Parnassus.

-

-What a harvest of happy memories is garnered in its leaves! How well I

-remember the day it got that faint yellow stain on the page where begins

-the _Ode on a Grecian Urn_. It was a clear, bright, warm, sunshiny

-afternoon late in the month of May. Three of us took a boat and rowed

-down a broad blue river, ran the nose of the boat ashore on the gravel

-beach of a sequestered island and landed. Pulling was warm work, and we

-all climbed a slope, reached the summit, and cast ourselves down on the

-long lush cool grass, in the shade of whispering sycamores, and in a

-stream of air that came fresh with the cheering spices of the hawthorn

-blossom.

-

-One of our company was the best chamber reader I have ever heard. His

-voice was neither very melodious nor very full. Perhaps he was all the

-better for this because he made no effort at display. As he read, the

-book vanished from his sight, and he leaned over the poet’s shoulder,

-saw what the poet saw, and in a voice timid with the sense of

-responsibility, and yet elated with a kind of fearing joy, told of what

-he saw in words that never hurried, and that, when uttered, always

-seemed to hang substantially in the air like banners.

-

-He discovered and related the poet’s vision rather than simulated

-passion to suit the scene. I remember well his reading of the passage:

-

-    “Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave

-     Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;

-     Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,

-     Though winning near the goal--yet, do not grieve;

-     She cannot fade though thou hast not thy bliss,

-     For ever wilt thou love and she be fair!”

-

-He rehearsed the whole of the ode over and over again as we lay on the

-grass watching the vast chestnuts and oaks bending over the river, as

-though they had grown aweary of the sun, and longed to glide into the

-broad full stream.

-

-As he read the lines just quoted, he gave us time to hear the murmur,

-and to breathe the fragrance of those immortal trees. “Nor ever can

-those trees be bare,” in the text has only a semicolon after it. Yet

-here he paused, while three wavelets broke upon the beach, as if he

-could not tear himself away from contemplating the deathless verdure,

-and realising the prodigious edict pronounced upon it. “Bold lover,

-never, never canst thou kiss, though winning near the goal.” At the

-terrible decree he raised his eyes and gazed with heavy-lidded, hopeless

-commiseration at this being, who, still more unhappy than Tithonus, had

-to immortality added perpetual youth, with passion for ever strong, and

-denial for ever final.

-

-“Yet do not grieve.” This he uttered as one who pleads forgiveness of a

-corpse--merely to try to soothe a conscience sensible of an obligation

-that can never now be discharged. “She cannot fade, though thou hast not

-thy bliss, for ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!” Here the reader,

-with eyes fixed and rayless, seemed by voice and pose to be sunk,

-beyond all power of hope, in an abyss of despair. The barren

-immutability of the spectacle appeared to weigh upon him more

-intolerably than the wreck of a people. He spoke the words in a long

-drawn-out whisper, and, after a pause, dropped his head, and did not

-resume.

-

-I recollect that when the illusion he wrought up so fully in my mind had

-passed away in that long pause, and when I remembered that the fancy of

-the poet was expending itself, not on beings whom he conceived

-originally as human, but on the figures of a mere vase, I was seized

-with a fierce desire to get up and seek that vase through all the world

-until I found it, and then smash it into ten thousand atoms.

-

-When I had written the last sentence, I took up the volume to decide

-where I should recommence, and I “turned the page, and turned the page.”

-I lived over again the days not forgotten, but laid aside in memory to

-be borne forth in periods of high festival. I could not bring myself

-back from the comrades of old, and the marvels of the great magician, to

-this poor street, this solitude, and this squalid company of my own

-thoughts--thoughts so trivial and so mean compared with the imperial

-visions into which I had been gazing, that I was glad for the weariness

-which came upon me, and grateful to gray dawn that glimmered against the

-blind and absolved me from further obligation for that sitting.

-

-On turning over the leaves without reading, I find _Hyperion_ opens most

-readily of all, and seems to have fared worst from deliberate and

-unintentional comment. Much of the wear and tear and pencil marks are to

-be set down against myself; for when I take the book with no definite

-purpose I turn to _Hyperion_, as a blind man to the warmth of the sun.

-Some qualities of the poem I can feel and appreciate; but always in its

-presence I am weighed down by the consciousness that my deficiency in

-some attribute of perception debars me from undreamed-of privileges.

-

-I recall one evening in a pine glen, with one man and _Hyperion_. It

-would be difficult to match this man or me as readers. I don’t think

-there can be ten worse employing the English language to-day. I not

-only do not by any inflection of voice expound what I utter, but I am

-often incapable of speaking the words before me. I take in a line at a

-glance, see its import with my own imagination apart from the verbiage,

-which leaves not a shadow of an impression on my mind. When I come to

-the next line I grow suddenly alive to the fact that I have to speak off

-the former one. I am in a hurry to see what line two has to show; so,

-instead of giving the poet’s words for line one, I give my own

-description of the vision it has conjured up in my mind. This is bad

-enough in all conscience; but the friend of whom I speak now, behaves

-even worse. His plan of reading is to stop his voice in the middle of

-line one, and proceed to discuss the merits of line two, which he had

-read with his eye, but not with his lips, and of which the listener is

-ignorant, unless he happen to know the poem by rote.

-

-On that evening in the glen I pulled out Keats, and turned, at my

-friend’s request, to _Hyperion_, and began to read aloud. He was more

-patient than mercy’s self; but occasionally, when I did a most

-exceptionally bad murder on the text, he would writhe and cry out, and I

-would go back and correct myself, and start afresh.

-

-He had a big burly frame, and a deep full voice that shouted easily, and

-some of the comments shouted as I read are indicated by pencil marks in

-the margin. The writing was not done then, but much later, when he and I

-had shaken hands, and he had gone sixteen thousand miles away. As he was

-about to set out on that long journey, he said, “In seven years more

-I’ll drop in and have a pipe with you.” It had been seven years since I

-saw him before. The notes on the margin are only keys to what was said;

-for I fear the comment made was more bulky than the text, and the text

-and comment together would far exceed the limits of such an essay as

-this. I therefore curtail greatly, and omit much.

-

-I read down the first page without meeting any interruption; but when I

-came in page two on

-

-              “She would have ta’en

-    Achilles by the hair and bent his neck,”

-

-he cried out, “Stop! Don’t read the line following. It is bathos

-compared with that line and a half. It is paltry and weak beside what

-you have read. ‘Ta’en Achilles by the hair and bent his neck.’ By Jove!

-can you not see the white muscles start out in his throat, and the look

-of rage, defeat and agony on the face of the Greek bruiser? But how flat

-falls the next line: ‘Or with a finger stay’d Ixion’s wheel.’ What’s the

-good of stopping Ixion’s wheel? Besides, a crowbar would be much better

-than a finger. It is a line for children, not for grown men. It exhausts

-the subject. It is too literal. There is no question left to ask. But

-the vague ‘Ta’en Achilles by the hair and _bent_ his neck’ is perfect.

-You can see her knee in the hollow of his back, and her fingers twisted

-in his hair. But the image of the goddess dabbling in that river of hell

-after Ixion’s wheel is contemptible.”

-

-He next stopped me at

-

-    “Until at length old Saturn lifted up

-     His faded eyes, and saw his kingdom gone.”

-

-“What an immeasurable vision Keats must have had of the old bankrupt

-Titan, when he wrote the second line! Taken in the context it is simply

-overwhelming. Keats must have sprung up out of his chair as he saw the

-gigantic head upraised, and the prodigious grief of the grey-haired god.

-But Keats was not happy in the matter of full stops. Here again what

-comes after weakens. We get no additional strength out of

-

-    “‘And all the gloom and sorrow of the place

-      And that fair kneeling Goddess.’

-

-The ‘gloom and sorrow’ and the ‘goddess’ are abominably

-anticlimacteric.”

-

-    “Yes, there must be a golden victory;

-     There must be gods thrown down and trumpets blown

-     Of triumph calm, and hymns of festival

-     Upon the gold clouds metropolitan,

-     Voices of soft proclaim, and silver stir

-     Of strings in hollow shells; and there shall be

-     Beautiful things made new, for the surprise

-     Of the sky-children; I will give command:

-     Thea! Thea! Thea! where is Saturn?”

-

-“Read that again!” cried my friend, clinging to the grass and breathing

-hard. “Again!” he cried, when I had finished the second time. And then,

-before I could proceed, he sprang to his feet, carrying out the action

-in the text immediately following:

-

-      “This passion lifted him upon his feet,

-    And made his hands to struggle in the air.”

-

-“Come on, John Milton,” cried my friend, excitedly sparring at the

-winds,--“come on, and beat that, and we’ll let you put all your

-adjectives behind your nouns, and your verb last, and your nominative

-nowhere! Why man,”--this being addressed to the Puritan poet--“it

-carried Keats himself off his legs; that’s more than anything you ever

-wrote when you were old did for you. There’s the smell of midnight oil

-off your later spontaneous efforts, John Milton.

-

-“When Milton went loafing about and didn’t mind much what he was writing

-he could give any of them points”--(I deplore the language) “any of

-them, ay, Shakespeare himself points in a poem. In a poem, sir” (this

-to me), “Milton could give Shakespeare a hundred and one out of a

-hundred and lick the Bard easily. How the man who was such a fool as to

-write Shakespeare’s poems had the good sense to write Shakespeare’s

-plays I can never understand. The most un-Shakesperian poems in the

-language are Shakespeare’s. I never read Cowley, but it seems to me

-Cowley ought to have written Shakespeare’s poems, and then his obscurity

-would have been complete. If Milton only didn’t take the trouble to be

-great he would have been greater. As far as I know there are no English

-poets who improved when they ceased to be amateurs and became

-professional poets, except Wordsworth and Tennyson. Shelley and Keats

-were never regular race-horses. They were colts that bolted in their

-first race and ran until they dropped. It was a good job Shakespeare

-gave up writing rhymes and posing as a poet. It was not until he

-despaired of becoming one and took to the drama that he began to feel

-his feet and show his pace. If he had suspected he was a great poet he

-would have adopted the airs of the profession and been ruined. In his

-time no one thought of calling a play a poem--that was what saved the

-greatest of all our poets to us. The only two things Shakespeare didn’t

-know is that a play may be a poem and that his plays are the finest

-poems finite man as he is now constructed can endure. It is all nonsense

-to say man shall never look on the like of Shakespeare again. It is not

-the poet superior to Shakespeare man now lacks, but the man to apprehend

-him.”

-

-I looked around uneasily, and found, to my great satisfaction, that

-there was no stranger in view. My friend occupied a position of

-responsibility and trust, and it would be most injurious if a rumour got

-abroad that not only did he read and admire verse, but that he held

-converse with the shades of departed poets as well. In old days men who

-spoke to the vacant air were convicted of necromancy and burned; in our

-times men offending in this manner are suspected of poetry and

-ostracized.

-

-As soon as my friend was somewhat calmed, and had cast himself down

-again and lit a pipe, I resumed my reading. He allowed me to proceed

-without interruption until I came to:

-

-                      “His palace bright,

-    Bastion’d with pyramids of glowing gold,

-    And touch’d with shade of bronzed obelisks,

-    Glared a blood-red through all its thousand courts,

-    Arches, and domes, and fiery galleries;

-    And all its curtains of Aurorian clouds

-    Flushed angerly: while sometimes eagles’ wings,

-    Unseen before by Gods or wondering men,

-    Darken’d the place; and neighing steeds were heard,

-    Not heard before by Gods or wondering men.”

-

-“Prodigious!” he shouted. “Go over that again. Keep the syllables wide

-apart. It is a good rule of water-colour sketching not to be too nice

-about joining the edges of the tints; this lets the light in. Keep the

-syllables as far apart as ever you can, and let the silentness in

-between to clear up the music. How the gods and the wondering men must

-have wondered! Do you know, I am sure Keats often frightened, terrified

-himself with his own visions. You remember he says somewhere he doesn’t

-think any one could dare to read some one or another aloud at midnight.

-I believe that often in the midnight he sat and cowered before the

-gigantic sights and sounds that reigned despotically over his fancy.”

-

-                  “O dreams of day and night!

-    O monstrous forms! O effigies of pain!

-    O spectres busy in a cold, cold gloom!

-    O lank-ear’d Phantoms of black-weeded pools!

-    Why do I know ye? why have I seen ye? why

-    Is my eternal essence thus distraught

-    To see and to behold these horrors new?

-    Saturn is fallen, am I too to fall?

-    Am I to leave this haven of my rest,

-    This cradle of my glory, this soft clime,

-    This calm luxuriance of blissful light,

-    These crystalline pavilions, and pure fanes,

-    Of all my lucent empire? It is left

-    Deserted, void, nor any haunt of mine.

-    The blaze, the splendour, and the symmetry

-    I cannot see--but darkness, death and darkness.

-    Even here, into my centre of repose,

-    The shady visions come to domineer,

-    Insult, and blind and stifle up my pomp--

-    Fall!--No, by Tellus and her briny robes!

-    Over the fiery frontier of my realms

-    I will advance a terrible right arm

-    Shall scare that infant thunderer, rebel Jove,

-    And bid old Saturn take his throne again.”

-

-“What more magnificent prelude ever was uttered to oath than the portion

-of this speech preceding ‘No, by Tellus’! What more overpowering,

-leading up to an overwhelming threat, than the whole passage going

-before ‘Over the fiery frontier of my realms I will advance a terrible

-right arm’! What menacing deliberativeness there is in this whole

-speech, and what utter completeness of ruin to come is indicated by

-those words, ‘I will advance a terrible right arm’! You feel no sooner

-shall that arm move than ‘rebel Jove’s’ reign will be at an end, and

-that chaos will be left for Saturn to rule and fashion once more into

-order. Shut up the poem now. That’s plenty of _Hyperion_, and the other

-books of it are inferior. There is more labour and more likeness to

-_Paradise Lost_.” And so my friend, who is 16,000 miles away, and I

-turned from the Titanic theme, and spoke of the local board of

-guardians, or some young girl whose beauty was making rich misery in the

-hearts of young men in those old days.

-

-There is no other long poem in the volume bearing any marks which

-indicate such close connection with any individual reader as in the case

-of _Hyperion_. _Endymion_ boasts only one mark, and that expressing

-admiration of the relief afforded from monotony of the heroic couplets

-by the introduction in the opening of the double rhyming verses:

-

-    “Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing

-     Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing--”

-

-The friend to whom this mark is due never handled the volume, never even

-saw it; but once upon a time when he, another man, and I had got

-together, and were talking of the “gallipot poet,” the first friend said

-he always regarded this couplet as most happily placed where it appears.

-So when I reached home I marked my copy at the lines. Now, when I open

-the volume and find that mark, it is as good to me as, better than, a

-photograph of my friend; for I not only see his face and figure, but

-once more he places his index-finger on the table, as we three sit

-smoking, and whispers out the six opening lines, ending with the two I

-have quoted. Suppose I too should some day go 16,000 miles away from

-London, and carry this volume with me, shall I not be able to open it

-when I please, and recall what I then saw and heard, what I now see and

-hear, as distinctly as though no long interval of ocean or of months lay

-between to-night and that hour?

-

-Can I ever forget my burly tenor friend, who sang and composed songs,

-and dinted the line in _The Eve of St. Agnes_,

-

-    “The silver, snarling trumpets ’gan to chide,”

-

-and declared a hundred times in my unwearied ears that no more happy

-epithet than snarling could be found for trumpets? He over and over

-again assured me, and over and over again I loved to listen to his fancy

-running riot on the line, how he heard and saw brazen and silver and

-golden griffins quarrelling in the roof and around his ears as the

-trumpets blared through the echoing halls and corridors. He, too, marked

-

-    “The music, yearning like a God in pain.”

-

-“Keats,” he would say, “seems to have got not only at the spirit of the

-music, but at the very flesh and blood of it. He has done one thing for

-me,” my friend continued. “Before I read these lines, and others of the

-same kind, in Keats, my favourite tunes always represented an emotion of

-my own mind. Now they stand for individual characters in scenes, like

-descriptions of people in a book. When I hear music now I am with the

-Falstaffs or the Romolas, with Quasimodo or Julius Cæsar.”

-

-I have been regarding the indentures in the volume chronologically. The

-next marks of importance in the order of the years occur, one in _The

-Eve of St. Agnes_, the other in the _Ode to a Nightingale_. These marks,

-more than any others, I regard with grateful memory. They are not the

-work of the hand of him for whom I value them. I have good reason to

-look on him as a valid friend. For months between him and me there had

-existed an acquaintance necessarily somewhat close, but wholly

-uninformed with friendship. We spoke to one another as Mr. So-and-so.

-Neither of us suspected that the other had any toleration of poets or

-poetry. Our commerce had been in mere prose. One day, in mid-winter,

-when a chilling fog hung over London, I chanced to go into a room where

-he was writing alone. After a formal greeting, I complained of the cold.

-He dropped his pen and looked up. “Yes,” he said, “very cold and dark as

-night. Do you know the coldest night that ever was?” I answered that I

-did not. “It was St. Agnes’s Eve, when

-

-    “‘The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold.’”

-

-And so we fell to talking about Keats, and talked and talked for hours;

-and before the first hour of our talk had passed we had ceased

-“Mistering” one another for ever. The fire of his enthusiasm rose higher

-and higher as the minutes swept by. He knew one poet personally, for

-whose verse I had profound respect, and this poet, he told me,

-worshipped Keats. Often in our talks I laid plots for bringing him back

-to the simple sentence, “You should hear M. talk about Keats.” The

-notion that any one who knew M. could think M. would talk to me about

-Keats intoxicated me. “He would not let me listen to him?” I said half

-fearfully. “M. would talk to any one about Keats--to even a lawyer.” How

-I wished at that moment I was a Lord Chancellor who might stand in M.’s

-path. I have, in a way, been near to that poet since. I might almost

-have said to him,

-

-    “So near, too! You could hear my sigh,

-     Or see my case with half an eye;

-     But must not--there are reasons why.”

-

-So this friend I speak of now and I came to be great friends indeed. We

-often met and held carnivals of verse, carnivals among the starry lamps

-of poetry. He had a subtle instinct that saw the jewel, however it might

-be set. He owned himself the faculty of the poet, which gave him ripe

-knowledge of all matters technical in the setting.

-

-    “Now more than ever seems it rich to die,

-     To cease upon the midnight with no pain.”

-

-He would quote these two lines and cry, “Was ever death so pangless as

-that spoken of here? ‘To _cease_ upon the midnight!’ Here is no

-struggle, no regret, no fear. This death is softer and lighter and

-smoother than the falling of the shadow of night upon a desert of

-noiseless sand.”

-

-For a long time the name of one man had been almost daily in my ears. I

-had been hearing much through the friend to whom I have last referred

-about his intuitive eye and critical acumen. That friend had informed me

-of the influence which his opinion carried; and of how this man held

-Keats high above poets to whom we have statues of brass, whose names we

-give to our streets. My curiosity was excited, and, while my desire to

-meet this man was largely mingled with timidity, I often felt a jealous

-pang at thinking that many of the people with whom I was acquainted knew

-him. At length I became distantly connected with an undertaking in which

-he was prominently concerned. Through the instrumentality of one

-friendly to us both, we met. It was a sacred night for me, and I sat and

-listened, enchanted. After some hours the talk wheeled round upon

-sonnets. “Sonnets!” he cried, starting up; “who can repeat the lines

-about Cortez in Keats? You all know it.” Some one began to read or

-repeat the sonnet. Until coming upon the words, “or like stout Cortez.”

-“That’s it, that’s it! Now go on.”

-

-    “Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

-       He stared at the Pacific--and all his men

-     Look’d at each other with a wild surmise--

-       Silent, upon a peak in Darien.”

-

-“‘And all his men looked at each other with a _wild_ surmise,’” he

-repeated, “‘_silent_ upon a peak in Darien.’ The most enduring group

-ever designed. They are standing there to this day. They will stand

-there for ever and for ever; they are immutable. When an artist carves

-them you may know that Buonarotti is risen from the dead and is once

-more abroad.”

-

-That portion of a book which is called a preface and put first, is

-always the last written. It may be human, but it is not logical, that

-when a man starts he does not know what he has to say first, until he

-finds out by an elaborate guess of several hundred pages what he wants

-to say last. It would be unbecoming of me in a collection of ignorant

-essays to affect to know less than a person of average intelligence; but

-I am quite sincere when I say I am not aware who the author is of the

-great aphorism that “After all, there is a great deal of human nature in

-man.” There is, I would venture to say, more human nature than logic in

-man. My copy of Keats is no exception to the general rule of books. The

-preface ought to precede immediately the colophon. Yet it is in the

-forefront of the volume, before even the very title page itself. It

-forms no integral part of the volume, and is unknown to the printer or

-publisher. It was given to me by a thoughtful and kind-hearted friend at

-whose side I worked for a considerable while. One time, years ago, he

-took a holiday and vanished, going from among us I knew not whither. On

-coming back he presented each of his associates with something out of

-his store of spoil. That which now forms the preface to my copy he gave

-me. It consists of twelve leaves; twelve myrtle leaves on a spray. When

-he was in Rome he bore me in mind and plucked this sprig at the grave of

-the poet. It is consoling to remember Keats is buried so far away from

-where he was born, when we cannot forget that the abominable infamy of

-publishing his love-letters was committed in his own country--here in

-England. His spirit was lent to earth only for a little while, and he

-gave all of it to us. But we were not satisfied. We must have his

-heart’s blood and his heart too. The gentlemen who attacked his poetry

-when he was alive really knew no better, and tried, perhaps, to be as

-honest as would suit their private ends. But the publication of the dead

-man’s love-letters, fifty years after he had passed away, cannot be

-attributed even to ignorance. If any money was made out of the book it

-would be a graceful act to give it to some church where the burial

-ground is scant, and the parish is in need of a Potter’s Field.

-

-When I take down my copy of Keats, and look through it and beyond it, I

-feel that while it is left to me I cannot be wholly shorn of my friends.

-It is the only album of photographs I possess. The faces I see in it

-are not for any eye but mine. It is my private portrait gallery, in

-which hang the portraits of my dearest friends. The marks and blots are

-intelligible to no eye but mine; they are the cherished hieroglyphics of

-the heart. I close the book; I lock up the hieroglyphics; I feel certain

-the book will last my time. Should it survive me and pass into new

-hands--into the hands of some boy now unborn, who may pluck out of it

-posies of love-phrases for his fresh-cheeked sweetheart--he will know

-nothing of the import these marginal notes bore to one who has gone

-before him; unless, indeed, out of some cemetery of ephemeral literature

-he digs up this key--this Rosetta stone.

-

-

-

-

-DECAY OF THE SUBLIME.

-

-

-The sublime is dying. It has been pining a long time. At last

-dissolution has set in. Nothing can save it but another incursion of

-Goths and Huns; and as there are no Goths and Huns handy just now, the

-sublime must die out, and die out soon. You can know what a man is by

-the company he keeps. You can judge a people by the ideas they retain

-more than by the ideas they acquire. The philology of a tongue, from its

-cradle to its grave, is the social history of the people who spoke it.

-To-day you may mark the progress of civilisation by the decay bf the

-sublime. Glance at a few of the nations of earth as they stand. Italy

-and Spain still hold with the sublime in literature and art, although,

-being exhausted stocks, they cannot produce it any longer. France is

-cynical, smart, artistic, but never was and never can be sublime, so

-long as vanity rules her; and yet, by the irony of selection, sublime is

-one of her favourite words. Central Europe has had her sublime phases,

-but cannot be even thought of now in connection with the quality; and

-Russia and Turkey are barbarous still. If we come to the active pair of

-nationalities in the progress of current civilisation, the United States

-and England, we find the sublime in very poor case.

-

-Young England across the water is the most progressive nation of our

-age, because it is the most practical. If ever there was a man who put

-his foot on the neck of the sublime, that man is Uncle Sam. His

-contribution to the arts is almost nothing. His outrages against

-established artistic canons have been innumerable. He owns a new land

-without traditions. He laughs at all traditions. He has never raised a

-saint or a mummy or a religion (Mormonism he stole from the East), a

-crusader, a tyrant, a painter, a sculptor, a musician, a dramatist, an

-inquisition, a star chamber, a council of ten. All his efforts have

-been in a strictly practical direction, and most of his efforts have

-been crowned with success. He has devoted his leisure time, the hours

-not spent in cutting down forests or drugging Indians with whisky, to

-laughing at the foolish old notions which the foolish old countries

-cherish. He had a wonderfully fertile estate of two thousand million

-acres, about only one fourth of which is even to this day under direct

-human management. In getting these five hundred million acres of land

-under him he had met all kinds of ground--valley, forest, mountain,

-plain. But in none of these did he find anything but axes and whisky of

-the least use. No mountain had been sanctified to him by first earthly

-contact with the two Tables of the Law. No plain had been rendered

-sacred as that upon which the miraculous manna fell to feed the chosen

-people. No inland sea had been the scene of a miraculous draught of

-fishes. All the land acquired and cultivated by Uncle Sam came to him by

-the right of whisky and the axe. The mountain was nothing more than so

-much land placed at a certain angle that made it of little use for

-tillage. The plains, the rivers, and inland seas had a simply commercial

-value in his eyes. He had no experience of a miracle of any kind, and he

-did not see why he should bow down and respect a mountain, that, to him,

-was no more than so many thousand acres on an incline unfavourable to

-cultivation. Such a condition of the ground was a bore, and he would

-have cut down the mountain as he had cut down the Indian and the forest,

-if he had known how to accomplish the feat. He saw nothing mystic in the

-waters or the moon. Were the rivers and lakes wholesome to drink and

-useful for carriage, and well stocked with fish? These were the

-questions he asked about the waters. Would there be moonlight enough for

-riding and working? was the only question he asked about that “orbèd

-maiden with white fire laden whom mortals call the moon.” His notions,

-his plains, his rivers, his lakes, were all “big,” but he never thought

-of calling them sublime. On his own farm he failed to find any present

-trace of the supernatural; and he discovered no trace of the

-supernatural in tradition, for there was no tradition once the red man

-had been washed into his grave with whisky. Hence Uncle Sam began

-treating the supernatural with familiarity, and matters built on the

-supernatural with levity. Now without the supernatural the sublime

-cannot exist any length of time, if at all.

-

-It may be urged it is unreasonable to hold that the Americans have done

-away with the sublime, since in the history of all nations the earlier

-centuries were, as in America, devoted to material affairs. There is one

-fact bearing on this which should not be left out of count, namely, that

-America did not start from barbarism, or was not raised on a site where

-barbarism had overrun a high state of civilisation. The barbarous hordes

-of the north effaced the civilisation of old Rome, and raised upon its

-ashes a new people, the Italians, who in time led the way in art, as the

-old Romans had before them. The Renaissance was a second crop raised off

-the same ground by new men. The arts Rome had borrowed from Greece had

-been trampled down by Goths, who, when they found themselves in the land

-of milk and honey, sat down to enjoy the milk and honey, until suddenly

-the germs of old art struck root, and once more all eyes turned to Italy

-for principles of beauty. But America started with the civilisation of a

-highly civilised age. She did not rear her own civilisation on her own

-soil. She did not borrow her arts from any one country. She simply

-peopled her virgin plains with the sons of all the earth, who brought

-with them the culture of their respective nationalities. She has not

-followed the ordinary course of nations, from conflict to power, from

-power to prosperity, from prosperity to the arts, luxury, and decay. She

-started with prosperity, and the first use she made of her prosperity

-was, not to cultivate the fine arts in her own people, but to laugh at

-them in others. In the individual man the sense of humour grows with

-years. In nations the sense of humour develops with centuries. The

-literature of nations begins with battle-songs and hymns, and ends with

-burlesques and blasphemies.

-

-Now although America has begun with burlesques and blasphemies, no one

-can for a moment imagine that America is not going to create a noble

-literature of her own. She is destined not only to found and build up a

-noble literature, but one which will be unique. When she has time, when

-she has let most of those idle one thousand five hundred million acres,

-she will begin writing her books. By that time she will have running in

-her veins choice blood from every race on earth, and it is a matter of

-certainty she will give the world many delights now undreamed of. No

-other nation on earth will have, or ever has had, such an opportunity of

-devoting attention to man in his purely domestic and social relations.

-The United States of to-day has, for practical purposes, no foreign

-policy. She has no foreign rivals, she is not likely to have foreign

-wars, while in her own country she has large bodies of men from every

-people on the world. She owns the largest assorted lot of mankind on the

-globe, and as years go by we may safely conclude she will add to the

-variety and number of her sons. In all this appears no hope for the

-sublime. There is no instance in literature of a nation going back from

-laughter to heroics. The two may exist side by side. But that is not the

-case in America. Up to this hour only one class of transatlantic writers

-has challenged the attention of Europe, and that class is humorous and

-profane. Emerson, Bryant, Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Lowell, Holmes, and

-Irving are merely Europeans born in America. But Ward, Harte, Twain, and

-Breitmann are original and American.

-

-America is undoubtedly the literary promise-land of the future. It has

-done nothing up to this. Its condition has forbidden it to achieve

-anything, but great triumphs may be anticipated from it. Crossing the

-Atlantic, what do we find in the other great branch of the

-English-speaking race? Religious publications head the list by a long

-way. They have nothing to do with this subject save in so far as they

-are in the line of the sublime. All forms of the Christian and Jewish

-creeds are sublime. Looking at the other walks of literature, we find

-the death sentence of the sublime written everywhere. With the

-exception of Mr. Browning, here or there we have no poet or dramatist

-who attempts it. We have elegant trifles and beautiful form in many

-volumes of second-rate contemporary verse. There never was a time when

-the science of poetry was understood until now. Our critics can tell you

-with mathematical certainty the number of poems as distinguished from

-pieces of verse every well-known man has written. But we are not

-producing any great poetry, and none of the sublime kind. This is the

-age of elegant poetic incentive, of exquisite culture, but it is too

-dainty. We do not rise much above a poem to a shoe, or an ode to a

-ringlet, perfumed with one of Mr. Rimmel’s best admired distillations.

-We have a few poets who are continually trying to find out who or what

-the deuce they are, and what they meant by being born, and so on; but

-then these men are for the eclectic, and not the herd of sensible

-people. We have two men who have done noble work, Browning and Tennyson;

-but, speaking broadly, we find the sublime nowhere. It is true you

-cannot force genius as you force asparagus; and these remarks are not

-intended to indict the age with having no poetic faculty or aspiration.

-Abundance of poetry of a new and beautiful kind does exist, but it is

-not of the lofty kind born to the men of old.

-

-Turning eyes away from literature, take a few more of the arts. Before

-we go farther, let us admit that one art at least never reached sublimer

-recorded heights than to-day. The music of the generation just past is,

-I believe, in the front rank of the art. It is an art now in the throes

-of an enormous transformation. Not using the phrase in its slangy

-meaning, the music of the future is sure to touch splendours never

-dreamed of by that Raphael of the lyre, Mozart. The only art-Titans now

-wrestling are the musicians; not those paltry souls that pad the poor

-words of inane burlesques, but the great spirits that sit apart, and

-have audiences of the angels. These men, out of their own mouths, assure

-us that they catch the far-off murmurs of such imperial tones as never

-filled the ear of man yet. They cannot gather up the broken chords they

-hear. They admit they have heard no more than a few bars of the great

-masters who are close upon us; but, they say, if they only reproduce the

-effect these preluding passages have upon them, “Such harmonious madness

-from their lips would flow, the world should listen then as they are

-listening now.”

-

-Go to the Royal Academy and look round you. How pretty! How nice! How

-pathetic! But would you like to lend your arm to Michael Angelo, and go

-round those walls with him? He would prefer the rack, the gridiron of

-St. Laurence. It is true there is no necessity for the sublime; but

-those men who have been in the awful presence of such dreams as _Night_

-and _Morning_, by that sculptor, must be pardoned if they prefer it to

-the art you find in Burlington House. One of our great English poets

-said, speaking of the trivial nature of conversation at the beginning of

-this century, that if Lord Bacon were alive now, and made a remark in an

-ordinary assembly, conversation would stop. If casts of _Night_ and

-_Morning_ were placed at the head of the staircase of Burlington House,

-no one with appreciation of art would enter the rooms; the strong would

-linger for ever round those stupendous groups, and the feeble would be

-frighted away. Of course, the vast crowd of art-patrons would pass the

-group with only a casual glance, and a protest against having plaster

-casts occupying ground which ought to be allotted to original work.

-

-Read any speech Burke or Grattan ever spoke, and then your _Times_ and

-the debate last night. How plain it becomes that from no art has the

-sublime so completely vanished as the orator’s. Take those two speakers

-above, and run your eye over Cicero and Demosthenes, the four are of the

-one school, in the great style. Theirs is the large and universal

-eloquence. It is as fresh and beautiful, as pathetic, as sublime now as

-when uttered, although the occasions and circumstances are no longer of

-interest to man. The statistician and the poltroon and the verbatim

-reporter have killed the orator. If any man were to rise in the House

-and make a speech in the manner of the ancients, the honourable members

-would hurry in from all sides to laugh. A few sessions ago a member rose

-in his place, and delivered an oration on a subject not popular with the

-House, but in a manner which echoed the grand old style. At once every

-seat for which there was a member present at the time was occupied; and

-the next morning the daily papers had articles which, while disposing of

-the speaker’s cause in a few lines, devoted columns to the manner in

-which he had pleaded it.

-

-To discover what has led to the decay of the sublime is not difficult,

-and even in an ignorant essay like this, it may be briefly indicated.

-Roughly speaking, it is attributable to the accumulation of certainties.

-Any handbook that cribs from Longinus or Burke will tell you the vague

-is essential to the sublime. To attain it there must be something half

-understood--not fully known, only partly revealed. To attain it detail

-must be lost, and only a totality presented to the mind. For instance,

-if a great lover of Roman history were suddenly to find himself on the

-top of the Coliseum, the most sublime result to be obtained from the

-situation would be produced by repeating to himself the simple words,

-“This is Rome.” By these words the totality of the city’s grandeur,

-influence, power, and enterprises would be vaguely presented to a

-scholar’s mind dim in the glow of a multitude of half-revealing

-side-lights. If a companion whispered in the scholar’s ears, “This place

-would at one time seat a hundred thousand people,” then the particular

-is reached, and the sublime vanishes like sunshine against a cloud. Most

-of North America has been explored. Africa and Australia have been

-traversed. The source of the Nile has been found. We can read the

-hieroglyphics. We know the elements now flaming in the sun. Many of the

-phenomena in all branches of physiology which were mysteries to our

-fathers are familiar commonplaces of knowledge now. We have learned to

-foretell the weather. We travel a thousand miles for the hundred

-travelled by our fathers. We have daily newspapers to discuss all

-matters, clear away mysteries. We have opened the grave for the sublime

-with the plough of progress. Though the words stick in my throat, I

-must, I daresay, cry, “God speed the plough!”

-

-

-

-

-A BORROWED POET.

-

-

-Twenty years ago I borrowed, and read for the first time, the poems of

-James Clarence Mangan. I then lived in a city containing not one-third

-as many people as yearly swell the population of London. The friend of

-whom I borrowed the volume in 1866 is still living in his old home, in

-the house from which I carried away the book then. I saw him last winter

-and he is almost as little aged as the hills he has fronted all that

-time. I have had in those years as many homes as an Arab nomad. He still

-stays in the old place, and in the gray twilight of dark summer mornings

-wakes to hear as of yore the twitter of sparrows and the cawing of rooks

-from the other side of the river, and the hoarse hooting of the

-steamboat hard by.

-

-The volume of Mangan now by me I borrowed of another old friend, who

-passes most of his day within sight of that familiar river not quite a

-hundred yards from the house of the lender of twenty years back. In the

-meantime I have seen no other copy of Mangan.

-

-This latest fact is not much to be wondered at, for I am not

-enterprising in the matter of books--rarely buy and rarely borrow, and

-have never been in the reading room of the British Museum in my life.

-The book may be common to those who know much about books; but I have

-seen only the two copies I speak of, and these are of the same edition

-and of American origin. I believe a selection from the poems was issued

-a few years ago in Dublin, but a copy has not drifted my way. The

-title-page of the volume before me is missing, but in a list of

-publications at the back I find “_The Poems of James Clarence Mangan_.

-Containing German Anthology, Irish Anthology, Apocrypha, and

-Miscellaneous Poems. With a Biographical and Critical Introduction, by

-John Mitchel. 1 vol. 12mo. Printed on tinted and calendered paper.

-Nearly 500 pages. $1.” Beyond all doubt this is the book, and it was

-published by Mr. P. M. Haverty, of New York.

-

-As far as I know, this is the only edition of Mangan which pretends to

-be even comprehensive. It does not lay claim to completeness. At the

-time the late John Mitchel wrote his introduction he was aware of but

-one other edition of Mangan’s poems--the German Anthology, published in

-Dublin many years ago. I am nearly sure that since the appearance of

-Mitchel’s edition there have been no verses of Mangan’s published in

-book form on this side of the Atlantic, except the selections I have

-already mentioned, and I do not think any edition whatever has been

-published in this country.

-

-During the twenty years which have elapsed since first I made the

-acquaintance of the poems of James Clarence Mangan, I have read much

-verse and many criticisms of verse, and yet I don’t remember to have

-seen one line about Mangan in any publication issued in England. I

-believe two magazine articles have appeared, but I never saw them.

-Almost during these years, or within a period which does not extend

-back far beyond them, criticism of verse has ceased to be a matter of

-personal opinion, and has been elevated or degraded, as you will, into

-an exact science. The opinions of old reviewers--the Jeffreys and

-Broughams--are now looked on as curiosities of literature. There is as

-wide a gulf between the mode of treating poetry now and eighty years ago

-as there is between the mode of travelling, or the guess-work that makes

-up the physician’s art; and if in a gathering of literary experts any

-one were now to apply to a new bard the dogmas of criticism quoted for

-or against Byron, Shelley, Keats, and the Lakers in their time, a

-silence the reverse of respectful would certainly follow.

-

-This is not the age of great poetry, but it is the age of “poetical

-poetry,” to quote the phrase of one of the finest critics using the

-English language--one who has, unfortunately for the culture of that

-tongue and those who use it, written lamentably little. The great danger

-by which we stand menaced at present is, that our perceptions may become

-too exquisite and our poetry too intellectual. This, anyway, is true of

-poetry which may at all claim to be an expression of thought. There are

-in our time supreme formists in small things, carvers of cameos and

-walnut shells, and musical conjurors who make sweet melodies with richly

-vowelled syllables. But unfortunately the tendency of the poetic men of

-to-day is towards intellectuality, and this is a humiliating decay. In

-the times of Queen Elizabeth, when all the poets were Shakespeares, they

-cared nothing for their intellects. The intellectual side of a poet’s

-mind is an impertinence in his art.

-

-I do not presume to say what place exactly James Clarence Mangan ought

-to occupy on the greater roll of verse-writers, and I am not sure that

-he is, in the finest sense of the phrase, a “poetical poet;” but he is,

-at all events, the most poetical poet Ireland has produced, when we take

-into account the volume and quality of his song. I shall purposely avoid

-any reference to him as a translator, except in acting on John Mitchel’s

-opinion, and treating one of his “translations” from the Arabic as an

-original poem; for during his lifetime he confessed that he had passed

-off original poems of his own as translations; and Mitchel assures us

-that Mangan did not know Arabic. As this essay does not profess to be

-orderly or dignified, or anything more than rambling gossip, put into

-writing for no other reason than to introduce to the reader a few pieces

-of verse he may not have met before, I cannot do better than insert here

-the lines of which I am now speaking:

-

-

-THE TIME OF THE BARMECIDES.

-

-

-I.

-

-    “My eyes are filmed, my beard is grey,

-       I am bowed with the weight of years;

-     I would I were stretched in my bed of clay

-       With my long-lost youth’s compeers!

-     For back to the past, though the thought brings woe,

-       My memory ever glides--

-     To the old, old time, long, long ago,

-       The time of the Barmecides!

-     To the old, old time, long, long ago,

-       The time of the Barmecides.

-

-

-II.

-

-    “Then youth was mine, and a fierce wild will,

-       And an iron arm in war,

-     And a fleet foot high upon Ishkar’s hill,

-       When the watch-lights glimmered afar,

-     And a barb as fiery as any I know

-       That Khoord or Beddaween rides,

-     Ere my friends lay low--long, long ago,

-       In the time of the Barmecides;

-     Ere my friends lay low--long, long ago,

-       In the time of the Barmecides.

-

-

-III.

-

-    “One golden goblet illumed my board,

-       One silver dish was there;

-     At hand my tried Karamanian sword

-       Lay always bright and bare;

-     For those were the days when the angry blow

-       Supplanted the word that chides--

-     When hearts could glow--long, long ago,

-       In the time of the Barmecides;

-     When hearts could glow--long, long ago,

-       In the time of the Barmecides.

-

-

-IV.

-

-    “Through city and desert my mates and I

-       Were free to rove and roam,

-     Our diapered canopy the deep of the sky,

-       Or the roof of the palace dome.

-     Oh, ours was the vivid life to and fro,

-       Which only sloth derides:

-     Men spent Life so--long, long ago,

-       In the time of the Barmecides;

-     Men spent Life so--long, long ago,

-       In the time of the Barmecides.

-

-

-V.

-

-    “I see rich Bagdad once again,

-       With its turrets of Moorish mould,

-     And the Kalif’s twice five hundred men

-       Whose binishes flamed with gold.

-     I call up many a gorgeous show

-       Which the Pall of Oblivion hides--

-     All passed like snow, long, long ago,

-       With the time of the Barmecides;

-     All passed like snow, long, long ago,

-       With the time of the Barmecides.

-

-

-VI.

-

-    “But mine eye is dim, and my beard is grey,

-       And I bend with the weight of years--

-     May I soon go down to the House of Clay,

-       Where slumber my Youth’s compeers!

-     For with them and the Past, though the thought wakes woe,

-       My memory ever abides,

-     And I mourn for the Times gone long ago,

-       For the Times of the Barmecides!

-     I mourn for the Times gone long ago,

-       For the Times of the Barmecides!”

-

-This is the poem claimed by Mangan to be from the Arabic. I have no

-means of knowing whether it is or not. There is one translation from the

-Persian, one from the Ottoman, and according to Mitchel, one from the

-Coptic. But seeing that he turned into verse a great number of Irish

-poems from prose translations done by another, and that he did not know

-a word of that language, I think it may be safely assumed that _The Last

-of the Barmecides_ is original. This poem is so old a favourite of mine

-that I cannot pretend to be an impartial judge of it. When I hear it (I

-can never see a poem I know well and love much) I listen as to the

-unchanged voice of an old friend; I wander in a maze of memories; “I see

-rich Bagdad once again;” I am once more owner of the magic carpet, and

-am floating irresponsibly and at will on the intoxicating atmosphere of

-the poets over the enchanted groves, and streams, and hills, and seas of

-fairyland, or harkening to voices that years ago ceased to stir in my

-ears, gazing at the faces that have long since moulded the face cloth

-into blunted memories of the face for the grave.

-

-On the 20th of June, 1849, Mangan died in the Meath Hospital, Dublin.

-Having been born in 1803, he was, in 1849, eight years older than Poe,

-who died destitute and forlorn at Baltimore in the same year. Both poets

-had been in abject poverty, both had been unfortunate in love, both had

-been consummate artists, both had been piteously unlucky in a thousand

-ways, and both had died the same year, and in common hospitals. Two more

-miserable stories it is impossible to find anywhere. I would recommend

-those of sensitive natures to confine their reading to the work these

-men did, and not to the misfortunes they laboured under, and the follies

-they committed. I think, of the two, Mangan suffered more acutely; for

-he never rose up in anger against the world, or those around him, but

-glided like an uncomplaining ghost into the grave, where, long before

-his death, all his hopes lay buried. He had only a half-hearted pity for

-himself. Poe, in his _Raven_, is, all the time of his most pathetic and

-terrible complaining, conscious that he complains as becomes a fine

-artist. But the raven’s croak does not touch the heart. It appeals to

-the intellect; it affects the fancy, the imagination, the ear, the eye.

-When Mangan opens his bosom and shows you the ravens that prey upon him,

-he cannot repress something like a laugh at the thought that any one

-could be interested in him and his woes. See:

-

-

-THE NAMELESS ONE.

-

-

-BALLAD.

-

-

-I.

-

-    “Roll forth, my song, like the rushing river,

-       That sweeps along to the mighty sea;

-     God will inspire me while I deliver

-                     My soul of thee!

-

-

-II.

-

-    “Tell thou the world, when my bones lie whitening

-       Amid the last homes of youth and eld,

-     That there was once one whose veins ran lightning

-                     No eye beheld.

-

-

-III.

-

-    “Tell how his boyhood was one drear night-hour,

-       How shone for _him_, through his griefs and gloom,

-     No star of all heaven sends to light our

-                     Path to the tomb.

-

-

-IV.

-

-    “Roll on, my song, and to after ages

-     Tell how, disdaining all earth can give,

-     He would have taught men from wisdom’s pages

-                     The way to live.

-

-

-V.

-

-    “And tell how, trampled, derided, hated,

-       And worn by weakness, disease, and wrong,

-     He fled for shelter to God, who mated

-                     His soul with song--

-

-

-VI.

-

-    “With song which alway, sublime or vapid,

-       Flowed like a rill in the morning beam,

-     Perchance not deep, but intense and rapid--

-                     A mountain stream.

-

-

-VII.

-

-    “Tell how the Nameless, condemned for years long

-       To herd with demons from hell beneath,

-     Saw things that made him, with groans and tears, long

-                     For even death.

-

-

-VIII.

-

-    “Go on to tell how, with genius wasted,

-       Betrayed in friendship, befooled in love,

-     With spirit shipwrecked and young hopes blasted,

-                     He still, still strove.

-

-

-IX.

-

-    “Till, spent with toil, dreeing death for others,

-       And some whose hands should have wrought for _him_

-     (If children live not for sires and mothers),

-                     His mind grew dim.

-

-

-X.

-

-    “And he fell far through the pit abysmal,

-       The gulf and grave of Maginn and Burns,

-     And pawned his soul for the devil’s dismal

-                     Stock of returns.

-

-

-XI.

-

-    “But yet redeemed it in days of darkness,

-       And shapes and signs of the final wrath,

-     Where death in hideous and ghastly starkness

-                     Stood in his path.

-

-

-XII.

-

-    “And tell how now, amid wreck and sorrow,

-       And want and sickness and houseless nights,

-     He bides in calmness the silent morrow

-                     That no ray lights.

-

-

-XIII.

-

-    “And lives he still, then? Yes! old and hoary

-       At thirty-nine, from despair and woe,

-     He lives enduring what future story

-                     Will never know.

-

-

-XIV.

-

-    “Him grant a grave to, ye pitying noble,

-       Deep in your bosoms! There let him dwell!

-     He, too, had tears for all souls in trouble,

-                     Here and in hell.”

-

-The burden of all his song is sad, and in his translations he has chosen

-chiefly themes which echoed the harpings of his own soul. He began life

-as a copying clerk in an attorney’s office, and had for some time to

-support wholly, or in the main, a mother and sister. In Mitchel’s

-preface there are many passages almost as fine as the verse of the poet.

-Here is one, long as it is, that must find a place. Mitchel is speaking

-of the days when Mangan was in the attorney’s office:--

-

-     “At what age he devoted himself to this drudgery, at what age he

-     left it, or was discharged from it, does not appear; for his whole

-     biography documents are wanting, the man having never, for one

-     moment, imagined that his poor life could interest any surviving

-     human being, and having never, accordingly, collected his

-     biographical assets, and appointed a literary executor to take care

-     of his posthumous fame. Neither did he ever acquire the habit,

-     common enough among literary men, of dwelling upon his own early

-     trials, struggles, and triumphs. But those who knew him in after

-     years can remember with what a shuddering and loathing horror he

-     spoke--when at rare intervals he could be induced to speak at

-     all--of his labours with the scrivener and attorney. He was shy and

-     sensitive, with exquisite sensibilities and fine impulses; eye,

-     ear, and soul open to all the beauty, music, and glory of heaven

-     and earth; humble, gentle, and unexacting; modestly craving nothing

-     in the world but celestial, glorified life, seraphic love, and a

-     throne among the immortal gods (that’s all); and he was eight or

-     ten years scribbling deeds, pleadings, and bills in Chancery.”

-

-There is, I believe, but one portrait of him in existence, and a copy of

-it hangs on the wall of the room in which I am writing, a few feet in

-front of my eyes. It is not a face easy to describe. Beauty is the chief

-characteristic of it. But it is not the beauty that men admire or that

-inspires love in women. It is not the face of a poet or a visionary or a

-thinker. There is no passion in it; not even the passionate sadness of

-his own verse. It is not the face of a man who has suffered greatly, or

-rejoiced in ecstasy. It is the face of a fleshless, worn man of forty,

-with hair pressed back from the forehead and ear. I have been looking at

-it for a long time, trying to find out something positive about it, and

-I have failed. It is not interesting. It is the face of a man who is

-done with the world and humanity. It is the face of a dead man whose

-spirit has passed away, while the body remains alive. The eyes are open,

-and have light in them; the face would be more complete if the light

-were out, and the lids drawn down and composed for the blind tomb.

-

-He gives a picture of his mental attitude at about the time this

-portrait was taken:--

-

-

-TWENTY GOLDEN YEARS AGO.

-

-

-I.

-

-    “Oh, the rain, the weary, dreary rain,

-       How it plashes on the window-sill!

-     Night, I guess too, must be on the wane,

-       Strass and Gass around are grown so still.

-     Here I sit with coffee in my cup--

-       Ah, ’twas rarely I beheld it flow

-     In the tavern where I loved to sup

-       Twenty golden years ago!

-

-

-II.

-

-    “Twenty years ago, alas!--but stay--

-       On my life, ’tis half-past twelve o’clock!

-     After all, the hours _do_ slip away--

-       Come, here goes to burn another block!

-     For the night, or morn, is wet and cold;

-       And my fire is dwindling rather low:

-     I had fire enough, when young and bold

-       Twenty golden years ago.

-

-

-III.

-

-    “Dear! I don’t feel well at all, somehow:

-       Few in Weimar dream how bad I am;

-     Floods of tears grow common with me now,

-       High-Dutch floods that Reason cannot dam.

-     Doctors think I’ll neither live nor thrive

-       If I mope at home so--I don’t know--

-     _Am_ I living _now_? I _was_ alive

-       Twenty golden years ago.

-

-

-IV.

-

-    “Wifeless, friendless, flagonless, alone,

-       Not quite bookless, though, unless I choose;

-     Left with naught to do, except to groan,

-       Not a soul to woo, except the Muse.

-     Oh, this is hard for _me_ to bear--

-       Me who whilom lived so much _en haut_--

-     Me who broke all hearts like china-ware,

-       Twenty golden years ago.

-

-

-V.

-

-    “Perhaps ’tis better;--time’s defacing waves

-       Long have quenched the radiance of my brow--

-     They who curse me nightly from their graves

-       Scarce could love me were they living now;

-     But my loneliness hath darker ills--

-       Such dun duns as Conscience, Thought, & Co.,

-     Awful Gorgons! Worse than tailors’ bills

-       Twenty golden years ago.

-

-

-VI.

-

-    “Did I paint a fifth of what I feel,

-       Oh, how plaintive you would ween I was!

-     But I won’t, albeit I have a deal

-       More to wail about than Kerner has!

-     Kerner’s tears are wept for withered flowers;

-       Mine for withered hopes; my scroll of woe

-     Dates, alas! from youth’s deserted bowers,

-       Twenty golden years ago.

-

-

-VII.

-

-    “Yet, may Deutschland’s bardlings flourish long!

-       Me, I tweak no beak among them;--hawks

-     Must not pounce on hawks: besides, in song

-       I could once beat all of them by chalks.

-     Though you find me, as I near my goal,

-       Sentimentalising like Rousseau,

-     Oh, I had a great Byronian soul

-       Twenty golden years ago!

-

-

-VIII.

-

-    “Tick-tick, tick-tick!--not a sound save Time’s,

-       And the wind gust as it drives the rain--

-     Tortured torturer of reluctant rhymes,

-       Go to bed and rest thine aching brain!

-     Sleep!--no more the dupe of hopes or schemes;

-       Soon thou sleepest where the thistles blow;

-     Curious anti-climax to thy dreams

-       Twenty golden years ago!”

-

-I find myself now in a great puzzle. I want, first of all, to say I

-think it most melancholy that Mangan, when of full age and judgment,

-should have thought Byron had “a great Byronian soul.” Observe, he does

-not mean that he had a soul greatly like Byron’s, but that he had a soul

-like the great soul of Byron. I do not believe Byron had a great soul at

-all. I believe he was simply a fine stage-manager of melodrama, the

-finest that ever lived, and that as a property-master he was unrivalled;

-but that to please no one, himself included, could he have written the

-play. I am not descending to so defiling a depth as to talk about

-plagiarism. What I wish to say is, that whether Byron stole or not made

-not the least difference in the world, for he never by the aid of his

-gifts or his thefts wrote a poem. I wanted further to say of Byron that

-there was nothing great about him except his vanity. Suddenly I

-remembered some words of the critic of whom I spoke a while back, in

-dealing with the question of poetical poetry and poems. I took down the

-printed page, where I found these lines:--

-

-     “Mr. Swinburne’s poetry is almost altogether poetical. Not all the

-     poetry of even the Poets is so, and to one who loves this dear and

-     intimate quality of which we speak, Coleridge, for instance, is a

-     poet of some four poems, Wordsworth of some sixteen, Keats of five,

-     Byron of none, though Byron is _great and eloquent_, but the thing

-     we prize so much is far away from eloquence. Poetical poetry is the

-     inner garden; there grows the ‘flower of the mind.’”

-

-Now, my difficulty is plain. My critic, who is also a poet, says Byron

-is great, and I find fault with Mangan for saying Byron had a great

-Byronian soul. Here are two of my select authors against me. Plainly,

-the best thing I can do is say nothing at all about the matter!

-

-_Twenty Golden Years Ago_ is by no means a poetical poem, but there is

-poetry in it. There is no poetical poem by Mangan. But he has written no

-serious verses in which there is not poetry.

-

-After giving Mangan’s own verse account of what he was like in his own

-regard at about forty years of age, I copy what Mitchel saw when the

-poet was first pointed out to him:--

-

-     “Being in the College Library [Trinity, Dublin], and having

-     occasion for a book in that gloomy apartment of the institution

-     called the ‘Fagal Library,’ which is the innermost recess of the

-     stately building, an acquaintance pointed out to me a man perched

-     on the top of a ladder, with the whispered information that the

-     figure was Clarence Mangan. It was an unearthly and ghostly figure,

-     in a brown garment; the same garment (to all appearance), which

-     lasted till the day of his death. The blanched hair was totally

-     unkempt; the corpse-like features still as marble; a large book was

-     in his arms, and all his soul was in the book. I had never heard of

-     Clarence Mangan before, and knew not for what he was celebrated,

-     whether as a magician, a poet, or a murderer; yet took a volume and

-     spread it on a table, not to read, but with the pretence of reading

-     to gaze on the spectral creature on the ladder.”

-

-I never met any one who had known Mangan. Mitchel did not know the name

-of the woman who lured him on with smiles that seemed to promise love.

-He always addressed her in his poems as Frances. Some time ago the name

-of the woman was divulged. It is ungallant of me to have forgotten it,

-but such is the case. The address at which Mangan visited her was in

-Mountpleasant Square, Dublin. At the time I saw the name of the lady I

-looked into a directory of 1848 which I happened to have by me, and

-found a different name at the address given in the Square. I know the

-love affair of the poet took place years before his death in 1849, but

-people in quiet and unpretentious houses in Dublin, or correctly

-Ranelagh, often live a whole generation in the same house.

-

-Here I find myself in a second puzzle. So long as I thought merely of

-writing this rambling account of “My Borrowed Poet,” I decided upon

-trying to say something about the stupidity of women and poets in

-general. But I don’t feel in case to do so when I glance up at the face

-of Mangan hanging on the wall, and bring myself to realise the fact

-that this face now looking so dead and unburied was young and bright and

-perhaps cheerful when he went wooing in Ranelagh.

-

-Instead of saying anything wise and stupid and commonplace about either

-poets or women, let me quote here stanzas which must have been written

-some day when he saw sunshine among the clouds:--

-

-

-THE MARINER’S BRIDE.

-

-    “Look, mother! the mariner’s rowing

-         His galley adown the tide;

-     I’ll go where the mariner’s going,

-         And be the mariner’s bride!

-

-    “I saw him one day through the wicket,

-         I opened the gate and we met--

-         As a bird in the fowler’s net,

-     Was I caught in my own green thicket.

-     O mother, my tears are flowing,

-         I’ve lost my maidenly pride--

-     I’ll go if the mariner’s going,

-         And be the mariner’s bride!

-

-    “This Love the tyrant winces,

-         Alas! an omnipotent might,

-     He darkens the mind like night,

-         He treads on the necks of Princes!

-     O mother, my bosom is glowing,

-         I’ll go whatever betide,

-     I’ll go where the mariners going,

-         And be the mariner’s bride!

-

-    “Yes, mother! the spoiler has reft me

-         Of reason and self-control;

-         Gone, gone is my wretched soul,

-     And only my body is left me!

-     The winds, O mother, are blowing,

-         The ocean is bright and wide;

-     I’ll go where the mariner’s going,

-         And be the mariner’s bride.”

-

-This appears among the Apocrypha, and is credited by Mangan to the

-“Spanish;” but it is safe to assume when he is so vague that the poem is

-original. It is one of the most bright and cheerful he has given us. The

-only touch of sorrow we feel is for the poor mother who is about to lose

-so impulsive and vivacious a daughter. The time of this delightful

-ballad is not clearly defined, but we may be absolutely certain that we

-of this moribund nineteenth century will never meet except at a function

-of a recondite spiritual medium even the great grandchild of the

-Mariner’s Bride. How much more is our devout gratitude due to a good and

-pious spiritualist than to any riotous and licentious poet! The former

-can give us intercourse with the illustrious defunct of history; the

-latter can give us no more than the image of a figment, the phantom of a

-shade, the echo of sounds that never vibrated in the ear of man. All

-persons who believe the evidence adduced by poets are the victims of

-subornation.

-

-A saw-mill does not seem a good subject for a “copy of verses.” Mangan

-died single and in poverty, and was buried by his friends. Listen:--

-

-

-THE SAW-MILL.

-

-    “My path lay towards the Mourne again,

-       But I stopped to rest by the hill-side

-     That glanced adown o’er the sunken glen

-       Which the Saw-and Water-mills hide,

-               Which now, as then,

-       The Saw-and Water-mills hide.

-

-    “And there, as I lay reclined on the hill,

-       Like a man made by sudden _qualm_ ill,

-     I heard the water in the Water-mill,

-       And I saw the saw in the Saw-mill!

-               As I thus lay still

-       I saw the saw in the Saw-mill!

-

-    “The saw, the breeze, and the humming bees,

-       Lulled me into a dreamy reverie,

-     Till the objects round me--hills, mills, trees,

-       Seemed grown alive all and every--

-               By slow degrees

-       Took life as it were, all and every!

-

-    “Anon the sound of the waters grew

-       To a Mourne-ful ditty,

-     And the song of the tree that the saw sawed through

-       Disturbed my spirit with pity,

-               Began to subdue

-       My spirit with tenderest pity!

-

-    “‘Oh, wanderer, the hour that brings thee back

-       Is of all meet hours the meetest.

-     Thou now, in sooth art on the Track,

-       And nigher to Home than thou weetest;

-               Thou hast thought Time slack,

-       But his flight has been of the fleetest!

-

-    “‘For this it is that I dree such pain

-       As, when wounded, even a plank will;

-     My bosom is pierced, is rent in twain,

-       That thine may ever bide tranquil.

-               May ever remain

-       Henceforward untroubled and tranquil.

-

-    “‘In a few days more, most Lonely One!

-       Shall I, as a narrow ark, veil

-     Thine eyes from the glare of the world and sun

-       ’Mong the urns of yonder dark vale--

-               In the cold and dun

-       Recesses of yonder dark vale!

-

-    “‘For this grieve not! Thou knowest what thanks

-       The Weary-souled and Meek owe

-     To Death!’ I awoke, and heard four planks

-       Fall down with a saddening echo.

-               _I heard four planks_

-       _Fall down with a hollow echo._”

-

-This was the epithalamium of James Clarence Mangan sung by himself.

-

-

-

-

-THE ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER.

-

-

-I bought my copy new for fourpence-halfpenny, in Holywell Street. It was

-published by George Routledge and Sons, of the Broadway, London. The

-little volume is made up of a “Preface,” by Thomas de Quincey;

-“Confessions of an English Opium-eater;” and “Notes from the Pocket-book

-of a late Opium-eater;” including “Walking Stewart,” “On the Knocking at

-the Gates in _Macbeth_,” and “On Suicide.” When it last left my hands it

-boasted a paper cover, on which appeared the head of the illustrious

-Laker. At my elbow now it lies, divested of its shield; and I sit face

-to face with the title-page, as though my author had taken off his hat

-and overcoat, and I were asking him which he preferred, clear or thick

-soup, while the servant stood behind filling his glass with

-Amontillado. How that cover came to be removed I do not know. The last

-borrower was of the less destructive sex, and I am at a great loss to

-account for the injury.

-

-I object to the presence of “Walking Stewart,” and “On Suicide,”

-otherwise I count my copy perfect. With the exception of _Robinson

-Crusoe_ and Poe’s _Tales_ I have read nothing so often as the

-_Opium-eater_. Only twice in my life up to five-and-twenty years of age

-did I sit up all night to read a book: once when about midnight I came

-into possession of _Enoch Arden_, and a second time when, at the same

-witching hour I drew a red cloth-bound edition of the _Opium-eater_ out

-of my pocket, in my lonely, dreary bedroom, five hundred miles from

-where I am now writing. The household were all asleep, and I by no means

-strong of nerve. The room was large, the dwelling ghostly. I sat in an

-embrasure of one of the windows, with a little table supporting the

-candles on one side, and on the other a small movable bookcase. Thus I

-was in a kind of dock, only open on one side, that fronting the room. It

-was in the beginning of autumn, and a low, warm wind blew the

-complaining rain against the pane on a level with my ear. At that time I

-had not seen London, and I remember being overpowered and broken before

-the spectacle of that sensitive and imaginative boy in the text, hungry

-and forlorn, in the unsympathetic mass of innumerable houses, every door

-of which was shut against him.

-

-As I read on and the hour grew late, the succession of splendours and

-terrors wrought on my imagination, until I felt cold and exhausted, and

-had scarcely strength to sit upright in my chair. My hand trembled, and

-my mind became tremulously apprehensive of something vague and awful; I

-could not tell what. Sounds of the night which I had heard a thousand

-times before, which were as familiar to me as the bell of my parish

-church, now assumed dire, uncertain imports. The rattling of the sash

-was not the work of the wind, not the work of ghostly hands, but worse

-still, of human hands belonging to men in some more dire extremity than

-the approach of death. The beating of the rain against the glass was

-made to cover voices trying to tell me secrets I could not hear and

-live, and which yet I would have given my life to know.

-

-I cannot tell why I was so exhilarated by terror. The _Confessions_

-alone are not calculated to produce inexplicable disturbance of the

-mind. It may be I had eaten little or nothing that day; it may be I had

-steeped myself too deeply in nicotine. All I know for certain is that I

-was in such a state of abject panic I had not courage to cross the room

-to my bed. It was in the dreary, pitiless, raw hour before the dawn I

-finished the book. Then I found I durst not rise. I put down the book

-and looked at the candles. They would last till daylight.

-

-I would have given all the world to lie on that bed over there, with my

-back secure against it, warmed by it, comforted by it. But that open

-space was more terrible to me than if it were filled with flame. I

-should have been much more at my ease in the dark, yet I could not bring

-myself to blow out the lights; not because I dreaded the darkness, but

-because I shrank from encountering the possibilities of that awful

-moment of twilight between the full light of the candles and the blank

-gloom.

-

-When I thought of blowing out the lights and imagined the dread of

-catching a glimpse of some spectacle of supreme horror, I imprudently

-gave my imagination rein, and set myself to find out what would terrify

-me most. All at once, and before I had made more than the inquiry of my

-mind, I saw in fancy between me and the bed, a thing of unapproachable

-terror; I had not been recently reading _Christabel_, and yet it must

-have been remotely from that poem I conjured the spectre which so awed

-me. I placed out in the open of the room on the floor, between me and

-the door, and close to a straight line drawn between me and the bed, a

-figure shrouded in a black cloak, from hidden shoulder to invisible

-feet. Over the head of this figure was cast a cowl, which completely

-concealed the head and face. At any moment the cloak might open and

-disclose the body of that figure. I knew the body of that figure was a

-“thing to dream of, not to see.” I felt sure I should lose my reason if

-the cloak opened and discovered the loathsome body. I had no idea what I

-should see, but I knew I should go mad.

-

-In my dock by the window, and with the light behind my eyes I felt

-secure. But at that moment no earthly consideration, no consideration

-whatever, would have induced me to face that ghostly form in the flicker

-of expiring light. I was not under any delusion. I knew then as well as

-I know now that there was no object on which the normal human eye could

-exercise itself between me and the bed. I deliberately willed the figure

-to appear, and although once I had summoned it I could not dismiss it, I

-had complete and self-possessed knowledge that I saw nothing with my

-physical eye. Moreover, full of potentiality for terror as that figure

-was in its present shape and attitude, it had no dread for me. I was

-fascinated by considering possibilities which I knew could not arise so

-long as the present circumstances remained unchanged. In other words, I

-knew I could trust my reason to keep my imagination in subjection, so

-long as my senses were not confused or my attention scared. If I

-attempted to extinguish the candles that figure might waver! if I moved

-across the floor it might get behind my back, and as I caught sight of

-it over my shoulder, the cloak might fall aside! Then I should go mad.

-Thus I sat and waited until daylight came. Then I fell asleep in my

-chair.

-

-As I have said, the copy of the _Opium-eater_ I then had was bound in

-red cloth. It was a much handsomer book than the humble one published by

-Routledge. Since that memorable night many years ago in my high, dreary,

-lonely bedroom, I cannot tell you all the copies of the _Opium-eater_

-which have been mine. I remember another, bound in dark blue cloth, with

-copious notes. There was a third, the outside seeming of which I forget,

-but which I think formed part of two volumes of selections from De

-Quincey. I love my little sixpenny volume for one reason chiefly. I can

-lend it without fear, and lose it without a pang. Why, the beggarliest

-miser alive can’t think much of fourpence-halfpenny! I have already

-dispensed a few copies of the _Opium-eater_, price fourpence-halfpenny.

-As it lies on my table now, I take no more care of it than one does of

-yesterday’s morning paper. When I read it I double it back, to show to

-myself how little I value the gross material of the book. Any one coming

-in likely to appreciate the book, and who has not read it is welcome to

-carry it off as a gift. Yet if I am free with the volume, I am jealous

-of the author. I do not mention his name to people I believe unwilling

-or unable to worship him becomingly.

-

-But when I meet a true disciple what prodigal joy environs and suffuses

-me! What talks of him I have had, and speechless raptures in hearing of

-him! How thick with gold the air of evenings has been, spent with him

-and one who loved him! I recall one glorious summer’s day, when an old

-friend and I (we were then, alas! years and years younger than we are

-to-day), had toiled on through mountain heather for hours, until we were

-half-baked by the sun and famished with thirst. Suddenly we came upon

-the topmost peak of all the hills, and saw, many miles away, the

-unexpected sea. As we stood, shading our eyes with our hands, my

-companion chanted out, “Obliquely to the right lay the many-languaged

-town of Liverpool; obliquely to the left ‘the multitudinous sea.’”

-“Whose is that?” I asked eagerly, notwithstanding my drought. “What

-isn’t Shakespeare’s is De Quincey’s.” “Where did you find it?” “In the

-_Opium-eater_.” I remember cursing my memory because I had forgotten

-that passage. When I got home I looked through the copy I then had, and

-could not find the sentence. I wrote to my friend, saying I could not

-come upon his quotation. He answered that he now believed it did not

-occur in the body of the _Confessions_, but in a note in some edition,

-he could not remember which. What a sense of miserable desolation I had

-that this edition had never come my way!

-

-There are only three marks of any kind in my present copy of the

-_Confessions_, one dealing with the semi-voluntary power children have

-over the coming and going of phantoms painted on the darkness. This mark

-is very indistinct, and, as I remember nothing about it, I think it must

-have been made by accident. The part indicated by it is only

-introductory to an unmarked passage immediately following which has

-always fascinated my imagination. It is in the “Pains of Opium,” and

-runs:--

-

-     “In the middle of 1817, I think it was, that this faculty became

-     positively distressing to me: at night, when I lay awake in bed,

-     vast processions passed along in mournful pomp, friezes of

-     never-ending stories, that to my feelings were as sad and solemn as

-     if they were stories drawn from times before Œdipus and

-     Priam--before Tyre--before Memphis. And at the same time a

-     corresponding change took place in my dreams: a theatre seemed

-     suddenly opened and lighted up within my brain, which presented

-     nightly spectacles of more than earthly splendour.”

-

-How thankful we ought to be that it has never been our fate to sit in

-that awful theatre of prehistoric woes! There is surely nothing more

-appalling in the past than the interminably vain activities of that

-mysterious atomie, Egyptian man. Who could bear to look upon the three

-hundred thousand ant-like slaves swarming among the colossal monoliths

-piled up in thousands for the pyramid of Cheops! The bare thought makes

-one start back aghast and shudder.

-

-I find the next mark opposite another awful passage dealing with

-infinity, on this occasion infinity of numbers, not of time:--

-

-     “The waters now changed their character,--from translucent lakes,

-     shining like mirrors, they now became seas and oceans. And now came

-     a tremendous change, which, unfolding itself slowly like a scroll,

-     through many months, promised an abiding torment; and, in fact, it

-     never left me until the winding-up of my case. Hitherto the human

-     face had mixed often in my dreams, but not despotically, not with

-     any special power of tormenting. But now, that which I have called

-     the tyranny of the human face began to unfold itself. Perhaps some

-     part of my London life might be answerable for this. Be that as it

-     may, now it was that upon the rocking waters of the ocean the human

-     face began to appear: the sea appeared paved with innumerable

-     faces, upturned to the heavens--faces imploring, wrathful,

-     despairing, surged upwards by thousands, by myriads, by

-     generations, by centuries.”

-

-Upon closer looking, I see an attempt has been made to erase the mark

-opposite this passage. Joining the fact with the faintness of the line

-opposite the former quotation I am driven to the conclusion that there

-is only one “stetted” note of admiration in the book. It is a whole page

-of the little volume. It begins on page 91, and ends on page 92. To show

-you how little I care for my copy of the _Confessions_, I shall cut it

-out. Even a lawyer would pay me more than fourpence-halfpenny for

-copying a page of the book, and, as I have said before, the volume has

-no extrinsic value for me. Excepting the Bible, I am not familiar with

-any finer passage of so great length in prose in the English language:--

-

-     “The dream commenced with a music which now I often heard in

-     dreams; a music of preparation and awakening suspense; a music like

-     the opening of the Coronation Anthem, and which, like _that_, gave

-     the feeling of a vast march--of infinite cavalcades filing off--and

-     the tread of innumerable armies. The morning was come of a mighty

-     day--a day of crisis and of final hope for human nature, then

-     suffering some mysterious eclipse, and labouring in some dread

-     extremity. Somewhere, I knew not where--somehow, I knew not

-     how--by some beings, I knew not whom--a battle, a strife, an agony

-     was conducting, was evolving like a great drama, or piece of music;

-     with which my sympathy was the more insupportable from my confusion

-     as to its place, its cause, its nature, and its possible issue. I,

-     as is usual in dreams (where, of necessity, we make ourselves

-     central to every movement), had the power and yet had not the

-     power, to decide it. I had the power, if I could raise myself, to

-     will it; and yet again had not the power, for the weight of twenty

-     Atlantics was upon me, or the oppression of inexpiable guilt.

-     ‘Deeper than ever plummet sounded,’ I lay inactive. Then, like a

-     chorus, the passion deepened. Some greater interest was at stake;

-     some mightier cause than ever yet the sword had pleaded or trumpet

-     had proclaimed. Then came sudden alarms; hurryings to and fro;

-     trepidations of innumerable fugitives, I knew not whether from the

-     good cause or the bad; darkness and lights; tempest and human

-     faces; and at last, with the sense that all was lost, female forms,

-     and the features that were all the world to me, and but a moment

-     allowed, and clasped hands, and heart-breaking partings, and

-     then--everlasting farewells! and with a sigh such as the caves of

-     hell sighed when the incestuous mother uttered the abhorred name of

-     death, the sound was reverberated--everlasting farewells! and again

-     and yet again reverberated--everlasting farewells! And I awoke in

-     struggles, and cried aloud, ‘I will sleep no more!’”

-

-Upon reading this passage over I am glad I am not familiar with any

-finer one in English prose--it would be impossible to endure it. In

-these sentences it is not the consummate style alone that overwhelms

-one, the matter is nearly as fine as the manner. How tremendously the

-numbers and sentences are marshalled! How inevitable, overbearing,

-breathless is the onward movement! What awful expectations are aroused,

-and shadowy fears vaguely realized! As the spectral pageant moves on

-other cohorts of trembling shades join the ghostly legion on the blind

-march! All is vaporous, spectral, spiritual, until when we are wound up

-to the highest pitch of physical awe and apprehension, we stop suddenly,

-arrested by failure of the ground, insufficiency of the road, and are

-recalled to life and light and truth and fellowship with the kindly race

-of man by the despairing human shriek of incommunicable, inarticulable

-agony in the words, “I will sleep no more!” In that despairing cry the

-tortured soul abjectly confesses that it has been vanquished and driven

-wild by the spirit-world. It is when you contrast the finest passages

-in Macaulay with such a passage as this, that you recognise the

-difference between a clever writer and a great stylist.

-

-

-

-

-A GUIDE TO IGNORANCE.

-

-

-For a long time I have had it in my mind to write a guide to ignorance.

-I have been withheld partly by a feeling of diffidence and partly by a

-want of encouragement from those to whom I mentioned the scheme. I have

-submitted a plan of my book to a couple of publishers, but each of these

-assured me that such a work would not be popular. In their

-straightforward commercial way they told me they could see “no money in

-the idea.” I differ from them; I think the book would be greeted with

-acclaim and bought with avidity.

-

-Novelties are, I know, always dangerous speculations except in the form

-of clothes, when they are certain of instant and immense adoption. The

-mind of man cannot conceive the pattern for trousers’ cloth or the

-design for a bonnet that will not be worn. There is nothing too high or

-too low to set the fashion to men and women in dress. Conquerors were

-crowned with mural wreaths, of which the chimney-pot hat is the lineal

-descendant; pigs started the notion of wearing rings in their noses, and

-man in the southern seas followed the example; kangaroos were the

-earliest pouch-makers and ladies took to carrying reticules.

-

-But an innovation in the domain of education or thought is a widely

-different thing from a frolic in gear. It is easy to set going any craze

-which depends merely or mostly on the way of wearing the hair or the

-height of the cincture. Hence æstheticism gained many followers in a

-little time. But remember it took ages and ages to reconcile people to

-wearing any clothes at all. Once you break the ice the immersion in a

-new custom may become as rapid as the descent of a round shot into the

-sea. The great step was, so to speak, from woad to wampum, with just an

-Atlantic of time between the two. If you went to Poole any day this

-week and asked him to make you a suit of wampum he would plead no

-insuperable difficulty. If you asked him to make you a suit of woad he

-would certainly detain you while he inquired as to your sanity and sent

-for your friends. Yet it is only one step, one film, from woad to

-wampum.

-

-Up to this time in the history of man there has, with few exceptions,

-been an infatuated pursuit of this will-o’-the-wisp, knowledge. Why

-should not man now turn his glance to ignorance, if it were only for a

-little while and for the sake of fair play? The idea is of course

-revolutionary, so also is every other new idea revolutionary, and (I am

-not now referring to politics) it is only from revolutionary ideas we

-derive what we regard as advantages. The earth and heavens themselves

-are revolutionary. Why then should we not fairly examine the chance of a

-revolution in the aim of man?

-

-The disinclination to face new attitudes of thought comes from the

-inherent laziness of man, and hence at the outset of my career towards

-that guide I should find nearly the whole race against me. Humboldt, who

-met people of all climes and races and colours, declares laziness to be

-the most common vice of human nature. Hence the initial obstacle is

-almost insuperable. But it is only almost, not quite insuperable. Men

-can be stirred from indolence only by a prospect of profit in some form.

-Even in the Civil Service they are incited to make the effort to

-continue living by the hope of greater leisure later in life, for with

-years comes promotion and promotion means less labour.

-

-By a little industry in the pursuit of ignorance greater repose would be

-attained in the immediate future. It would be very difficult to prove

-that up to this hour progress has been of the slightest use or pleasure

-to man. Higher pleasures, higher pains. Complexities of consciousness

-are merely a source of distraction from centralisation. The jelly fish

-may, after all, be the highest ideal of living things, and we may, if

-the phrase be admitted, have been developing backward from him. Of all

-the creatures on earth man is the most stuck up. He arrogates

-everything to himself and because he can split a flint or make a bow or

-gun-barrel he thinks he centres the universe, and insists that the

-illimitable deeps of space are focused upon him. Astronomers, a highly

-respectable class of people, assert there are now visible to us one

-hundred million fixed stars, one hundred million suns like our own. Each

-may have its system of planets, such as earth, and each planet again its

-attendant satellites. With that splendid magnanimity characteristic of

-our race, man would rather pitch the hundred million suns into chaos

-than for a moment entertain the idea that he is a humbug and of no use

-whatever. And yet after all the jelly-fish may be a worthier fellow than

-the best of us.

-

-I do not of course insist on reversion to the jelly-fish. In this

-climate his habits of life are too suggestive of ague and rheumatism. In

-fact I do not know that I am urging reversion to anything, even to the

-flocks of pastoral man. But I am saying that as myriads of facilities

-are given for acquiring knowledge, one humble means ought to be devised

-for acquiring ignorance. If I had anywhere met with the encouragement

-which I think I merited, I should have undertaken to write the book

-myself.

-

-I should open by saying it was not until I had concluded a long and

-painful investigation that I considered myself in any way qualified to

-undertake so grave and important a task as writing a guide to ignorance:

-that I had not only inquired curiously into my own fitness, but had also

-looked about carefully among my friends in the hope of finding some one

-better qualified to carry out this important undertaking. But upon

-gauging the depth of my own knowledge and considering conscientiously

-the capacity of my acquaintances, I came to the conclusion that no man I

-knew personally had so close a personal intimacy with ignorance as

-myself. There are few branches, I may say no branch, of knowledge except

-that of ignorance in which any one of my friends was not more learned

-than myself. I was born in such profound ignorance that I had no

-personal knowledge of the fact at the time. I had existed for a long

-time before I could distinguish between myself and things which were

-not.

-

-As a boy I was averse from study; and since I have grown to manhood I

-have acquired so little substantive information that I could write down

-in a bold hand on one page of this book every single fact, outside facts

-of personal experience, of which I am possessed.

-

-I know that the Norman invasion occurred in 1066, and the Great Fire in

-1666. I know that gunpowder is composed of saltpetre, sulphur, and

-charcoal, and sausages of minced meat and bread under the name of Tommy.

-I am aware Milton and Shakespeare were poets, and that needle-grinders

-are short lived. I know that the primest brands of three-shilling

-champagnes are made in London. I can give the Latin for seven words, and

-the French for four. I can repeat the multiplication table (with the

-pence) up to six times. I know the mere names of a number of people and

-things; but, as far as clear and definite information goes, I don’t

-believe I could double the above brief list. I am, I think, therefore,

-warranted in concluding that few men can have a more close or exhaustive

-personal acquaintance with ignorance. If you want learning at secondhand

-you must go to the learned: if you want ignorance at first hand you

-cannot possibly do better than come to me.

-

-In the first place let us consider the “Injury of Knowledge.” How much

-better off the king would be if he had no knowledge! Suppose his mental

-ken had never been directed to any period before the dawn of his own

-memory, he would have no disquieting thoughts of the trouble into which

-Charles I. or Richard II. drifted. He would be filled with no envy of

-the good old King John, who, from four or five ounces of iron in the

-form of thumb-screws, and a few hundredweight of rich Jew, filled up the

-royal pockets as often as they showed any signs of growing empty. And,

-above all, he would be spared the misery of committing dates to memory.

-How it must limit the happiness of a constitutional sovereign to know

-anything about the constitution! Why should he be burdened with the

-consciousness of rights and prerogatives? Would he not be much happier

-if he might smoke his cigar in his garden without the fear of the

-Speaker or the Lord Chancellor before his eyes? The Commons want their

-Speaker, the Lords want their Lord Chancellor--let them have them. The

-king wants neither. Why should he be troubled with any knowledge of

-either? Although he is a king is he not a man and a brother also? Why

-should he be worried out of his life with reasons for all he does? The

-king feels he can do no wrong. That ought to be enough for him. Most men

-believe the same thing of themselves, but few others share the faith.

-The king can do no wrong, then in mercy’s name let the man alone.

-Suppose it is a part of my duty to look out of the oriel window at dawn,

-noon, and sunset, why should I be bored with cause, reason, and

-precedent for this? Let me look out of window if it is my duty to do so;

-but, before and after looking out of the window, let me enjoy my life.

-

-Take the statesman. How knowledge must hamper him! He is absolutely

-precluded from acting with decision by the consciousness of the

-difficulties which lay in the path of his predecessors. He has to make

-up his subject, to get facts and figures from his subordinates and

-others. He has to arrange the party manœuvres before he launches his

-scheme, by which time all the energy is gone out of him, and he has not

-half as much faith in his bill as if he had never looked at the _pros_

-and _cons_. “Never mind manœuvring, but go at them,” said Nelson. The

-moment you begin to manœuvre you confess your doubtfulness of

-success, unless you can take your adversary at a disadvantage; but if

-you fly headlong at his throat, you terrify him by the display of your

-confidence and valour.

-

-The words of Nelson apply still more closely to the general. His

-knowledge that fifty years ago the British army was worsted on this

-field, unnerves, paralyses him. If he did not know that shells are

-explosive and bullets deadly, he would make his dispositions with twice

-the confidence, and his temerity would fill the foe with panic. His

-simple duty is to defeat the enemy, and knowing anything beyond this

-only tends to distract his mind and weaken his arm. In the middle of one

-of his Indian battles, and when he thought the conflict had been decided

-in favour of British arms, a messenger rode hastily up to the general in

-command, who was wiping his reeking forehead on his coat-sleeve: “A

-large fresh force of the enemy has appeared in such a place; what is to

-be done?” Gough rubbed his forehead with the other sleeve, and shouted

-out, “Beat ’em!” Obviously no better command could have been given. What

-the English nation wanted the English army to do with the enemy was to

-“beat ’em.” In the pictures of the Victoria Cross there is one of a

-young dandy officer with an eyeglass in his eye and a sword in his hand,

-among the thick of the foe. He knows he is in that place to kill some

-one. He is quite ignorant of the fact that the enemy is there to kill

-him, and he is taking his time and looking through his eyeglass to try

-to find some enticing man through whom to run his sword. One of

-Wellington’s most fervent prayers was, “Oh, spare me my dandy officers!”

-Now dandies are never very full of knowledge, and yet the greatest Duke

-thought more of them than of your learning-begrimed sappers or your

-science-bespattered gunners.

-

-If an advocate at the bar knew one quarter of the law of the land, he

-could never get on. In the first place, he would know more than the

-judges, and this would prejudice the bench against him. With regard to a

-barrister, the best position for him to assume, if he is addressing a

-jury, is, “Gentlemen, the indisputable facts of the case, as stated to

-you by the witnesses, are so-and-so. In presence of so distinguished a

-lawyer as occupies the bench in this court, I do not feel myself

-qualified to tell you what the law is; that will be the easy duty of his

-lordship.” Even in Chancery cases, the barrister would best insure

-success by merely citing the precedent cases, in an off-hand way, “Does

-not your lordship think the case of Burke _v._ Hare meets the exact

-conditions of the one under consideration?” The indices are all the

-pleader need look at. The judge will surely strain a point for one who

-does not bore him with extracts and arguments, but leaves all to

-himself, and lets the work of the court run smoothly and just as the

-president wishes.

-

-Knowledge is an absolute hindrance to the doctor of medicine. Supposing

-he is a man of average intelligence (some doctors are), he is able to

-diagnose, let me say, fever. You or I could diagnose fever pretty

-well--quick pulse, dry skin, thirst, and so on. But as the doctor leans

-over the patient, he is paralysed by the complication of his knowledge.

-Such a theory is against feeding up, such a theory against slops, such a

-theory against bleeding, such a theory in favour of phlebotomy; there

-are the wet and the dry, the hot and the cold methods; and while the

-doctor is deliberating, vacillating, or speculating, the patient has

-ample opportunity of dying, or nature of stepping in and curing the man,

-and thus foiling the doctor. Is there not much more sense and candour in

-the method adopted by the Irish hunting dispensary doctor, who, before

-starting with the hounds, locked up all drugs, except the Glauber’s

-salts, a stone or two of which he left in charge of his servant, with

-instructions it was to be meted out impartially to all comers, each

-patient receiving an honest fistful as a dose? It is a remarkable fact

-that within this century homœopathy has gained a firm hold on an

-important section of the community, and yet, notwithstanding the growth

-of what the allopathists or regular profession regard as ignorant

-quackery, the span of human life has had six years added to it in eighty

-years. Still homœopathy is a practical confession of ignorance; for

-it says, in effect, “We don’t know exactly what Nature is trying to do,

-but let us give her a little help, and trust in luck.” Whereas allopathy

-pretended to know everything and to fight Nature. Here, in the result of

-years added to man’s life by the development of the ignorant system, we

-see once more the superiority of ignorance over knowledge.

-

-How full of danger to the unwedded men is knowledge owned by the widow!

-She has knowledge of the married state, in which she was far removed

-from all the troubles and responsibilities of life. She had her

-pin-money, her bills paid, stalls taken for her at the opera, agreeable

-company around her board, no occasion to face money difficulties. Now

-all that is changed. There is no elasticity in her revenue, no margin

-for the gratification of her whims; she has to pay her own bills, secure

-her own stalls; she cannot very well entertain company often, and all

-the unpleasantnesses of business matters press her sorely. Her knowledge

-tells her that, if she could secure a second husband, all would be

-pleasant again. It may be said that here knowledge is in favour of the

-widow. Yes; but it is against the “Community.” Remember, the “Community”

-is always a male.

-

-There is hardly any class or member of the community that does not

-suffer drawback or injury from knowledge. As I am giving only a crude

-outline of a design, I leave a great deal to the imagination of the

-reader. He will easily perceive how much happier and more free would be

-the man of business, the girl, the boy, the scientist, the

-controversialist, and, above all, the literary man, if each knew little

-or nothing, instead of having pressed upon the attention from youth

-accumulated experiences, traditions, discoveries, and reasonings of many

-centuries.

-

-To the “Delights of Ignorance,” I should devote the consideration of man

-devoid of knowledge under various circumstances and in various

-positions.

-

-By the sea who does not love to lie “propt on beds of amaranth and moly,

-how sweet (while warm airs lull, blowing lowly), with half-dropt eyelids

-still, beneath a heaven dark and holy, to watch the long bright river

-drawing slowly his waters from the purple hill--to hear the dewy echoes

-calling from cave to cave through the thick-twined vine--to watch the

-emerald-coloured waters falling through many a woven acanthus wreath

-divine! Only to see and hear the far-off sparkling brine, only to hear

-were sweet, stretched out beneath the pine.” Just so! Is not that much

-better than bothering about gravitation and that wretched old clinker

-the moon, and the tides, and how sea-water is made up of oxygen and

-hydrogen and chloride of sodium and bromide of something else, and fifty

-other things, not one of which has a tolerable smell when you meet it in

-a laboratory? Isn’t it better than thinking of the number of lighthouses

-built on the coast of Albion, and the tonnage which yearly is reported

-and cleared at the custom-houses of London, Liverpool, and that

-prosperous seaport of Bohemia! Isn’t it much better than improving the

-occasion by reading a hand-book on hydraulics or hydrostatics? Who on

-the seashore wants to know anything? There will always, down to the last

-syllable of recorded time, be finer things unknown about the sea than

-can be said about all other matters in the world. Trying to know

-anything about the sea is like shooting into the air an arrow attached

-to a pennyworth of string with a view to sounding space. If we threw all

-the knowledge we have into the ocean the Admiralty standards of

-high-water mark would not have to be altered one-millionth part of a

-line.

-

-What a blessing ignorance would be in an inn! Who would not dispense

-with a knowledge of all the miseries that follow in the wake of the vat

-when one is thirsty, and has before him amber sunset-coloured ale, and

-in his hand a capacious, long, cool-meaning churchwarden? Who would at

-such a moment cumber his mind with the unit of specific gravity used by

-excisemen in testing beer? Who would at such a moment care to calculate

-the toll exacted by the Chancellor of the Exchequer before each cool

-gulp may thrill with amazing joy the parched gullet?

-

-Who, when upon a journey, would care to know the precise pressure

-required to blow the boiler of the engine to pieces, or the number of

-people killed in collisions during the corresponding quarter of last

-year? Should we not be better in sickness for not knowing the exact

-percentage of deaths in cases of our class? In adversity should we not

-be infinitely happier were we in ignorance of the chance we ran of

-gaining a good position or of cutting our throats? Should we not enjoy

-our prosperity all the more if we were not, morning and evening,

-exercised by the fluctuations of the share-list, fluctuations in all

-likelihood destined never to increase or diminish our fortunes one

-penny? And oh, for ignorance in sleep! For sleep without dream, or

-nightmare, or memory! For sleep such as falls upon the body when the

-soul is done with it and away!

-

-But all this is only rambling talk and likely to come to nothing. I fear

-I shall never find a publisher for my great work. Upon reading over what

-I have written I am impressed by the faintness of the outline it

-displays of the book. In fact there is hardly any outline at all. It is

-no more clear than the figures thrown by a magic-lantern upon a fog. I

-have done nothing more than wave the sacred lamp of ignorance before

-your eyes. I daresay my friend the jelly-fish would shake his fat sides

-with laughter if he became aware of this futile effort to show how far

-we are removed from his state of blissful calm. I feel infinitely

-depressed and discouraged. I feel that not only will I not be hailed as

-a prophet in my own country, but that the age will have nothing to do

-with my scheme. It may be thought by many that there is something like

-treason in thus enrolling oneself under the banner of the jelly-fish.

-Egypt, Assyria, Greece, Carthage, and Rome have gone back from

-knowledge, and even the jelly-fish does not flourish on their sites. But

-is the condition of their sites the worse for lacking the jelly-fish?

-Perhaps the “silence, and desolation, and dim night” are better in those

-places than the blare of trumpets and the tramp of man. So far as we

-know man is the only being capable of doing evil or offending heaven.

-His absence may by nature be considered very good company. Whatever part

-of earth he can handle and move he has turned topsy-turvy. One day earth

-will turn on him and wipe him out altogether.

-

-For me and my great scheme for the book there is no hope. Man has always

-been accounted a poor creature when judged by a fellow man whom he does

-not appreciate. How can I be expected to go on taking an interest in

-man when not the most credulous or the most crafty publisher in London

-will as much as look at my _Guide to Ignorance_? I feel that my life is

-wasted and that my functions have been usurped by the School Board. I

-cool the air with sighs for the days when a philosopher might teach his

-disciples in the porch or the grove. I feel as if I could anticipate

-earth and turn on man. But some of the genial good nature of the

-jelly-fish still lingers in my veins. I will not finally desert man

-until man has finally deserted me. I had by me a few scattered essays in

-the style of the book I projected in vain. If in them the reader has not

-found ample proof of my fitness to inculcate the philosophy of Ignorance

-I shall abandon Man to his fate. I have relieved my mind of some of its

-teeming store of vacuity. I can scarcely hope I have added to the

-reader’s hoard. But it would be consoling to fancy that upon laying down

-this book the reader’s mind will if possible be still more empty than

-when he took it up.

-

-                        RICHARD CLAY AND SONS,

-                          LONDON AND BUNGAY.

-

-

-Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:

-

-the face of a charletan=> the face of a charlatan {pg 13}

-

-acccording to Mitchel=> acccording to Mitchel {pg 140}

-

-are focussed upon him.=> are focused upon him. {pg 179}

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Ignorant Essays, by Richard Dowling

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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 53169 ***
+
+                           IGNORANT ESSAYS.
+
+
+
+
+                         _IGNORANT_
+
+                                 _ESSAYS._
+
+                    [Illustration: text decoration]
+
+                                LONDON:
+
+                           WARD AND DOWNEY,
+
+                 12, YORK STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C.
+
+                                 1887.
+
+                       [_All Rights Reserved._]
+
+                        RICHARD CLAY AND SONS,
+
+                          LONDON AND BUNGAY.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+                                PAGE
+
+THE ONLY REAL GHOST IN FICTION     1
+
+THE BEST TWO BOOKS                30
+
+LIES OF FABLE AND ALLEGORY        55
+
+MY COPY OF KEATS                  83
+
+DECAY OF THE SUBLIME             117
+
+A BORROWED POET                  132
+
+THE ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER          160
+
+A GUIDE TO IGNORANCE             175
+
+
+
+
+
+IGNORANT ESSAYS.
+
+
+
+
+THE ONLY REAL GHOST IN FICTION.
+
+
+My most ingenious friend met me one day, and asked me whether I
+considered I should be richer if I had the ghost of sixpence or if I had
+not the ghost of sixpence.
+
+“What side do you take?” I inquired, for I knew his disputatious turn.
+
+“I am ready to take either,” he answered; “but I give preference to the
+ghost.”
+
+“What!” I said. “Give preference to the ghost!”
+
+“Yes. You see, if I haven’t the ghost of sixpence I have nothing at
+all; but if I have the ghost of a sixpence----”
+
+“Well?”
+
+“Well, I am the richer by having the ghost of a sixpence.”
+
+“And do you think when you add one more delusion to those under which
+you already labour”--he and I could never agree about the difference
+between infinity and zero--“that you will be the better off?”
+
+“I have not admitted a ghost is a delusion; and even if I had I am not
+prepared to grant that a delusion may not be a source of wealth. Look at
+the South Sea Bubble.”
+
+I was willing, so there and then we fell to and were at the question--or
+rather, the questions to which it led--for hours, until we finally
+emerged upon the crystallization of cast-iron, the possibility of a
+Napoleonic restoration, or some other kindred matter. How we wandered
+about and writhed in that talk I can no more remember than I can recall
+the first articulate words that fell into my life. I know we handled
+ghosts (it was broad day and in a public street) with a freedom and
+familiarity that must have been painful to spirits of refinement and
+reserve. I know we said much about dreams, and compared the phantoms of
+the open lids with the phantoms of the closed eyes, and pitted them one
+against another like cocks in a main, and I remember that the case of
+the dreamer in Boswell’s Johnson came up between us. The case in Boswell
+submitted to Johnson as an argument in favour of a man’s reason being
+more acute in sleep than in waking, showed the phantom antagonistic able
+to floor the dreamer in his proper person. Johnson laughed at such a
+delusion, for, he pointed out, only the dreamer was besotted with sleep
+he would have perceived that he himself had furnished the confounding
+arguments to the shadowy disputant. That is very good, and seems quite
+conclusive as far as it goes; but is there nothing beyond what Johnson
+saw? Was there no ghostly prompter in the scene? No _suggeritore_
+invisible and inaudible to the dreamer, who put words and notes into the
+mouth of the opponent? No thinner shade than the spectral being visible
+in the dream? If in our waking hours we are subject to phantoms which
+sometimes can be seen and sometimes cannot, why not in our sleeping
+hours also? Are all ghosts of like grossness, or do some exist so fine
+as to be beyond our carnal apprehension, and within the ken only of the
+people of our sleep? If we ponderable mortals are haunted, who can say
+that our insubstantial midnight visitors may not know wraiths finer and
+subtler than we, may not be haunted as we are? In physical life
+parasites have parasites. Why in phantom life should not ghosts have
+ghosts?
+
+The firm, familiar earth--our earth of this time, the earth upon which
+we each of us stand at this moment--is thickly peopled with living
+tangible folk who can eat, and drink, and talk, and sing, and walk, and
+draw cheques, and perform a number of other useful, and hateful, and
+amusing actions. In the course of a day a man meets, let us say, forty
+people, with whom he exchanges speech. If a man is a busy dreamer, with
+how many people in the course of one night does he exchange speech? Ten,
+a hundred, a thousand? In the dreaming of one minute by the clock a man
+may converse with half the children of Adam since the Fall! The command
+of the greatest general alive would not furnish sentries and vedettes
+for the army of spirits that might visit one man in the interval between
+one beat of the pendulum of Big Ben and another!
+
+Shortly after that talk with my friend about the ghost of the sixpence,
+I was walking alone through one of the narrow lanes in the tangle of
+ways between Holborn and Fleet Street, when my eye was caught by the
+staring white word “Dreams” on a black ground. The word is, so to speak,
+printed in white on the black cover of a paper-bound book, and under the
+word “Dreams” are three faces, also printed in white on a black ground.
+Two of the faces are those of women: one of a young woman, purporting to
+be beautiful, with a star close to her forehead, and the other of a
+witch with the long hair and disordered eyes becoming to a person of her
+occupation. I dare say these two women are capable not only of
+justification, but of the simplest explanation. For all I know to the
+contrary, the composition may be taken wholly, or in part, from a
+well-known picture, or perhaps some canon of ghostly lore would be
+violated if any other design appeared on the cover. About such matters I
+know absolutely nothing. The word “Dreams” and the two female faces are
+now much less prominent than when I saw the book first, for, Goth that I
+am, long ago I dipped a brush in ink and ran a thin wash over the
+letters and the two faces; as they were, to use artist’s phrases, in
+front of the third face, and killing it.
+
+The third face is that of a man, a young man clean shaven and handsome,
+with no ghastliness or look of austerity. His arms are resting on a
+ledge, and extend from one side of the picture to the other. The left
+arm lies partly under the right, and the left hand is clenched softly
+and retired in half shadow. The right arm rises slightly as it crosses
+the picture, and the right wrist and hand ride on the left. The fore and
+middle fingers are apart, and point forward and a little downward,
+following the sleeve of the other arm. The third finger droops still
+more downward, and the little finger, with a ring on it, lies directly
+perpendicular along the cuff of the sleeve beneath. The hand is not well
+drawn, and yet there is some weird suggestiveness in the purposeless
+dispersion of the fingers.
+
+Fortunately upon my coming across the book, the original cost of which
+was one shilling, I had more than the ghost of a sixpence, and for
+two-thirds of that sum the book became mine. It is the only art purchase
+I ever made on the spur of the moment; I knew nothing of the book then,
+and know little of it now. It says it is the cut-down edition of a much
+larger work, and what I have read of it is foolish. The worst of the
+book is that it does not afford subject for a laugh. Thomas Carlyle is
+reported to have said in conversation respecting one of George Eliot’s
+latest stories that “it was not amusing, and it was not instructive; it
+was only dull--dull.” This book of dreams is only dull. However, there
+are some points in it that may be referred to, as this is an idle time.
+
+“To dream you see an angel or angels is very good, and to dream that you
+yourself are one is much better.” The noteworthy thing in connection
+with this passage being that nothing is said of the complexion of the
+angel or angels! Black or white it is all the same. You have only to
+dream of them and be happy. “To dream that you play upon bagpipes,
+signifies trouble, contention, and being overthrown at law.” Doubtless
+from the certainty, in civilised parts, of being prosecuted by your
+neighbours as a public nuisance. I would give a trifle to know a man who
+did dream that he played upon the bagpipes. Of course, it is quite
+possible he might be an amiable man in other ways.
+
+“To dream you have a beard long, thick, and unhandsome is of a good
+signification to an orator, or an ambassador, lawyer, philosopher or any
+who desires to speak well or to learn arts and sciences.” That
+“ambassador” gleams like a jewel among the other homely folk. I remember
+once seeing a newspaper contents-bill after a dreadful accident with the
+words “Death of fifty-seven people and a peer.” “To dream that you have
+a brow of brass, copper, marble, or iron signifies irreconcilable hatred
+against your enemies.” The man capable of such a dream I should like to
+see--but through bars of metal made from his own sleep-zoned forehead.
+“If any one dreams that he hath encountered a cat or killed one, he will
+commit a thief to prison and prosecute him to the death; for the cat
+signifies a common thief.” Mercy on us! Does the magistrate who commits
+usually prosecute, and is thieving a hanging matter now? This is
+necromancy or nothing; prophecy, inspiration, or something out of the
+common indeed.
+
+“To dream one plays or sees another play on a clavicord, shows the death
+of relations, or funeral obsequies.” I now say with feelings of the most
+profound gratitude that I never to my knowledge even saw a clavicord. I
+do not know what the beastly, ill-omened contrivance is like. The most
+recondite musical instrument I ever remember to have performed on is the
+Jew’s harp; and although there seems to be something weak, uncandid and
+treacherous in the spelling of “clavicord,” I presume the two are not
+identical. In any case I am safe, for I have never dreamed of playing
+even on the Jew’s harp. Here however is a cheerful promise from a
+painful experience--one wants something encouraging after that
+terrifying “clavicord.” “For a man to dream that his flesh is full of
+corns, shows that a man will grow rich proportionately to his corns.” I
+can breathe freely once more, having got away from outlandish musical
+instruments and within the influence of the familiar horn.
+
+As might be expected, it is not useful to dream about the devil. Let
+sleeping dogs lie. “To dream of eating human flesh” is also a bad way of
+spending the hours of darkness. It is lucky to dream you are a fool. You
+see, even in sleep, the virtue of candour brings reward. “To dream that
+you lose your keys signifies anger.” And very naturally too. “To dream
+you kill your father is a bad sign.” I had made up my mind not to go
+beyond the parricide, but I am lured on to quote this, “To dream of
+eating mallows, signifies exemption from trouble and dispatch of
+business, because this herb renders the body soluble.” I will not say
+that Nebuchadnezzar may not at one time have eaten mallows among other
+unusual herbs, but I never did. That however is not where the wonder
+creeps in. It is at the reason. If you eat mallows you will have no
+trouble _because_ this herb renders the body _soluble_. Why is it good
+to render the body soluble, and what is the body soluble in? One more
+and I am done. “To dream one plays, or sees another play, upon the
+virginals, signifies the death of relations, or funeral obsequies.” From
+bagpipes, clavicords, and virginals, we hope we may be protected. And
+yet if these are the only instruments banned, a person having an
+extensive acquaintance with wind and string instruments of the orchestra
+may be musical in slumber without harm to himself or threat to his
+friends.
+
+In the interpretation of dreams Artemidorus was the most learned man
+that ever lived. He gave the best part of his life to collecting matter
+about dreams, and this he afterwards put together in five books. He
+might better have spent his time in bottling shadows of the moon.
+
+It was however for the face of the man on the cover that I bought and
+have kept the book. The face is that of a man between thirty and
+thirty-five years of age. It is regular and handsome. The forehead leans
+slightly forward, and the lower part of the face is therefore a little
+foreshortened. It is looking straight out of the picture; the shadows
+fall on the left of the face, on the right as it fronts you. The nose is
+as long and broad-backed as the nose of the Antinous. The mouth is large
+and firm and well-shaping with lips neither thick nor thin. The interval
+between the nostrils and verge of the upper lip is short. The chin is
+gently pointed and prominent. The outline of the jaws square. The
+modelling of the left cheek is defectively emphasised at the line from
+above the hollow of the nostrils downward and backward. The brows are
+straight, the left one being slightly more arched than the right. The
+forehead is low, broad, compact, hard, with clear lines. The lower line
+of the temples projects beyond the perpendicular. The hair is thick and
+wavy and divided at the left side, depressed rather than divided, for
+the parting is visible no further up the head than a splay letter V.
+
+The eyes are wide open, and notwithstanding the obtuse angle made by the
+facial line in the forward pose of the head, they are looking out level
+with their own height upon the horizon. There is no curiosity or
+speculation in the eyes. There is no wonder or doubt; no fear or joy.
+The gaze is heavy. There is a faint smile, the faintest smile the human
+face is capable of displaying, about the mouth. There is no light in the
+eyes. The expression of the whole face is infinitely removed from
+sinister. In it there is kindliness with a touch of wisdom and pity. It
+asks no question; desires to say no word. It is the face of one who
+beyond all doubt knows things we do not know, things which can scarcely
+be shaped into words, things we are in ignorance of. It is not the face
+of a charlatan, a seer, or a prophet.
+
+It is the face of a man once ardent and hopeful, to whom everything that
+is to be known has lately been revealed, and who has come away from the
+revelation with feelings of unassuageable regret and sorrow for Man. It
+says with terrible calmness, “I have seen all, and there is nothing in
+it. For your own sakes let me be mute. Live you your lives. _Miserere
+nobis!_”
+
+My belief is that the extraordinary expression of that face is an
+accident, a happy chance, a result that the artist never foresaw. Who
+drew the cover I cannot tell. No initials appear on it and I have never
+made inquiries. Remember that in pictures and poems (I know nothing of
+music), what is a miracle to you, has in most cases been a miracle to
+the painter or poet also. Any poet can explain how he makes a poem, but
+no poet can explain how he makes poetry. He is simply writing a poem and
+the poetry glides or rushes in. When it comes he is as much astonished
+by it as you are. The poem may cost him infinite trouble, the poetry he
+gets as a free gift. He begins a poem to prepare himself for the
+reception of poetry or to induce its flow. His poem is only a
+lightning-rod to attract a fluid over which he has no control before it
+comes to him. There may be a poetic art, such as verse-making, but to
+talk about the art of poetry is to talk nonsense. It is men of genteel
+intellects who speak of the art of poetry. The man who wrote the _Art of
+Poetry_ knew better than to credit the possible existence of any such
+art. He himself says the poet is born, not made.
+
+I am very bad at dates, but I think Le Fanu wrote _Green Tea_ before a
+whole community of Canadian nuns were thrown into the most horrible
+state of nervous misery by excessive indulgence in that drug. Of all the
+horrible tales that are not revolting, _Green Tea_ is I think the most
+horrible. The bare statement that an estimable and pious man is haunted
+by the ghost of a monkey is at the first blush funny. But if you have
+not read the story read it, and see how little of fun is in it. The
+horror of the tale lies in the fact that this apparition of a monkey is
+the only _probable_ ghost in fiction. I have not the book by me as I
+write, and I cannot recall the victim’s name, but he is a clergyman,
+and, as far as we know to the contrary, a saint. There is no reason _on
+earth_ why he should be pursued by this malignant spectre. He has
+committed no crime, no sin even. He labours with all the sincerity of a
+holy man to regain his health and exorcise his foe. He is as crimeless
+as you or I and infinitely more faultless. He has not deserved his fate,
+yet he is driven in the end to cut his throat, and you excuse _that_
+crime by saying he is mad.
+
+I do not think any additional force is gained in the course of this
+unique story by the importation of malignant irreverence to Christianity
+in the latter manifestations of the ape. I think the apparition is at
+its best and most terrible when it is simply an indifferent pagan,
+before it assumes the _rôle_ of antichrist. This ape is at his best as a
+mind-destroyer when the clergyman, going down the avenue in the
+twilight, raised his eyes and finds the awful presence preceding him
+along the top of the wall. There the clergyman reaches the acme of
+piteous, unsupportable horror. In the pulpit with the brute, the priest
+is fighting against the devil. In the avenue he has not the
+strengthening or consoling reflection that he is defending a cause,
+struggling against hell. The instant motive enters into the story the
+situation ceases to be dramatic and becomes merely theatrical. Every
+“converted” tinker will tell you stirring stories of his wrestling with
+Satan, forgetting that it takes two to fight, and what a loathsome
+creature he himself is. But the conflict between a good man and the
+unnecessary apparition of this ape is pathetic, horribly pathetic, and
+full of the dramatic despair of the finest tragedy.
+
+It is desirable at this point to focus some scattered words that have
+been set down above. The reason this apparition of the ape appears
+probable is _because_ it is unnecessary. Any one can understand why
+Macbeth should see that awful vision at the banquet. The apparition of
+the murdered dead is little more than was to be expected, and can be
+explained in an easy fashion. You or I never committed murder,
+therefore we are not liable to be troubled by the ghost of Banquo. In
+your life or mine Nemesis is not likely to take heroic dimensions. The
+spectres of books, as a rule, only excite our imaginative fears, not our
+personal terrors. The spectres of books have and can have nothing to do
+with us any more than the sufferings of the Israelites in the desert.
+When a person of our acquaintance dies, we inquire the particulars of
+his disease, and then discover the predisposing causes, so that we may
+prove to ourselves we are not in the same category with him. We do not
+deny our liability to contract the disease, we deny our likelihood to
+supply the predisposing causes. He died of aneurysm of the aorta: Ah, we
+say, induced by the violent exercise he took--we never take violent
+exercise. If not of aneurysm of the aorta, but fatty degeneration of the
+heart: Ah, induced by the sedentary habits of his latter years--we take
+care to secure plenty of exercise. If a man has been careful of his
+health and dies, we allege that he took all the robustness out of his
+constitution by over-heedfulness; if he has been careless, we say he
+took no precautions at all; and from either of these extremes we are
+exempt, and therefore we shall live for ever.
+
+Now here in this story of _Green Tea_ is a ghost which is possible,
+probable, almost familiar. It is a ghost without genesis or
+justification. The gods have nothing to do with it. Something, an
+accident due partly to excessive tea-drinking, has happened to the
+clergyman’s nerves, and the ghost of this ape glides into his life and
+sits down and abides with him. There is no reason why the ghost should
+be an ape. When the victim sees the apparition first he does not know it
+to be an ape. He is coming home in an omnibus one night and descries two
+gleaming spots of fire in the dark, and from that moment the life of the
+poor gentleman becomes a ruin. It is a thing that may happen to you or
+me any day, any hour. That is why Le Fanu’s ghost is so horrible. You
+and I might drink green tea to the end of our days and suffer from
+nothing more than ordinary impaired digestion. But you or I may get a
+fall, or a sunstroke, and ever afterwards have some hideous familiar.
+To say there can be no such things as ghosts is a paltry blasphemy. It
+is a theory of the smug, comfortable kind. A ghost need not wear a white
+sheet and have intelligible designs on personal property. A ghost need
+not be the spirit of a dead person. A ghost need have no moral mission
+whatever.
+
+I once met a haunted man, a man who had seen a real ghost; a ghost that
+had, as the ape, no ascertainable moral mission but to drive his victim
+mad. In this case too the victim was a clergyman. He is, I believe,
+alive and well now. He has shaken off the incubus and walks a free man.
+I was travelling at the time, and accidentally got into chat with him on
+the deck of a steamboat by night. We were quite alone in the darkness
+and far from land when he told me his extraordinary story. I do not of
+course intend retailing it here. I look on it as a private
+communication. I asked him what brought him to the mental plight in
+which he had found himself, and he answered briefly, “Overwork.” He was
+then convalescent, and had been assured by his physicians that with
+care the ghost which had been laid would appear no more. The spectre he
+saw threatened physical harm, and while he was haunted by it he went in
+constant dread of death by violence. It had nothing good or bad to do
+with his ordinary life or his sacred calling. It had no foundation on
+fact, no basis on justice. He had been for months pursued by the figure
+of a man threatening to take away his life. He did not believe this man
+had any corporeal existence. He did not know whether the creature had
+the power to kill him or not. The figure was there in the attitude of
+menace and would not be banished. He knew that no one but himself could
+see the murderous being. That ghost was there for him, and there for him
+alone.
+
+Respecting the Canadian nuns whose convent was beleaguered and infested
+by ghostly enemies that came not by ones or twos but in battalions, I
+had a fancy at the time. I do not intend using the terminologies or
+theories of the dissecting room, or the language of physiology found in
+books. I am not sure the fancy is wholly my own, but some of it is
+original. I shall suppose that the nerves are not only capable of
+various conditions of health and disease, but of large structural
+alteration in life; structural alteration not yet recorded or observed
+in fact; structural alteration which, if you will, exists in life but
+disappears instantly at death. In fine, I mean rather to illustrate my
+fancy than to describe anything that exists or could exist. Before
+letting go the last strand of sense, let me say that talking of nerves
+being highly strung is sheer nonsense, and not good nonsense either. The
+muscles it is that are highly strung. The poor nerves are merely
+insulated wires from the battery in the head. Their tension is no more
+affected by the messages that go over them, than an Atlantic cable is
+tightened or loosened by the signals indicating fluctuations in the
+Stock Exchanges of London and New York.
+
+The nerves, let us suppose, in their normal condition of health have
+three skins over the absolute sentient tissue. In the ideal man in
+perfect health, let us say Hodge, the man whose privilege it is to “draw
+nutrition, propagate, and rot,” the three skins are always at their
+thickest and toughest. Now genius is a disease, and it falls, as ladies
+of Mrs. Gamp’s degree say, “on the nerves.” That is, the first of these
+skins having been worn away or never supplied by nature, the patient
+“sees visions and dreams dreams.” The man of genius is not exactly under
+delusions. He does not think he is in China because he is writing of
+Canton in London, but his optic nerve, wanting the outer coating, can
+build up images out of statistics until the images are as full of line
+and colour and as incapable of change at will as the image of a barrel
+of cider which occupies Hodge’s retina when it is imminent to his
+desires, present to his touch. The sensibility of the nerves of genius
+is greater than the sensibility of the nerves of Hodge. Not all the
+eloquence of an unabridged dictionary could create an image in Hodge’s
+mind of a thing he had never seen. From a brief description a painter of
+genius could make a picture--not a likeness of course--of Canton,
+although he had never been outside the four corners of these kingdoms.
+The painting would not, in all likelihood, be in the least like Canton,
+but it would be very like the image formed in the painter’s mind of that
+city. In the painter such an image comes and goes at will. He can either
+see it or not see it as he pleases. It is the result of the brain
+reacting on the nerve. It relies on data and combination. It is his
+slave, not his master. Before it can be formed there must be great
+increase of sensibility. Hodge is crude silver, the painter is the
+polished mirror. The painter can see things which are not, things which
+he himself makes in his mind. His invention is at least as vivid as his
+memory.
+
+I suppose then that the man of genius, the painter or poet, is one who,
+having lost the first skin, or portion of the first skin of his nerves,
+can create and see in his mind’s eye things never seen by the eye of any
+other man, and see them as vividly as men of no genius can see objects
+of memory.
+
+Now peel off the second skin. The more exquisitely sensitive or the
+innermost skin of the nerve is exposed. Things which the eye of genius
+could not invent or even dream of are revealed. A drop of putrid water
+under the microscope becomes a lake full of terrifying monsters large
+enough to destroy man. Heard through the microphone the sap ascending a
+tree becomes loud as a torrent. Seen through a telescope nebulous spots
+in the sky become clusters of constellations. Divested of its second
+skin the nerve becomes sensitive to influences too rare and fine for the
+perception of the optic nerve in a more protected state. Beings that
+bear no relation whatever to weight or the law of impenetrability, float
+about and flash hither and thither swifter than lightning. The air and
+other ponderable matter are nothing to them. They are no more than the
+shadows or reflections of action, the imperishable progeny of thought.
+Here lies disclosed to the partly emancipated nerve the Canton of the
+painter’s vision. Here the city he made to himself is as firm and sturdy
+and solid and full of life as the Canton of this day on the southern
+coast of China. Here throng the unrecorded visions of all the poets.
+Here are the counterfeits of all the dead in all their phases. Here
+float the dreams of men, the unbroken scrolls of life and action and
+thought complete of all beings, man and beast, that have lived since
+time began. In the world of matter nothing is lost; in the world of
+spirit nothing is lost either.
+
+If instead of taking the whole of this imaginary skin off the optic
+nerve, we simply injure it ever so slightly, the nerve may become alive
+to some of these spirits; and this premature perception of what is
+around all of us, but perceived by few, we call seeing ghosts. It may be
+objected that all space is not vast enough to afford room for such a
+stupendous panorama. When we begin to talk of limits of space to
+anything beyond our knowledge and the touch of our inch-tape, we talk
+like fools. There is no good in allotting space with a two-foot rule. It
+is all the same whether we divide zero into infinity or infinity into
+zero. The answer is the same; “I don’t know how many times it goes.”
+Take a cubic inch of air outside your window and see the things packed
+into it. Here interblent we find all together resistance and light and
+sound and odour and flavour. We must stop there, for we have got to the
+end, not of what _is_ packed into that cubic inch of air, but to the end
+of the things in it revealed to our senses. If we had five more senses
+we should find five more qualities; if we had five thousand senses, five
+thousand qualities. But even if we had only our own senses in higher
+form we should see ghosts.
+
+If the third skin were removed from the optic nerve all things we now
+call opaque would become transparent, owing to the naked nerve being
+sensitive to the latent light in every body. The whole round world would
+become a crystal ball, the different degrees of what we now call opacity
+being indicated merely by a faint chromatic modification. What we now
+regard as brilliant sunlight would then be dense shadow. Apocalyptic
+ranges of colour would be disclosed, beginning with what is in our
+present condition the least faint trace of tint and ascending through a
+thousand grades to white, white brighter far than the sun our present
+eyes blink upon. Burnished brass flaming in our present sun would then
+be the beginning of the chromatic scale descending in the shadow of
+yellow, burnished copper of red, burnished tin of black, burnished steel
+of blue. So intense then would the sensibility of the optic nerve become
+that the satellites attendant on the planets in the system of the suns,
+called fixed stars, would blaze brighter than our own moon reflected in
+the sea. To the eye matter would cease to be matter in its present,
+gross obstructive sense. It would be no more than a delicate transparent
+pigment in the wash of a water-colour artist. The gross rotundity of the
+earth would be, in the field of the human eye, a variegated transparent
+globe of reduced luminousness and enormous scales and chords of colour.
+The Milky Way would then be a concave measureless ocean of prismatic
+light with pendulous opaline spheres.
+
+The figures of dreams and ghosts may be as real as we are pleased to
+consider ourselves. What arrogance of us to say they are our own
+creation! They may look upon themselves as superior to us, as we look
+upon ourselves as superior to the jelly-fish. No doubt we are to ghosts
+the baser order, the spirits stained with the woad of earth, low
+creatures who give much heed to heat and cold, and food and motion. They
+are the sky-children, the chosen people. They are nothing but
+circumscribed will wedded to incorporeal reasons of the nobler kind, and
+with scopes the contemplation of which would split our tenement of clay.
+They are the arch-angelic hierarchs of man, the ultimate condition of
+the race, the spirit of this planet distilled by the sun.
+
+
+
+
+THE BEST TWO BOOKS.
+
+
+In no list I met of the best hundred books, when that craze took the
+place of spelling-bees and the fifteen puzzle, do I recollect seeing
+mention made of my two favourite works. These two books stand completely
+apart in my esteem, and if I were asked to name the volume that comes
+third, I should have to make a speech of explanation. The first of them
+is not in prose or verse, it is not a work of theology or philosophy or
+science or art or history or fiction or general literature. It is at
+once the most comprehensive and impartial book I know. This paragraph is
+assuming the aspect of a riddle. Being in a mild and passionless way a
+lover of my species, I am a loather of riddles. So I will go no further
+on the downward way, but declare the name, title, and style of my book
+to be Nuttall’s _Standard Dictionary_.
+
+I am well aware there is a great deal to be said against Nuttall’s
+_Dictionary_ as a dictionary, but I am not speaking of it in that sense.
+I am treating it as a dear companion, a true friend, a _vade mecum_. Let
+those who have a liking for discovering spots in the sun glare at the
+orb until they have a taste for nothing else but spots in the sun. I
+find Nuttall so close to my affections that I can perceive no defects in
+him. I cannot bear to hold him at arm’s length, for critical
+examination. I hug him close to me, and feel that while I have him I am
+almost independent of all other books printed in the English language.
+
+Cast your eyes along your own bookshelves of English authors; every
+word, liberally speaking, that is in each and every volume on your
+shelves is in my Nuttall! Here is the juice of the language, from
+Shakespeare to Huxley, in a concentrated solution. Here is a book that
+starts by telling you that A is a vowel, and does not desert you until
+it informs you that zythum is a beverage, a liquor made from malt and
+wheat; a fact, I will wager, you never dreamed of before! And between A
+and zythum, what a boundless store of learning is disclosed! This is the
+only single-volume book I know of which no man living is or ever can be
+the master. Charles Lamb would not allow that dictionaries are books at
+all. In his days they were white-livered charlatans compared with the
+full-blooded enthusiast, Nuttall.
+
+If such an unkind thing were desirable as to diminish the conceit of a
+man of average reading and intelligence, there is no book could be used
+with such paralysing effect upon him as this one. It is almost
+impossible for any student to realise the infinite capacity for
+ignorance with which man is gifted until he is brought face to face with
+such a book as Nuttall. The list of words whose meanings are given
+occupies 771 very closely printed pages of small type in double column.
+The letter A takes up from 1 to 52. How many words unfamiliar to the
+ordinary man are to be found in this fifteenth part of the dictionary!
+On the top of every folio there occur four words, one at the head of
+each column. Barring the right of the candidates in ignorance to guess
+from the roots how many well-informed people know or would use any of
+the following words--absciss, acidimeter, acroteleutic, adminicular,
+adminiculator, adustion, aerie, agrestic, allignment, allision,
+ambreine, ampulla, ampullaceous, android, antiphonary, antiphony,
+apanthropy, aponeurosis, appellor, aramaic, aretology, armilla,
+armillary, asiarch, assentation, asymptote, asymptotical, aurate,
+averruncator, aversant, axotomous, or axunge? And yet all these are at
+the heads of columns under A alone! Take, now, one column haphazard
+perpendicularly, and with the same reservation as before, who would use
+antimaniac, antimask, antimasonic, antimeter, antimonite, antinephritic,
+antinomian, antinomy, antipathous, antipedobaptist, antiperistaltic,
+antiperistasis, or antiphlogistic? The letter A taken along the top of
+the pages or down one column is not a good letter for the confusion of
+the conceited; because viewed across the top of the page it is pitifully
+the prey of prefixes which lead to large families of words, and viewed
+down the column (honestly selected at haphazard), it is the bondslave of
+one prefix. When, however, one starts a theory, it is not fair to pick
+and choose. I have, of course, eschewed derivatives in coming down the
+column; across the column I did not do so, as the chance of a prime word
+being at the bottom of one column and its derivate at the top of the
+next ought to count two in my favour. I am aware this claim may be
+disputed; I have disputed it with myself at much too great length to
+record here, and I have decided in my own favour.
+
+Of course the mere reading of the dictionary in a mechanical way would
+produce no more effect than the repetition of numerals abstracted from
+things. There is no greater suggestiveness in saying a million than in
+saying one. But what an enlargement of the human capacity takes place
+when a person passes from the idea of one man to the idea of a million
+men. Take the first word quoted from the head of the column. I had
+wholly forgotten the meaning of absciss. I cannot even now remember
+that I ever knew the meaning of it, though of course I must, for I was
+supposed to have learned conic sections once. Why any one should be
+expected to learn conic sections I cannot guess. As far as I can now
+recall, they are the study of certain possible systems and schemes of
+lines in a wholly unnecessary figure. I believe the cone was invented by
+some one who had conic sections up his sleeve, and devised the miserable
+spinning of the triangle merely to gratify his lust of cruelty to the
+young. The only one use to which cones are put, as far as I am aware, is
+for a weather signal on the sea coast. The only section of a cone put to
+any pleasant use is a frustum when it appears in the bark of the cork
+tree; and even this conic section is not of much use to pleasure until
+it is removed from the bottle. Conic sections are reprehensible in
+another way. They are, in the matter of difficulty, nothing better than
+impostors. They are really “childlike and bland,” and will, when you
+have conquered your schoolboy terror of them, be found agreeable
+after-dinner reading.
+
+But I must return to Nuttall. The systematic study of the book is to be
+deplored. It is, like the Essays of Elia, not to be read through at a
+sitting, but to be dipped into curiously when one is in the vein. The
+charm of Lamb is in the flavour; and one cannot reach the more remote
+and finer joys of taste if one eats quickly. There is no cohesion, and
+but little thought in Nuttall. It is as a spur, an incentive, to thought
+I worship the book, and as a storehouse for elemental lore. You have
+known a thing all your life, let us say, and have called it by a
+makeshift name. You feel in your heart and soul there must be a more
+close-fitting appellation than you employ for it, and you endure a sense
+of feebleness and dispersion of mind. One day you are idly glancing
+through your Nuttall, and suddenly the clouds, the nebulous mists of a
+generalized term, roll away, and out shines, clear and sharply defined,
+the particular definition of the thing. From childhood I have, for
+example, known a pile-driver, and called it a pile-driver for years and
+years. All along something told me pile-driver was no better than a
+loose and off-hand way of describing the machine. It partook of the
+barbarous nature of a hieroglyphic. You drew, as it were, the figure of
+a post, and of a weight descending upon it. The device was much too
+pictorial and crude. Moreover, it was, so described, a thing without a
+history. To call a pile-driver a pile-driver is no more than to describe
+a barn-door cock onomatopoetically as cock-a-doodle-doo--a thing
+repellent to a pensive mind. But in looking over Nuttall I accidentally
+alighted on this: “Fistuca, fis’--tu-ka, _s._ A machine which is raised
+to a given height by pulleys, and then allowed suddenly to fall on the
+head of a pile; a monkey (L. a rammer).” Henceforth there is, in my
+mind, no need of a picture for the machine. So to speak, the abstract
+has become concrete. I would not, of course, dream of using the word
+fistuca, but it is a great source of internal consolation to me.
+Besides, I attain with it to other eminences of curiosity, which show me
+fields of inquiry I never dreamed of before.
+
+I have not met the word monkey in this sense until now. I look out
+monkey in my book, and find one of the meanings “a pile-driver,” and
+that the word is derived from the Italian “_monna_, contraction for
+_madonna_.” Up to this moment I did not know from what monkey was
+derived, although I had heard that from monkey man was derived. All this
+sets one off into a delicious doze of thought and keeps one carefully
+apart from his work. For “who would fardels bear to groan and sweat
+under a weary” load of even pens, when he might lie back and close his
+eyes, and drift off to the Rome of Augustus or the Venice of to-day?
+Philology as mere philology is colourless, but if one uses the records
+of verbal changes as glasses to the past and present, what panchromatic
+hues sweep into the pale field of the dictionary! What myriads of dead
+men stand up out of their graves, and move once more through scenes of
+their former activities! What reimpositions of old times on old earth
+take place! What bravery of arms and beauty of women are renewed; what
+glowing argosies, long mouldered, sparkle once more in the sun! What
+brazen trumpets blare of conquest, and dust of battle roll along the
+plain! What plenitude of life, of movement, of man is revealed! A
+dictionary is to me the key-note in the orchestra where mankind sit
+tuning their reeds for the overture to the final cataclysm of the world.
+
+My second book would be Whitaker’s _Almanack_. Owing to miserable
+ill-luck I have not been able to get a copy of the almanac for this
+year. I offered fair round coin of the realm for it before the Jubilee
+plague of ugliness fell upon the broad pieces of her most gracious
+Majesty. But, alas! no copy was to be had. I was too late in the race.
+All the issue had been sold. The last edition of which I have a copy is
+that for 1886. I have one for each year of the ten preceding, and I
+cannot tell how crippled and humiliated I feel in being without one for
+1887.
+
+This is another of the books that Charles Lamb classes among the
+no-books. As in the case of Nuttall, there was no Whitaker in his day,
+and certainly no almanac at all as good. At first glance this book may
+seem dry and sapless as the elm ready sawn for conversion into parish
+coffins. But how can anything be considered dry or dead when two hundred
+thousand of its own brothers are at this moment dwelling in useful amity
+among our fellowmen? It in one way contrasts unfavourably with almanacs
+which can claim a longer life, there are no vaticinations in it. But if
+the gift of prophecy were possessed by other almanacs, why did they not
+foretell that they would be in the end known as humbugs, and cut their
+conceited throats? I freely own I am a bigot in this matter; I have
+never given any other almanac a fair chance, and, what is worse, I have
+firmly made up my mind not to give any other one any chance at all. What
+is the good of being loyal to one’s friends if one’s loyalty is at the
+beck of every upstart acquaintance, no matter how great his merits or
+how long his purse? I place my faith in Whitaker, and am ready to go to
+the stake (provided it is understood that nothing unpleasant takes place
+there) chaunting my belief and glorying in my doom.
+
+If you took away Whitaker’s _Almanack_ from me I do not know how I
+should get on. It is a book for diurnal use and permanent reference. One
+edition of it ought to be printed on bank note paper for the pocket, and
+another on bronze for friezes for the temple of history. It is worth all
+the Livys and Tacituses that ever breathed and lied. It is more truthful
+than the sun, for that luminary is always eight minutes in advance of
+where it seems to be. It is as impartial and veracious as fossilising
+mud. It contains infinitely more figures than Madame Tussaud’s, and
+teaches of everything above and under the sun, from stellar influences
+to sewage.
+
+How is the daily paper to be understood lacking the aid of Whitaker? Who
+is the honourable member for Berborough, of whom the Chanceller of the
+Exchequer spoke in such sarcastic terms last night? For what place sits
+Mr. Snivel, who made that most edifying speech yesterday? How old is
+the Earl of Champagne, who has been appointed Governor of Labuan? Where
+is Labuan? What is the value in English money of £T97,000, and 2,784,000
+roubles? What are the chances of a man of forty (yourself) living to be
+a hundred? and what is the chance of a woman of sixty-four (your
+mother-in-law) dying next year? How much may one deduct from one’s
+income with a view to income tax before one needs begin to lie? What
+annuity ought a man of your age be able to get for the five thousand
+pounds you expect on the death of your mother-in-law? How much will you
+have to pay to the state if you article your son to a solicitor or give
+him a little capital and start him in an honest business as a
+pawnbroker? How old is the judge that charged dead against the prisoner
+whom the jury acquitted without leaving the box? What railway company
+spends the most money in coal? legal charges? palm oil? Is there
+anything now worth a gentleman’s while to smuggle on his return from the
+Continent? What is the tonnage of the ironclad rammed yesterday morning
+by another ironclad of the Channel squadron? When may one begin to eat
+oysters? What was the most remarkable event last year? How much longer
+is it likely to pay to breed farmers in England?
+
+These are only a few, very few, of the queries Whitaker will answer
+cheerfully for you. Indeed, you can scarcely frame any questions to
+which it will not make a reply of some kind or other. It contains,
+moreover, either direct or indirect reference to every man in the United
+Kingdoms of Great Britain and Ireland. If you occupy a prominent
+official position in any walk in life, you will find yourself herein
+mentioned by name. If you are a simple and prudent trader, you will have
+your name and your goods described elaborately among the advertisements.
+If you come under neither of these heads you are sure to be included,
+not distinguished perhaps personally, under the statistics of the Insane
+or Criminal classes.
+
+All the information on the points indicated may be said to lie within
+the parochial domain of the book. But it has a larger, a universal
+scope, and takes into view all the civilized and half civilized nations
+of all the earth. It contains multitudinous facts and figures about
+Abyssinia, Afghanistan, Annam, Argentine Republic, Austro-Hungary,
+Baluchistan, Belgium, Bokhara, Bolivia, Borneo, Brazil, Bulgaria,
+Eastern Roumelia, Burmah, Corea, Central America, Chili, China, Cochin
+China, Colombia, Congo State, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador,
+Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Hawaiian Islands, Hayti, Italy, Japan,
+Liberia, Madagascar, Mexico, Montenegro, Morocco, Nepal, Netherlands,
+Oman, Orange Free State, Paraguay, Persia, Peru, Portugal, Roumania,
+Russia, Sarawak, Servia, Siam, Sokoto, Spain, Sweden and Norway,
+Switzerland, Tibet, Transvaal, Tripoli, Tunis, Turkey, United States,
+Uruguay, Venezuela, and Zanzibar!
+
+The list takes away one’s breath. The mere recital of it leaves one
+faint and exhausted. Passing the most elementary knowledge of these
+nations and countries through the mind is like looking at a varying
+rainbow while the ears are solicited by a thousand tunes. The names, the
+mere names, of Mexico and Brazil stop my heart with amazement. The
+Aztecs and the Amazon call up such visions of man in decay and nature in
+naked strength that I pause like one in a gorgeous wood held in fear by
+its unfamiliarity. What has the Amazon done in the ages of its
+unlettered history? What did the Aztecs know before they began to revert
+to birds? Then Morocco and Tripoli, what memories and mysteries of man!
+And Sokoto--of which little is known but the name; and that man was here
+before England was dissevered from the mainland of Europe. Turkey, as it
+even now lies crippled and shorn, embraces within its stupendous arms
+the tombs of the greatest empire of antiquity. Only to think of China is
+to grow old beyond the reach of chroniclers. Compared with China,
+Turkey, India, and Russia, even Greece and Rome are mushroom states, and
+Germany and France virgin soil.
+
+But when I am in no humour for contemplation and alarms of eld I take up
+my Whitaker for 1886, and open it at page 285. There begins the most
+incredible romance ever written by man, and what increases its
+incredibility is that it happens to be all true.
+
+At page 285 opens an account of the British Empire. The first article is
+on India, and as one reads, taking in history and statistics with
+alternate breaths, the heart grows afraid to beat in the breast lest its
+motion and sound might dispel the enchantment and bring this “miracle of
+rare device” down about one’s head. The opening statement forbids
+further progress for a time. When one hears that “the British Empire in
+India extends over a territory as large as the continent of Europe
+without Russia,” it is necessary to pause and let the capacity of the
+mind enlarge in order to take in this stupendous fact with its
+stupendous significances.
+
+Here are 254 millions of people living under the flag of Britain! Here
+is a vast country of the East whose history goes back for a thousand
+years from this era, which knew Alexander the Great and was the scene of
+Tamerlane’s exploits, subject to the little island on the western verge
+of modern Europe. Here, paraded in the directest and most prosaic
+fashion, are facts and figures that swell out the fancy almost
+intolerably. Here is one feudatory state, one dependent province, almost
+as populous as the whole empire over which Don Pedro II. reigns in South
+America. Here is a public revenue of eighty millions sterling a year,
+and Calcutta, including suburbs, with a population close upon a million.
+Here are no fewer than fifty-three towns and cities of more than fifty
+thousand people each. Here is a gross number of seven hundred and
+fourteen thousand towns and villages! Is not this one item incredible?
+Just three quarters of a million, not of people or even houses, but of
+“towns and villages!” The population of Madras alone is five-sixths of
+that of the United Kingdom, that of the North-West Provinces and Oudh
+considerably more, and that of Bengal nearly twice as much as England,
+Ireland, Scotland, and Wales together. The Native States have many more
+inhabitants than any country in Europe, except Russia. Bombay equals
+Spain. The Punjaub exceeds Turkey in Asia. Assam exceeds Turkey in
+Europe. The Central Provinces about equal Belgium and Holland together;
+British Burmah, Switzerland. Berar exceeds Denmark, and all taken
+together contain more than the combined populations of the United States
+of America, Austria, Germany, France, Turkey, Italy, Spain, Portugal,
+Holland, and Belgium! All ours absolutely, or in the feudatory leash;
+with more Mohammedans than are to be found in the Sultan’s dominions,
+and a larger revenue than is enjoyed by any country on earth except
+England, France, United States of America, Austria, and Russia!
+
+These are facts and figures enough to set one dreaming for a month. This
+is not an age for epic poetry. It is exceedingly unlikely any poet in
+the present age will seek the framework for his great work in the past.
+The past was all very well in its own day until it was found out.
+Certitudes in bygone centuries have been shaken. The present time is
+wildly volcanic. Now the hidden, throbbing, mad, fierce, upheaving fires
+bulge out the crust of earth under fabrics whilom regarded as
+indestructible, and split their walls, and warp their pillars, and
+choke their domes. It was a good thing for Milton and Dante they lived
+and wrote long ago, for the iconoclasts of to-day are trying to build a
+great wall across heaven and tear up the sacred pavement of hell. They
+tell us the Greek armies were a mob of disorderly and timid cits, and
+that speculations as to the reported dealings of Dr. Faustus with any
+folk but respectable druggists are too childish for the nursery or
+Kaffirs. The golden age is no longer the time that will never come
+again. The past is a fire that has burnt out, a flame that has vanished.
+To kneel before what has been is to worship impotent shadows. Up to this
+man has been wandering in the desert, and until now there have not been
+even trustworthy rumours of the land of promise. But to us has come a
+voice prophesying good things. The Canaan of the ages is in the future
+of time. Taking this age at its own estimate I have long thought the
+subject for the finest epic lying within possibility in our era is the
+building of the railway to India. Into a history of that undertaking
+would flow all the affluents of the ancient world. The stories of
+Baalbec and Nineveh that are finished, and of Aleppo and Damascus that
+survive, would fall into this prodigious tale of peaceful conquest. The
+line would have for marge Assyria on one hand, Egypt on the other; it
+would reach from the land of the Buddhist through the land of the
+Mohammedan to the land of the Christian. It would be a work undertaken
+in honour of the modern god, Progress, through the graves of the oldest
+peoples, to link the three great forms of faith. All the action of the
+epic would take place on earth, and all the actors would be men. There
+would be no need for evolving the god from the machine, for the machine
+itself would be the god. It would be the history of man from his birth
+till this hour. It would be most fitly written in English, for English
+is the most capacious and virile language yet invented by man.
+
+But a mere mortal, such as I, cannot stay in India always, or even abide
+for ever by the way. Although I have _Whitaker’s Almanack_ before me
+all the time, I have strayed a little from it. In thinking of the lands
+through which that heroic line of railway would pass, I have almost
+forgotten the modest volume at my elbow. Yet fragile as it looks, one
+volume similar to it will last as long as the Pyramids, will come in
+time to be as old as the oldest memory is now; that is, if the ruins of
+England endure as long as those of Egypt, for a copy of it lies built up
+under Cleopatra’s Needle.
+
+I turn over the last page of “British India” in my _Almanack_. We are
+not yet done with orient lands and seas. The article over-leaf is headed
+“Other British Possessions in the East.” Here, if one wants incitement
+towards prose or verse, dreaming or doing, commerce or pillage, is
+matter to his hand. The places one may read of are--Aden, Socotra,
+Ceylon, Hong-Kong, Labuan, British North Borneo, and Cyprus. Then in my
+book comes “The Dominion of Canada,” with its territory “about as large
+as Europe”! and a revenue equal to Portugal, which discovered and once
+held India. After Canada come “Other American Possessions,” including
+British Guiana, which, except for the sugar of Demerara, is little heard
+of; it occupies a space of earth as large as all Great Britain. So
+little do people of inferior education know of this dependency, that
+once, when a speaker in the House of Commons spoke of the “island of
+Demerara,” there was not a single member present who knew that Demerara
+was not an island, but part of the mainland of South America. Last in
+the list comes British Honduras, about as big as Wales.
+
+After America, we have our enormous outlying farm in the southern
+hemisphere, “British Possessions in Australasia.” There the land owned
+by England is again about the size of Europe! Then follow “British
+Possessions in the West Indies,” small in mileage, great in fertility
+and richness of produce, and with a population twice that of Eastern
+Roumelia. The “British Possessions in Africa” are considerably larger
+than France, with about half as many inhabitants as Denmark. The
+territories owned in the Southern Atlantic are Ascension, the Falkland
+Islands, South Georgia, and St. Helena. This prodigious list ends with
+the European Possessions, namely, Malta, Gibraltar, Heligoland, the
+Channel Islands, and Isle of Man.
+
+By this time the hand is tired writing down the mere names of the riches
+belonging to Great Britain. Towards the close of my list from Whitaker
+my energy drooped, and a feeling of enervating satiety came upon me. I
+am surfeited with splendours, and, like a tiger filled with flesh, I
+must sleep. But in that sleep what dreams may come! How the imagination
+expands and aspires under the stimulus of a page of tabulated figures!
+How the fancy is excited, provoked, by the spectacle of an endless sea
+in which every quarter of the globe affords a bower for Britannia when
+it pleases her aquatic highness to adventure abroad upon the deep, into
+the farthest realms of the morning, into the regions of the dropping
+sun. Here, in my best two books, are the words of the most copious
+language that man ever spoke, and the facts and figures of the greatest
+realm over which man ever ruled. _Civis Romanus sum!_ I will sleep. I
+will dream that I am alone with my two books. I will speak in this
+imperial, this dominant dialect, as I move by sea and land among the
+peoples who live under the flag flying above me now. Who would encumber
+himself with finite poetry or romance when he may take with him the
+uncombined vocabulary, with its infinite possibilities of affinities,
+and the history of the countries and the peoples that lie beneath this
+flag, and bear in his heart the astounding and exalting
+consciousness--_Civis Romanus sum!_
+
+
+
+
+LIES OF FABLE AND ALLEGORY.
+
+
+Some little while ago the battered and shattered remains of an old
+bookcase with the sedimentary deposit of my own books, reached me after
+a journey of many hundred miles from its former resting place. The front
+of the bookcase is twisted wirework, which, when I remember it first,
+was lined with pink silk. Not a vestige, not a shred of the silk remains
+and the half dozen shelves now depend for preservation in position on a
+frame as crazy as Her Majesty’s ship _Victory_, and certainly older. The
+bookcase had belonged to my grandfather before Trafalgar, and some of
+the books I found in it among the sediment were printed before the Great
+Fire of London. In all there were about a couple or three hundred books,
+none of which would be highly valued by a bibliophile. Owing to my
+being in a very modest way a wanderer on the face of the realm, these
+books had been out of my possession for nearly twenty years, and dusty
+and dilapidated as they were when they reached me I took them in my arms
+as long-lost friends. I had finished the last sentence with the word
+children, but that would not do for two reasons. These books were not
+mine as this one I am now writing is, and long-lost children change more
+than they have changed, or more than friends change. Children grow and
+outpace us and leave us behind and are not so full of companionable
+memories as friends. There is hardly time to make friends of our adult
+children before we are beckoned away. The friends we make and keep when
+we are young have always twenty years’ start of our children in
+friendship. A man may be friendly with his son of five but a father and
+son cannot be full friends until the son is twenty years older.
+
+Again, as to the impropriety of speaking of the books as long-lost
+children I have another scruple. I am in great doubt as to whether the
+recovery of a long-lost child is at all desirable. A long-lost child
+means a young girl or boy of our own who is lost when under ten years of
+age and recovered years afterwards. I do not know that the recovery of
+the missing one is a cause of gratitude. Remember it is not at all the
+child we lost. It is a child alleged or alleging itself to be the child
+we lost. It is more correctly not a child at all, but a lad or lass whom
+we knew when young, and whose acquaintance we have to make over again.
+Our personality has become dim to it, and we have to occupy ourselves
+seriously in trying to identify the unwieldy bulk of the stranger with
+our memory of the wanderer. When the boy went from us we mourned for him
+as dead, and now he comes back to us from the tomb altered all out of
+memory. He is not wholly our child. There is an interregnum in our reign
+over him and we do not know what manner of king has held sway in our
+stead, or, if knowing the usurper, we cannot measure the extent or force
+of his influence. How much of this young person is really our very own?
+how much the development of untoward fate? Is the memory of our lost one
+dearer than the presence of this lad who is half stranger? What we lost
+and mourned was ours surely; how much of what we have regained belongs
+to us?
+
+With books no such question arises. They are our very own. They have
+suffered no increment, but rather loss. What we remember of them and
+find again in them fills us with joy; what we have forgotten and recall
+excites a surprise which makes us feel rich. We reproach ourselves with
+not having loved them sufficiently well, and swear upon them to endow
+them with warmer affection henceforth. In turning over the books in the
+old case I lighted upon one which I believe to be the volume that came
+earliest into my possession. It is Cobbett’s _Spelling-Book_, and by the
+writing on the title page I see it was given to me by my father on the
+second of February, 1854. It is in a very battered and tattered
+condition. I find a youthful autograph of my own on the fly-leaf, the
+Christian name occupying one line, the surname the second; on a third
+line is the name of the town, and on a fourth the number of the street
+and part of the name of the street, the last being, I blush to say,
+ill-spelt. Surely there never was a book hated as I hated this one! At
+that time I had declared my unalterable determination of never learning
+to read. I possessed, until recently, a copy of Valpy’s Latin Grammar of
+about the same date, and I remember I worshipped the Latin Grammar
+compared with the Spelling-Book. I knew _rosa_ before I could read words
+of two syllables, and at this moment I do not know much more Latin than
+I did then. The Spelling-Book was published by Anne Cobbett, at 137,
+Strand, in 1849. It is almost incredible that so short a time ago the
+atrocious woodcuts could be got in England for love or money. There is
+no attempt whatever at overlaying in the printing; the cut pages are all
+what are called “flat pulls.” Here and there through the pages of
+chilling columns of words of one, two, three or more syllables are
+pencil marks indicating the limits of a day’s lesson. What a ruthless
+way they had with us children in those days! When I look at those
+appalling columns of arid words I applaud my childish determination of
+never learning to read if the art were to be acquired only by traversing
+those fearful deserts of unintelligible verbiage. Fancy a child of
+tender years confronted with antitrinitarian, consubstantiality,
+discontinuation, excommunication, extraordinarily, immateriality,
+impenetrability, indivisibility, naturalization, plenipotentiary,
+recapitulation, supererogation, transubstantiation, valetudinarian, and
+volatilization, not one of which is as difficult to spell as one quarter
+the words of one syllable, and not one of which could be understood by a
+child or would be used by a single man out of a thousand in all his
+life. The country had penal settlements then, why in the name of mercy
+did they not send children to the settlements and give them a chance to
+keep their reason and become useful citizens when their time of
+punishment had expired? I am happy to say I find no pencil marks among
+those leviathan words above. I suppose I never got into the deep waters
+where they “wallowing unwieldy in their gait tempest the ocean.”
+
+I wonder was the foundation of a lifelong dislike to Cobbett’s writings
+laid in me at that early time of my existence? Anyway I do not remember
+the day when I did not dislike everything I read of Cobbett’s, and I
+dislike everything of his I read now. I wonder, also, was it at that
+early date the seed of my hatred of fable or allegory was sown? To me
+the fables in the back of that Spelling-Book were always odious, now
+they are loathsome. With the cold-blooded “morals” attendant upon them
+they are the worst form of literary torture I know. I am aware that the
+bulk of them are not original, but Cobbett inserted them in his book,
+and I give him full credit for evil intention. Yet in later years it was
+not his taste for fable that repelled me but his intense combativeness.
+He is never comfortable unless he is mangling some one. It was a pity he
+ever left the army. He would have been a credit to his corps at close
+quarters with a clubbed musket. Even in the Spelling-Book, intended for
+young children, his “Stepping-Stone to Cobbett’s English Grammar” takes
+the form of a dialogue, in which he, the “Teacher,” smashes the
+unfortunate Scholar and Mr. William. Cobbett sprang from the people and
+was a Saxon pure and simple, and the Saxon is the element in the English
+people which has been most undistinguished when unmingled with other
+blood. The Saxon of fifteen hundred years ago is the yokel of to-day,
+and he never was more than a yokel intellectually. The enormous
+intellectual fertility of England is owing to successive invasions, and
+chiefly to the Norman Conquest. All the great and noble and sweet faces
+in English history are Norman, or largely Norman. The awful faces of the
+Gibbon type make periods of English history like a night spectral with
+evil dreams.
+
+Does any one past the condition of childhood really like fables? Mind, I
+do not say past the years of childhood. But does any one of fully mature
+intellect like fables or pleasantly endure allegories? I think not. In
+the vigour of all lives there must be _lacunæ_ of intense indolence,
+backwaters of the mind, where one is willing to float effortless and
+take the things that come as though they were good things rather than
+work at the oars in pursuit of novelties. At such times it is easier to
+persuade ourselves we are amused by books that we admired when we lacked
+experience and discernment than to break new ground and encounter fresh
+obstacles. I am leaving out of account the dull worthy people who say
+they like a book because other people say they like it. These good
+people live in a continual state of self-justification. They are much
+more serenely secure in what they imagine to be their opinions than
+those travailing souls that really have opinions of their own. Their
+life is easy, and in lazy moments one sighs for the repose they enjoy.
+But do not the people with active minds often adhere to childish likings
+merely from indolence? A certain question they settled in their own
+minds when they were ten; it is too much trouble to treat it as an open
+matter at thirty. Consistency in a politician is invariably a sign of
+stupidity, because no man (outside fundamental questions of morals) can
+with credit to his sense remain stationary in opinion for thirty years
+where all is change. The very data on which he based an opinion in the
+year one are vapourized in the year thirty. The foundation of all
+political theories is first principles of some kind, and the only
+support a philosophic mind rejects with disdain is a first principle of
+any kind. Now, the fables we tolerate, nay, admire as children, are in
+imaginative literature what first principles are in that branch of
+imaginary philanthropy called politics. It is much easier to say every
+man has a right to eight shillings a day than to find out what each
+particular man has a right to, or if man has a right to anything at all.
+It is much easier to say one does like Fontaine than at thirty years of
+age to acquire a disgust of him and his fables.
+
+The lying insincerity of fables and their morals always shocks me, and
+the gross blindness of the fabulist to any view of transactions but that
+adopted by him to point his precept, fills me with contempt for him as
+an artist. In the Spelling-Book I do not feel myself at liberty to
+select the fables as I choose. I will take only one, the first that
+comes. It is about the swallow and the sparrow. It is a very bad
+specimen for my contention, but as I am the challenger I have not the
+choice of weapons, and I accept the first presented by Cobbett.
+
+A swallow coming back to her old nest in the spring finds it occupied by
+a sparrow and his brood of young ones. The swallow demands possession on
+the grounds of having built the nest and brought up three broods in it.
+The sparrow will not budge. The swallow summons a number of swallows,
+and they wall up the sparrow and he and his brood die of hunger.
+
+The first notice of bias the reader gets is that the swallow is called
+she, and the sparrow he. Why? For the dishonest purpose of enlisting
+sympathy with the swallow. There is no evidence or statement the sparrow
+was aware when taking possession of the nest that it would be reclaimed
+by the swallow. How was the sparrow to know that the swallow was not
+dead and buried by the mole? The nest was derelict. Again, when the
+swallow returned the sparrow had young ones, which it would be dangerous
+to remove from the nest. How was the sparrow to know the swallow was
+telling the truth, and that the nest was hers? Then, even supposing the
+sparrow to be all in the wrong, the punishment was out of all proportion
+to the offence. The sparrow had done no harm beyond intruding. He had
+not injured the furniture, or burned any of the swallow’s gas, or broken
+into the wine-cellar. Justice would have been vindicated by the
+expulsion of the intruder and his brood. But what takes place instead?
+The door is built up, and the sparrow with his innocent young is
+murdered! Surely if this is a fruitful fable, the moral is immoral. This
+is the old Mosaic theory of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,
+and a little, or rather a great deal more. It is hideously un-Christian.
+I believe Cobbett professed Christianity. Why did he put this odious
+vengeful story in the forefront of his exemplars of righteous doing?
+
+But the worst part of the story is in the Moral. “Thus it always is with
+the unjust,” says the Chorus of the fabulist. He means that the unjust
+are always nailed up in their houses with their blameless children and
+starved to death. Now neither Cobbett nor any other sane preacher
+believes anything of the kind. This is a lie, pure and simple; a lie no
+doubt told with a good object, but a lie all the same. Cobbett had too
+much common-sense not to know that it is not always “thus” with the
+“unjust.” As a rule, the unjust go scot free when they stop short of
+crime. The people who say otherwise are yielding to a feminine,
+sentimental weakness. Poetic justice no doubt does exist--in poetry.
+Most men are as unjust as they dare be, and most men get on comfortably
+from their cradles to their graves. It is only the fools, the men of
+ungovernable passions and impulses and the blunderers who suffer. Man is
+at heart a rapacious brute. All his centuries of civilization have not
+quelled the predatory spirit in him. Any man will become a thief if he
+only be sufficiently tempted when he is sufficiently desperate. The
+crime of the sparrow in appropriating the swallow’s nest is
+intelligible, the crime of the swallow in murdering the sparrow and his
+brood is intelligible, the crime of lying committed by the moralist is
+abominable. When the child to whom Cobbett lied grows up, he will know
+the lie, despise the liar, and have nothing left of the precious fable
+but a shaken faith in the words of all men, whether they be liars like
+Cobbett and the other moralists, or truth-tellers like the ordinary
+everyday folk, who do not pose as teachers and latter-day prophets. It
+is very improving to reflect on the freedom these teachers give
+themselves in act when enforcing their theories in writing. In order
+that Cobbett might exemplify his principles against the credit system,
+he signed his name across the face of acceptances for seventy thousand
+pounds!
+
+Cobbett’s Grammar was written for sailors and soldiers and such men. I
+gave the only copy of it I ever had to a sailor who had abandoned living
+on the sea to live by the sea, who had eschewed the paint-pot and the
+stage aboard the merchant service for the palette and stool of the
+studio. It is years since I have seen the book, but I remember the
+contemptuous way in which the ex-soldier disposes of prosody. He says to
+his pupil in effect: You need pay no attention to this branch of
+grammar, as it deals only with the _noise_ made by words. Cobbett’s
+treatment of prosody does not occupy more than one line or one line and
+a half of print. It is briefer than Dr. Johnson’s Syntax:
+
+     “The established practice of grammarians requires that I should
+     here treat of the Syntax; but our language has so little inflexion,
+     or variety of terminations, that its construction neither requires
+     nor admits many rules. Wallis, therefore, has totally neglected it;
+     and Jonson, whose desire of following the writers upon the learned
+     languages made him think a syntax indispensably necessary, has
+     published such petty observations as were better omitted.
+
+     “The verb, as in other languages, agrees with the nominative in
+     number and person; as _Thou fliest from good; He runs to death_.
+
+     “Our adjectives are invariable.
+
+     “Of two substantives the noun possessive is the genitive; as _His
+     father’s glory; the sun’s heat_.
+
+     “Verbs transitive require an oblique case; as _He loves me; You
+     fear him_.
+
+     “All prepositions require an oblique case: _He gave this to me; He
+     took this from me; He says this of me; He came with me_.”
+
+That is all the merciful Dr. Samuel Johnson has to say about syntax. Oh,
+Lindley Murray! Oh, memories of youth! Does it seem possible that
+Johnson could have enjoyed the luxury of speaking in this light and airy
+and debonair way of English grammar in his day, and that Lindley Murray
+could have matured his awful Grammar in so few years afterwards?
+Recollect there were not forty years between the lexicographer and the
+grammarian. Could not Lindley Murray have left the unfortunate English
+language alone? Johnson says no one need bother about syntax, and
+Cobbett says no one need bother about prosody. Thus we have only
+orthography and etymology to look after, when in comes Murray and spoils
+all! It is doubtful if the language will ever recover the interference
+of that Yankee merchant who invented syntax and made the life of dull
+school boys and girls a path of thorns and agony.
+
+An allegory is a fable for fools of larger growth. I am writing in an
+off-hand way, and I will not pause to examine the question nicely; but
+is there any such thing as a successful allegory? I have no experience
+of one. I seem to hear a loud shout of “_The Pilgrim’s Progress_.” Well,
+I never could read the book through, and I have tried at least twenty
+times. I have put the reading of that book before myself in the most
+solemn manner. I have told myself over and over again that I ought to
+read it as an educational exercise. In vain. How any man with
+imagination can bear the book I do not know. Bunyan had inexhaustible
+invention, but no imagination. He saw a reason for things, not the
+things themselves. No creation of the imagination can lack consequence
+or verisimilitude. On almost every page of the _Progress_ there is
+violation of sequence, outrage against verisimilitude. Christian has a
+great burden on his back and is in rags. He cannot remove the burden.
+(Why?) He is put to bed (with the burden on his back), then he is
+troubled in his mind (the burden is forgotten, and the vision altered
+completely and fatally); again we are reminded that he has the burden
+on his back when he tells Evangelist of it. Why can he not loose the
+burden on his back? How is it secured so that he cannot remove it? He
+cannot see a wicket gate across a very wide field, but he sees a shining
+light (where?), and then he begins to run (burden and all) away from his
+wife and children (which is immoral and abhorrent to the laws of God and
+man). For the mere selfish ease of his body he deserts his wife and
+children, who must be left miserably poor, for is he not in rags? The
+neighbours come out and mock at him for running across a field. Why? How
+do they know why he runs, and what neighbours are there to come out and
+mock at one when one is running across a large field? The Slough of
+Despond is in this field (for he has not passed through the wicket
+gate), and he does not seem to know of the Slough, or think of avoiding
+it. Fancy any man not knowing of such a filthy hole within a field of
+his home! How is it that Pliable and Obstinate have no burdens on their
+backs? It is not the will of the King that the Slough should be
+dangerous to wayfarers: this surely is blasphemy. The whole thing is
+grotesquely absurd and impossible to imagine. There is no sobriety in
+it, no sobriety of keeping in it; and no matter how wild the effort or
+vision of imagination may be there must always be sobriety of keeping in
+it or it is delirium not imagination, disease not inspiration. As far as
+I can see there is no trace of imagination, or even fancy, in the
+_Pilgrim’s Progress_. The story never happened at all. It is a horrible
+attempt to tinkerise the Bible.
+
+One of the things I cannot understand about Macaulay is that he stands
+by Bunyan’s silly book. Macaulay was a man of vast reading and
+acquirements and of common-sense tastes. He was not a poet, but he was
+very nearly one, and ought to have responded in sympathy with poets. In
+politics he belonged to that most melancholy of all sects, the Whigs,
+and it may be that the spirit of political compromise to which he had
+familiarised himself in public life had slipped unknown to him into his
+literary briefs. Anyway, he himself says that the _Pilgrim’s Progress_
+is the only book which was promoted from the kitchen to the
+drawing-room. There is no difficulty in accounting for the fact that the
+book was popular among scullions and cooks, but how it ever gained
+currency among people of moderate education and taste cannot be
+explained. It is the most dull and tedious and monstrous book of any
+note in the English language, and how any man with a gleam of
+imagination can like it is more than I can understand. If one has been
+familiar with it when young, one may tolerate it on the score of
+tenderness--tenderness for memories and laziness in new enterprises; but
+I never yet knew any one with even fancy who, meeting it for the first
+time after the dawn of adolescence, could even endure it.
+
+It is like celebrating one’s own apotheosis to drop Bunyan and take up
+Spenser. Here we share the air with an immortal god and not a bilious
+enthusiast. When I have laid aside the _Spelling-Book_ and the
+_Pilgrim’s Progress_, and opened the _Faerie Queen_, I feel as though
+the leaden clouds of the north had rolled away, disclosing the blue of
+Ægean skies; as though for squalid porridge and buttermilk had been
+substituted ambrosia and nectar; as though for fallow and stubble had
+drifted under my feet soft meadow-grass dense with flowers; as though
+the moist and clayey crags had changed into purple hills, the
+green-mantled pools to azure lakes, the narrow waters of a stagnant mere
+to the free imperial waves and tides of the ocean. It is better than
+escaping out of an East-end slum into the green lanes and roads of
+Warwickshire.
+
+And yet, melancholy truth! the _Faerie Queen_ is most unpopular and most
+unreadable. It has with justice, I think, been said that of ten thousand
+people who begin the _Faerie Queen_, not ten read half way through it,
+and only one arrives at the end. I find by a mark in my copy that I have
+got a good deal more than half through it, but that I have not reached
+the last line of this most colossal fragment of a poem. What a mercy the
+rest of it was drowned in the Irish sea! My _Faerie Queen_ occupies 792
+pages of five stanzas to the page; that is, between thirty-five and
+thirty-six thousand verses, two hundred and sixty to seventy thousand
+words, or equal in length to a couple of ordinary three-volume novels!
+And still it is _unperfite_! I find that although I have owned the book
+for twenty years, I have got no further than page 472, so that I have
+read only three-fifths of the fragment of this stupendous poem.
+
+It is not the length alone that defeats the reader. In all the field of
+English verse there is no poem of great length that comes upon the mind
+with more full and easy flow. The stanza after a long while becomes, no
+doubt, monotonous, but it is the monotony of a vast and freightful river
+that moves majestically, bearing interminable argosies of infinite
+beauty and variety and significance. After one hundred pages one might
+put down the book, wearied by the melodious monotony of the imperial
+chords. I have never been able to read anything like a hundred, anything
+like fifty pages at a time. I think I have rarely exceeded as many
+stanzas. Spenser is the poets’ poet, and the _Faerie Queen_ the poets’
+poem, and yet even the poets cannot read it freely and fully, as one
+reads Milton or Shakespeare or Shelley or Keats or the readable parts of
+Coleridge, all of whom are poets’ poets also.
+
+The allegory bars the way. One reads on smoothly and joyously about a
+wood or a nymph, or a knight or a lady, or a castle or a dragon, and is
+half drunk on the wealthy poet’s mead (is not Spenser the wealthiest of
+English poets?), when suddenly Dan Allegory comes along and assures you
+that it is not a wood or a nymph, or a knight or lady, or a castle or
+dragon, but a virtue or a vice posing in property clothes; that in fact
+things are not what they seem, but visions are about. Cobbett intended
+his fables for little children, and Bunyan his allegory for the company
+of the stewpans, but Spenser’s story is for the ears of ladies and of
+knights; why then does he try to spoon-feed them with virtuous
+sentiment? There is not, as far as I know, a trace of dyspepsia in all
+the _Faerie Queen_, and yet he has sicklied it over “with the pale cast
+of thought.” In this Vale of Tears there are quite as many virtuous
+persons as any reasonable man can desire. Why should our poets--those
+rare and exquisite manifestations of our possibilities--turn themselves
+into moralists, who are, bless you, as common as grocers, as plentiful
+as mediocrity. In fact, nine-tenths of the civilised race of man are
+moralists. But poets ought not to be theorists. They are not sent to us
+for the purpose of converting us, but for the purpose of delighting us.
+They ought to be catholic and pagan. They are among the settled property
+of joy to which all mankind are heirs. They come in among the flowers
+and colours of the sky and earth, and the vocal rapture of the birds,
+and the perfumes of the breeze, and the love of woman and children and
+friends and kind. They are sent to us for our mere delight. They never
+grow less or fade away or change. They have nothing to do with dynasties
+or creeds or codes of manners. They are apart from all bias and strife.
+The will of Heaven itself is against poets preaching, for no poet has
+ever written hymns that were not a burden upon his reputation as a
+singer, and did not weigh him to the ground, compared with his flight
+when free and catholic and pagan.
+
+After entertaining the nightmares of dulness born of Cobbett and Bunyan,
+how one’s shoulders swing back, one’s chest opens, and one’s breath
+comes with large and ample coolness and joy as one reads--
+
+    “The ioyous day gan early to appeare;
+     And fayre Aurora from the deawy bed
+     Of aged Tithone gan herselfe to reare
+     With rosy cheekes, for shame as blushing red:
+     Her golden locks, for hast, were loosely shed
+     About her eares, when Una her did marke
+     Clymbe to her charet, all with flowers spred,
+     From heven high to chace the chearelesse darke;
+     With mery note her lowd salutes the mountain larke.”
+
+Or again here--
+
+    “Then forth he called that his daughter fayre,
+     The fairest Un’, his onely daughter deare,
+     His onely daughter and his onely hayre;
+     Who forth proceeding with sad sober cheare,
+     As bright as doth the morning starre appeare
+     Out of the east with flaming lockes bedight,
+     To tell that dawning day is drawing neare
+     And to the world does bring long wished light:
+     So fair and fresh that lady shewd herselfe in sight.”
+
+Is it not a miserable destiny to be obliged to read stanza after stanza
+redolent of such rich perfumed words about the lady, and then to find
+that Una is not a mortal or a spirit even--but Truth! An abstraction! A
+whim of degrading reason! A figment of a moralist’s heated and
+disordered brain. Any Lie of a poet is better than any Truth of a
+moralist. Why did Spenser stoop to run on the same intellectual plain as
+the accidental teacher? The teacher would have done admirably for Truth,
+but all the worthy essayists of England in the “spacious days of Queen
+Elizabeth,” put together, could not have written the stanzas about Una
+as Spenser saw her. This poaching of poets on the preserves of moralists
+is one of the most shameful things in the history of art.
+
+There are few poets it is harder to select quotations from than Spenser.
+The fact is, all the _Faerie Queen_ ought to be quoted except the
+blinding allegory. I find that in years of my movement from the opening
+of the poem to page 472, the limit I have reached, I have marked a
+hundred passages at least, some of them running through pages. In no
+other poem--except Shelley’s _Alastor_--do I notice such grievous,
+continuous pencil scores. What is one to do? Whither is one to turn? As
+I handle the book I am lost in a deeper forest of delight than ever
+knight of Gloriana’s trod. Here I find a passage of several stanzas
+marked. I am much too lazy to copy them, and the spelling is troublesome
+often. But who can resist this?--
+
+                        “---- And, when she spake,
+    Sweete wordes, like dropping honny, she did shed,
+    And twixt the perles and rubins softly brake
+    A silver sound, that heavenly musicke seemed to make.
+
+        *       *       *       *       *
+
+    Upon her eyelids many graces sate
+    Under the shadow of her even browes.”
+
+I have quoted the three lines and a half of the earlier stanza merely
+that they may act as an overture to the last two lines. Surely there are
+no two lovelier lines in the language! In the last line the words seem
+to melt together of their own propinquity.
+
+Here is an alexandrine that haunts me night and day--
+
+    “Sweete is the love that comes alone with willingnesse.”
+
+As a rule, I hate writing with the books I am speaking of near me; they
+fetter one cruelly when they are at hand. There is a tendency to verify
+one’s memory, and read up the context of favourite lines. This is
+checking to the speed and chilling to the spirits. When I was saying
+something about the _Spelling-Book_ and the _Pilgrim’s Progress_, I had
+the copies within arm’s length, for I did not know either well enough to
+trust to memory. Since I got done with them I have placed them in
+distant safety. But one likes to handle Spenser--to have it nigh. My
+copy is lying at my left elbow in the blazing sun as I write now. It
+seems to me I shall never again look into the _Spelling-Book_ or the
+_Pilgrim’s Progress_. Fables and allegories are only foolishnesses fit
+for people of weak intellect and children. Well, when I put down this
+pen, and before this ink is dry, I shall have resumed my interrupted
+reading of the _Faerie Queen_ at page 473. My intellect is too weak and
+my heart too childish to resist the seduction of Spenser’s verse. So
+much for my own theory of allegory and my respect for my own theory.
+
+
+
+
+MY COPY OF KEATS.
+
+
+The only copy of Keats I ever owned is a modest volume published by
+Edward Moxon and Co. in the year 1861. By writing on its yellow fly-leaf
+I find it was given to me four years later, in September 1865. At that
+time it was clean and bright, opened with strict impartiality when set
+upon its back, and had not learned to respond with alacrity to hasty
+searches for favourite passages.
+
+The binding is now racked and feeble from use; and if, as in army
+regulations, service under warm suns is to be taken for longer service
+in cooler climes, it may be said that to the exhaustion following
+overwork have been added the prejudices of premature age.
+
+It is not bound as books were bound once upon a time, when they
+outlasted the tables and chairs, even the walls; ay, the very races and
+names of their owners. The cover is simple plain blue cloth; on the back
+is a little patch of printing in gold, with the words Keats’s _Poetical
+Works_ in the centre of a twined gilt ribbon and twisted gilt flowers.
+The welt at the back is bleached and frayed; the corners of the cover
+are battered and turned in. There is a chink between the cover and the
+arched back; and the once proud Norman line of that arc is flattened and
+degraded, retaining no more of its pristine look of sturdy strength than
+a wheaten straw after the threshing.
+
+In a list of new books preceding the biography of the poet I find the
+volume I speak of under the head “POETRY--_Pocket Editions_;” described
+as “Keats’s _Poetical Works_. With a Memoir by R. M. Milnes. Price 3_s._
+6_d._ cloth.” It was from no desire to look my gift-horse in the mouth I
+alighted upon the penultimate fact disclosed in the description. When I
+become owner of any volume my first delight in it is to read the
+catalogue of new books annexed, if there be any, before breaking my fast
+upon the subject-matter of the writer in my hand--as a poor gentleman
+in a spacious restaurant, who, having ordered luncheon, consisting of
+bread and cheese, butter, and a half-pint of bitter ale, takes up the
+bill of fare and the list of wines, and designs for his imagination a
+feast his purse denies to his lips.
+
+If any owner of a cart of old books in Farringdon Street asked you a
+shilling for such a copy of Keats as mine, you would smile at him. You
+would think he had acquired the books merely to satisfy his own taste,
+and now displayed them to gratify a vanity that was intelligible; you
+would feel assured no motive towards commerce could underlie ever so
+deeply such a preposterous demand.
+
+My copy will, I think, last my time. Already it has been in my hands
+more than half the years of a generation; and I feel that its severest
+trials are over. In days gone by it made journeys with me by sea and
+land, and paid long visits to some friends, both when I went myself, and
+when I did not go. Change of air and scene have had no beneficial effect
+upon it. Journey after journey, and visit after visit, the full cobalt
+of the cloth grew darker and dingier, the boards of the cover became
+limper and limper, and the stitching at the back more apparent between
+the sheets, like the bones and sinews growing outward through the flesh
+of a hand waxing old.
+
+Once, when the book had been on a prolonged excursion away from me, it
+returned sadly out of sorts. Had it been a dear friend come back from
+India on sick-leave, after an absence from temperate skies of twenty
+years, I could not have observed a more disquieting change. The cover
+was darkened so that the original hue had almost wholly disappeared,
+save at the edges, that, like the Indian veteran’s forehead, were of
+startling and unwholesome pallor. Its presence in such guise aroused a
+gnawing solicitude which undermined all peace. I could not endure the
+symptoms of its speedy decline, the prospect of its dissolution; and to
+shield its case from harm and my sensibilities from continual assault, I
+wrapped it with sighs and travail of heart in a gritty cover of
+substantial brown paper.
+
+For a while, the consciousness that my book was safe compensated for
+the unfamiliarity of its appearance and my constitutional antipathy to
+contact with brown paper, even a lively image of which makes me cringe.
+
+But as days went on the brown paper entered into my soul and rankled.
+What! was my Keats to be clad in that wretched union garb, that livery
+of poverty acknowledged, that corduroy of the bookshelf? Intolerable!
+Should I, who had, like other men, only my time to live, be denied all
+friendly sight of the natural seeming of my prime friend? My Keats would
+last my time; and why should I hide my friend in an unparticularised
+garb, the uniform of the mean or the needy, merely that those who came
+after me might enjoy a privilege of which senseless timidity sought to
+rob me? No; that should not be. I would cast away the badge of beggary,
+and, like a man, face the daily decay of my old companion. I tore the
+paper off, threw it upon the fire, and set my disenthralled Keats in its
+own proper vesture on the shelf among its comrades and its peers.
+
+There is no man, how poor soever, who has not some taste which, for his
+circumstances, must be regarded as expensive; and in that “sweet
+unreasonableness” of human nature, not at all limited to “the Celt,” men
+take a kind of foolish pride in their particular extravagances. You know
+a man that declares he would sooner go without his dinner than a clean
+shirt; another who would prefer one good cigar to a pound of cavendish;
+one who would rather travel to the City of winter mornings by train
+without an overcoat than by vulgar tramcar in fur and pilot cloth; a
+fourth who would more gladly give his right hand than forget his Greek;
+a fifth who pays the hire of a piano and does without the beer which as
+a Briton is his birthright; a sixth who starves himself and stints his
+family for the love of a garden. For my own part, I felt the using of my
+Keats without protection of any kind to be beyond my means, but I
+gloried in this extravagance. It seemed rich to be thus hand and glove
+with the book: to touch it when and where I would, and as much as ever I
+liked: to feel assured that even with free using and free lending it
+would outlast my short stay here, as the blossoms of the roses in a
+friend’s hedge outlast your summer visit. Was it not fine, did it not
+strike a chord of kingly generosity, to be able to say to a friend,
+“Here is my copy of Keats. Take it, use it, read it. There is plenty of
+it for you and me”? I would rather have the lending of my Keats than the
+bidding to a banquet.
+
+So it fell out that my favourite went more among my friends than ever,
+and accumulated at a usurious rate all manner of marks and stains, and
+defacements, and dog-ears, and other unworded comments, as well as
+verbal comments expressed in pencil and ink. It is true that a rolling
+stone gathers no moss, but a rolling snowball gathers more snow, and
+moss and snow are of about equal value. Oliver Wendell Holmes says, if I
+may trust my memory, that only three things improve with years: violins,
+wine, and meerschaum pipes. He loves books, and knows books as well as
+any man now living--almost as well as Charles Lamb did when he was with
+us; and yet Dr. Holmes does not think books worthy of being included in
+the list of things that time ripens. Is this ingratitude or
+carelessness, or does it mean that books dwell apart, and are no more to
+be classed with mere tangible things than angels, or mathematical
+points, or the winds of last winter? Is a book to him an ethereal record
+of a divine trance? an insubstantial painting of a splendid dream? the
+music of a yesterday fruitful in heavenly melody? the echo of a syren’s
+song haunting a sea shell?
+
+Does not De Quincey tell us that, having lent some books to Coleridge,
+the poet not only wrote the lender’s name in them, but enriched the
+margins with observations and comments on the texts? Who would not give
+a tithe of the books he has for one volume so gloriously illuminated? I
+remember when I was a lad, among lads, a friend of ours picked up
+secondhand Cary’s Dante, in which was written the name of a poet still
+living, but who is almost unknown. We loved the living poet for his
+work, and when the buyer told us that the Dante bore not only the poet’s
+name, but numerous marginal notes and hints in his handwriting, we all
+looked upon the happy possessor with eyes of envious respect. The
+precious volume was shown to us, not in groups, for in gatherings there
+is peril of a profaning laugh, or an unsympathetic sneer. One by one we
+were handed the book, on still country roads, upon the tranquil heights
+of hills, where we were alone with the brown heather and the plover, or
+on some barren cliff above the summer sea. The familiar printed text
+sank into insignificance beside the blurred pencil lines. Any one might
+buy a fair uncut copy for a crown piece. The text was common
+property--“’twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands.” But
+here before us lay revealed the private workings of a poetic
+imagination, fired by contact with a master of the craft. To us this
+volume disclosed one of our heroes, clad in the homely garb of prose,
+speaking in his own everyday speech, and lifting up his voice in
+admiration, wonder, awe, to the colossal demi-god, in whose presence we
+had stood humiliated and afeard.
+
+My Keats has suffered from many pipes, many thumbs, many pencils, many
+quills, many pockets. Not one stain, one gape, one blot of these would
+I forego for a spick and span copy in all the gorgeous pomp of the
+bookbinder’s millinery. These blemishes are aureolæ to me. They are
+nimbi around the brows of the gods and demi-gods, who walk in the
+triumph of their paternal despot on the clouds metropolitan that
+embattle the heights of Parnassus.
+
+What a harvest of happy memories is garnered in its leaves! How well I
+remember the day it got that faint yellow stain on the page where begins
+the _Ode on a Grecian Urn_. It was a clear, bright, warm, sunshiny
+afternoon late in the month of May. Three of us took a boat and rowed
+down a broad blue river, ran the nose of the boat ashore on the gravel
+beach of a sequestered island and landed. Pulling was warm work, and we
+all climbed a slope, reached the summit, and cast ourselves down on the
+long lush cool grass, in the shade of whispering sycamores, and in a
+stream of air that came fresh with the cheering spices of the hawthorn
+blossom.
+
+One of our company was the best chamber reader I have ever heard. His
+voice was neither very melodious nor very full. Perhaps he was all the
+better for this because he made no effort at display. As he read, the
+book vanished from his sight, and he leaned over the poet’s shoulder,
+saw what the poet saw, and in a voice timid with the sense of
+responsibility, and yet elated with a kind of fearing joy, told of what
+he saw in words that never hurried, and that, when uttered, always
+seemed to hang substantially in the air like banners.
+
+He discovered and related the poet’s vision rather than simulated
+passion to suit the scene. I remember well his reading of the passage:
+
+    “Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
+     Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
+     Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
+     Though winning near the goal--yet, do not grieve;
+     She cannot fade though thou hast not thy bliss,
+     For ever wilt thou love and she be fair!”
+
+He rehearsed the whole of the ode over and over again as we lay on the
+grass watching the vast chestnuts and oaks bending over the river, as
+though they had grown aweary of the sun, and longed to glide into the
+broad full stream.
+
+As he read the lines just quoted, he gave us time to hear the murmur,
+and to breathe the fragrance of those immortal trees. “Nor ever can
+those trees be bare,” in the text has only a semicolon after it. Yet
+here he paused, while three wavelets broke upon the beach, as if he
+could not tear himself away from contemplating the deathless verdure,
+and realising the prodigious edict pronounced upon it. “Bold lover,
+never, never canst thou kiss, though winning near the goal.” At the
+terrible decree he raised his eyes and gazed with heavy-lidded, hopeless
+commiseration at this being, who, still more unhappy than Tithonus, had
+to immortality added perpetual youth, with passion for ever strong, and
+denial for ever final.
+
+“Yet do not grieve.” This he uttered as one who pleads forgiveness of a
+corpse--merely to try to soothe a conscience sensible of an obligation
+that can never now be discharged. “She cannot fade, though thou hast not
+thy bliss, for ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!” Here the reader,
+with eyes fixed and rayless, seemed by voice and pose to be sunk,
+beyond all power of hope, in an abyss of despair. The barren
+immutability of the spectacle appeared to weigh upon him more
+intolerably than the wreck of a people. He spoke the words in a long
+drawn-out whisper, and, after a pause, dropped his head, and did not
+resume.
+
+I recollect that when the illusion he wrought up so fully in my mind had
+passed away in that long pause, and when I remembered that the fancy of
+the poet was expending itself, not on beings whom he conceived
+originally as human, but on the figures of a mere vase, I was seized
+with a fierce desire to get up and seek that vase through all the world
+until I found it, and then smash it into ten thousand atoms.
+
+When I had written the last sentence, I took up the volume to decide
+where I should recommence, and I “turned the page, and turned the page.”
+I lived over again the days not forgotten, but laid aside in memory to
+be borne forth in periods of high festival. I could not bring myself
+back from the comrades of old, and the marvels of the great magician, to
+this poor street, this solitude, and this squalid company of my own
+thoughts--thoughts so trivial and so mean compared with the imperial
+visions into which I had been gazing, that I was glad for the weariness
+which came upon me, and grateful to gray dawn that glimmered against the
+blind and absolved me from further obligation for that sitting.
+
+On turning over the leaves without reading, I find _Hyperion_ opens most
+readily of all, and seems to have fared worst from deliberate and
+unintentional comment. Much of the wear and tear and pencil marks are to
+be set down against myself; for when I take the book with no definite
+purpose I turn to _Hyperion_, as a blind man to the warmth of the sun.
+Some qualities of the poem I can feel and appreciate; but always in its
+presence I am weighed down by the consciousness that my deficiency in
+some attribute of perception debars me from undreamed-of privileges.
+
+I recall one evening in a pine glen, with one man and _Hyperion_. It
+would be difficult to match this man or me as readers. I don’t think
+there can be ten worse employing the English language to-day. I not
+only do not by any inflection of voice expound what I utter, but I am
+often incapable of speaking the words before me. I take in a line at a
+glance, see its import with my own imagination apart from the verbiage,
+which leaves not a shadow of an impression on my mind. When I come to
+the next line I grow suddenly alive to the fact that I have to speak off
+the former one. I am in a hurry to see what line two has to show; so,
+instead of giving the poet’s words for line one, I give my own
+description of the vision it has conjured up in my mind. This is bad
+enough in all conscience; but the friend of whom I speak now, behaves
+even worse. His plan of reading is to stop his voice in the middle of
+line one, and proceed to discuss the merits of line two, which he had
+read with his eye, but not with his lips, and of which the listener is
+ignorant, unless he happen to know the poem by rote.
+
+On that evening in the glen I pulled out Keats, and turned, at my
+friend’s request, to _Hyperion_, and began to read aloud. He was more
+patient than mercy’s self; but occasionally, when I did a most
+exceptionally bad murder on the text, he would writhe and cry out, and I
+would go back and correct myself, and start afresh.
+
+He had a big burly frame, and a deep full voice that shouted easily, and
+some of the comments shouted as I read are indicated by pencil marks in
+the margin. The writing was not done then, but much later, when he and I
+had shaken hands, and he had gone sixteen thousand miles away. As he was
+about to set out on that long journey, he said, “In seven years more
+I’ll drop in and have a pipe with you.” It had been seven years since I
+saw him before. The notes on the margin are only keys to what was said;
+for I fear the comment made was more bulky than the text, and the text
+and comment together would far exceed the limits of such an essay as
+this. I therefore curtail greatly, and omit much.
+
+I read down the first page without meeting any interruption; but when I
+came in page two on
+
+              “She would have ta’en
+    Achilles by the hair and bent his neck,”
+
+he cried out, “Stop! Don’t read the line following. It is bathos
+compared with that line and a half. It is paltry and weak beside what
+you have read. ‘Ta’en Achilles by the hair and bent his neck.’ By Jove!
+can you not see the white muscles start out in his throat, and the look
+of rage, defeat and agony on the face of the Greek bruiser? But how flat
+falls the next line: ‘Or with a finger stay’d Ixion’s wheel.’ What’s the
+good of stopping Ixion’s wheel? Besides, a crowbar would be much better
+than a finger. It is a line for children, not for grown men. It exhausts
+the subject. It is too literal. There is no question left to ask. But
+the vague ‘Ta’en Achilles by the hair and _bent_ his neck’ is perfect.
+You can see her knee in the hollow of his back, and her fingers twisted
+in his hair. But the image of the goddess dabbling in that river of hell
+after Ixion’s wheel is contemptible.”
+
+He next stopped me at
+
+    “Until at length old Saturn lifted up
+     His faded eyes, and saw his kingdom gone.”
+
+“What an immeasurable vision Keats must have had of the old bankrupt
+Titan, when he wrote the second line! Taken in the context it is simply
+overwhelming. Keats must have sprung up out of his chair as he saw the
+gigantic head upraised, and the prodigious grief of the grey-haired god.
+But Keats was not happy in the matter of full stops. Here again what
+comes after weakens. We get no additional strength out of
+
+    “‘And all the gloom and sorrow of the place
+      And that fair kneeling Goddess.’
+
+The ‘gloom and sorrow’ and the ‘goddess’ are abominably
+anticlimacteric.”
+
+    “Yes, there must be a golden victory;
+     There must be gods thrown down and trumpets blown
+     Of triumph calm, and hymns of festival
+     Upon the gold clouds metropolitan,
+     Voices of soft proclaim, and silver stir
+     Of strings in hollow shells; and there shall be
+     Beautiful things made new, for the surprise
+     Of the sky-children; I will give command:
+     Thea! Thea! Thea! where is Saturn?”
+
+“Read that again!” cried my friend, clinging to the grass and breathing
+hard. “Again!” he cried, when I had finished the second time. And then,
+before I could proceed, he sprang to his feet, carrying out the action
+in the text immediately following:
+
+      “This passion lifted him upon his feet,
+    And made his hands to struggle in the air.”
+
+“Come on, John Milton,” cried my friend, excitedly sparring at the
+winds,--“come on, and beat that, and we’ll let you put all your
+adjectives behind your nouns, and your verb last, and your nominative
+nowhere! Why man,”--this being addressed to the Puritan poet--“it
+carried Keats himself off his legs; that’s more than anything you ever
+wrote when you were old did for you. There’s the smell of midnight oil
+off your later spontaneous efforts, John Milton.
+
+“When Milton went loafing about and didn’t mind much what he was writing
+he could give any of them points”--(I deplore the language) “any of
+them, ay, Shakespeare himself points in a poem. In a poem, sir” (this
+to me), “Milton could give Shakespeare a hundred and one out of a
+hundred and lick the Bard easily. How the man who was such a fool as to
+write Shakespeare’s poems had the good sense to write Shakespeare’s
+plays I can never understand. The most un-Shakesperian poems in the
+language are Shakespeare’s. I never read Cowley, but it seems to me
+Cowley ought to have written Shakespeare’s poems, and then his obscurity
+would have been complete. If Milton only didn’t take the trouble to be
+great he would have been greater. As far as I know there are no English
+poets who improved when they ceased to be amateurs and became
+professional poets, except Wordsworth and Tennyson. Shelley and Keats
+were never regular race-horses. They were colts that bolted in their
+first race and ran until they dropped. It was a good job Shakespeare
+gave up writing rhymes and posing as a poet. It was not until he
+despaired of becoming one and took to the drama that he began to feel
+his feet and show his pace. If he had suspected he was a great poet he
+would have adopted the airs of the profession and been ruined. In his
+time no one thought of calling a play a poem--that was what saved the
+greatest of all our poets to us. The only two things Shakespeare didn’t
+know is that a play may be a poem and that his plays are the finest
+poems finite man as he is now constructed can endure. It is all nonsense
+to say man shall never look on the like of Shakespeare again. It is not
+the poet superior to Shakespeare man now lacks, but the man to apprehend
+him.”
+
+I looked around uneasily, and found, to my great satisfaction, that
+there was no stranger in view. My friend occupied a position of
+responsibility and trust, and it would be most injurious if a rumour got
+abroad that not only did he read and admire verse, but that he held
+converse with the shades of departed poets as well. In old days men who
+spoke to the vacant air were convicted of necromancy and burned; in our
+times men offending in this manner are suspected of poetry and
+ostracized.
+
+As soon as my friend was somewhat calmed, and had cast himself down
+again and lit a pipe, I resumed my reading. He allowed me to proceed
+without interruption until I came to:
+
+                      “His palace bright,
+    Bastion’d with pyramids of glowing gold,
+    And touch’d with shade of bronzed obelisks,
+    Glared a blood-red through all its thousand courts,
+    Arches, and domes, and fiery galleries;
+    And all its curtains of Aurorian clouds
+    Flushed angerly: while sometimes eagles’ wings,
+    Unseen before by Gods or wondering men,
+    Darken’d the place; and neighing steeds were heard,
+    Not heard before by Gods or wondering men.”
+
+“Prodigious!” he shouted. “Go over that again. Keep the syllables wide
+apart. It is a good rule of water-colour sketching not to be too nice
+about joining the edges of the tints; this lets the light in. Keep the
+syllables as far apart as ever you can, and let the silentness in
+between to clear up the music. How the gods and the wondering men must
+have wondered! Do you know, I am sure Keats often frightened, terrified
+himself with his own visions. You remember he says somewhere he doesn’t
+think any one could dare to read some one or another aloud at midnight.
+I believe that often in the midnight he sat and cowered before the
+gigantic sights and sounds that reigned despotically over his fancy.”
+
+                  “O dreams of day and night!
+    O monstrous forms! O effigies of pain!
+    O spectres busy in a cold, cold gloom!
+    O lank-ear’d Phantoms of black-weeded pools!
+    Why do I know ye? why have I seen ye? why
+    Is my eternal essence thus distraught
+    To see and to behold these horrors new?
+    Saturn is fallen, am I too to fall?
+    Am I to leave this haven of my rest,
+    This cradle of my glory, this soft clime,
+    This calm luxuriance of blissful light,
+    These crystalline pavilions, and pure fanes,
+    Of all my lucent empire? It is left
+    Deserted, void, nor any haunt of mine.
+    The blaze, the splendour, and the symmetry
+    I cannot see--but darkness, death and darkness.
+    Even here, into my centre of repose,
+    The shady visions come to domineer,
+    Insult, and blind and stifle up my pomp--
+    Fall!--No, by Tellus and her briny robes!
+    Over the fiery frontier of my realms
+    I will advance a terrible right arm
+    Shall scare that infant thunderer, rebel Jove,
+    And bid old Saturn take his throne again.”
+
+“What more magnificent prelude ever was uttered to oath than the portion
+of this speech preceding ‘No, by Tellus’! What more overpowering,
+leading up to an overwhelming threat, than the whole passage going
+before ‘Over the fiery frontier of my realms I will advance a terrible
+right arm’! What menacing deliberativeness there is in this whole
+speech, and what utter completeness of ruin to come is indicated by
+those words, ‘I will advance a terrible right arm’! You feel no sooner
+shall that arm move than ‘rebel Jove’s’ reign will be at an end, and
+that chaos will be left for Saturn to rule and fashion once more into
+order. Shut up the poem now. That’s plenty of _Hyperion_, and the other
+books of it are inferior. There is more labour and more likeness to
+_Paradise Lost_.” And so my friend, who is 16,000 miles away, and I
+turned from the Titanic theme, and spoke of the local board of
+guardians, or some young girl whose beauty was making rich misery in the
+hearts of young men in those old days.
+
+There is no other long poem in the volume bearing any marks which
+indicate such close connection with any individual reader as in the case
+of _Hyperion_. _Endymion_ boasts only one mark, and that expressing
+admiration of the relief afforded from monotony of the heroic couplets
+by the introduction in the opening of the double rhyming verses:
+
+    “Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing
+     Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing--”
+
+The friend to whom this mark is due never handled the volume, never even
+saw it; but once upon a time when he, another man, and I had got
+together, and were talking of the “gallipot poet,” the first friend said
+he always regarded this couplet as most happily placed where it appears.
+So when I reached home I marked my copy at the lines. Now, when I open
+the volume and find that mark, it is as good to me as, better than, a
+photograph of my friend; for I not only see his face and figure, but
+once more he places his index-finger on the table, as we three sit
+smoking, and whispers out the six opening lines, ending with the two I
+have quoted. Suppose I too should some day go 16,000 miles away from
+London, and carry this volume with me, shall I not be able to open it
+when I please, and recall what I then saw and heard, what I now see and
+hear, as distinctly as though no long interval of ocean or of months lay
+between to-night and that hour?
+
+Can I ever forget my burly tenor friend, who sang and composed songs,
+and dinted the line in _The Eve of St. Agnes_,
+
+    “The silver, snarling trumpets ’gan to chide,”
+
+and declared a hundred times in my unwearied ears that no more happy
+epithet than snarling could be found for trumpets? He over and over
+again assured me, and over and over again I loved to listen to his fancy
+running riot on the line, how he heard and saw brazen and silver and
+golden griffins quarrelling in the roof and around his ears as the
+trumpets blared through the echoing halls and corridors. He, too, marked
+
+    “The music, yearning like a God in pain.”
+
+“Keats,” he would say, “seems to have got not only at the spirit of the
+music, but at the very flesh and blood of it. He has done one thing for
+me,” my friend continued. “Before I read these lines, and others of the
+same kind, in Keats, my favourite tunes always represented an emotion of
+my own mind. Now they stand for individual characters in scenes, like
+descriptions of people in a book. When I hear music now I am with the
+Falstaffs or the Romolas, with Quasimodo or Julius Cæsar.”
+
+I have been regarding the indentures in the volume chronologically. The
+next marks of importance in the order of the years occur, one in _The
+Eve of St. Agnes_, the other in the _Ode to a Nightingale_. These marks,
+more than any others, I regard with grateful memory. They are not the
+work of the hand of him for whom I value them. I have good reason to
+look on him as a valid friend. For months between him and me there had
+existed an acquaintance necessarily somewhat close, but wholly
+uninformed with friendship. We spoke to one another as Mr. So-and-so.
+Neither of us suspected that the other had any toleration of poets or
+poetry. Our commerce had been in mere prose. One day, in mid-winter,
+when a chilling fog hung over London, I chanced to go into a room where
+he was writing alone. After a formal greeting, I complained of the cold.
+He dropped his pen and looked up. “Yes,” he said, “very cold and dark as
+night. Do you know the coldest night that ever was?” I answered that I
+did not. “It was St. Agnes’s Eve, when
+
+    “‘The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold.’”
+
+And so we fell to talking about Keats, and talked and talked for hours;
+and before the first hour of our talk had passed we had ceased
+“Mistering” one another for ever. The fire of his enthusiasm rose higher
+and higher as the minutes swept by. He knew one poet personally, for
+whose verse I had profound respect, and this poet, he told me,
+worshipped Keats. Often in our talks I laid plots for bringing him back
+to the simple sentence, “You should hear M. talk about Keats.” The
+notion that any one who knew M. could think M. would talk to me about
+Keats intoxicated me. “He would not let me listen to him?” I said half
+fearfully. “M. would talk to any one about Keats--to even a lawyer.” How
+I wished at that moment I was a Lord Chancellor who might stand in M.’s
+path. I have, in a way, been near to that poet since. I might almost
+have said to him,
+
+    “So near, too! You could hear my sigh,
+     Or see my case with half an eye;
+     But must not--there are reasons why.”
+
+So this friend I speak of now and I came to be great friends indeed. We
+often met and held carnivals of verse, carnivals among the starry lamps
+of poetry. He had a subtle instinct that saw the jewel, however it might
+be set. He owned himself the faculty of the poet, which gave him ripe
+knowledge of all matters technical in the setting.
+
+    “Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
+     To cease upon the midnight with no pain.”
+
+He would quote these two lines and cry, “Was ever death so pangless as
+that spoken of here? ‘To _cease_ upon the midnight!’ Here is no
+struggle, no regret, no fear. This death is softer and lighter and
+smoother than the falling of the shadow of night upon a desert of
+noiseless sand.”
+
+For a long time the name of one man had been almost daily in my ears. I
+had been hearing much through the friend to whom I have last referred
+about his intuitive eye and critical acumen. That friend had informed me
+of the influence which his opinion carried; and of how this man held
+Keats high above poets to whom we have statues of brass, whose names we
+give to our streets. My curiosity was excited, and, while my desire to
+meet this man was largely mingled with timidity, I often felt a jealous
+pang at thinking that many of the people with whom I was acquainted knew
+him. At length I became distantly connected with an undertaking in which
+he was prominently concerned. Through the instrumentality of one
+friendly to us both, we met. It was a sacred night for me, and I sat and
+listened, enchanted. After some hours the talk wheeled round upon
+sonnets. “Sonnets!” he cried, starting up; “who can repeat the lines
+about Cortez in Keats? You all know it.” Some one began to read or
+repeat the sonnet. Until coming upon the words, “or like stout Cortez.”
+“That’s it, that’s it! Now go on.”
+
+    “Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
+       He stared at the Pacific--and all his men
+     Look’d at each other with a wild surmise--
+       Silent, upon a peak in Darien.”
+
+“‘And all his men looked at each other with a _wild_ surmise,’” he
+repeated, “‘_silent_ upon a peak in Darien.’ The most enduring group
+ever designed. They are standing there to this day. They will stand
+there for ever and for ever; they are immutable. When an artist carves
+them you may know that Buonarotti is risen from the dead and is once
+more abroad.”
+
+That portion of a book which is called a preface and put first, is
+always the last written. It may be human, but it is not logical, that
+when a man starts he does not know what he has to say first, until he
+finds out by an elaborate guess of several hundred pages what he wants
+to say last. It would be unbecoming of me in a collection of ignorant
+essays to affect to know less than a person of average intelligence; but
+I am quite sincere when I say I am not aware who the author is of the
+great aphorism that “After all, there is a great deal of human nature in
+man.” There is, I would venture to say, more human nature than logic in
+man. My copy of Keats is no exception to the general rule of books. The
+preface ought to precede immediately the colophon. Yet it is in the
+forefront of the volume, before even the very title page itself. It
+forms no integral part of the volume, and is unknown to the printer or
+publisher. It was given to me by a thoughtful and kind-hearted friend at
+whose side I worked for a considerable while. One time, years ago, he
+took a holiday and vanished, going from among us I knew not whither. On
+coming back he presented each of his associates with something out of
+his store of spoil. That which now forms the preface to my copy he gave
+me. It consists of twelve leaves; twelve myrtle leaves on a spray. When
+he was in Rome he bore me in mind and plucked this sprig at the grave of
+the poet. It is consoling to remember Keats is buried so far away from
+where he was born, when we cannot forget that the abominable infamy of
+publishing his love-letters was committed in his own country--here in
+England. His spirit was lent to earth only for a little while, and he
+gave all of it to us. But we were not satisfied. We must have his
+heart’s blood and his heart too. The gentlemen who attacked his poetry
+when he was alive really knew no better, and tried, perhaps, to be as
+honest as would suit their private ends. But the publication of the dead
+man’s love-letters, fifty years after he had passed away, cannot be
+attributed even to ignorance. If any money was made out of the book it
+would be a graceful act to give it to some church where the burial
+ground is scant, and the parish is in need of a Potter’s Field.
+
+When I take down my copy of Keats, and look through it and beyond it, I
+feel that while it is left to me I cannot be wholly shorn of my friends.
+It is the only album of photographs I possess. The faces I see in it
+are not for any eye but mine. It is my private portrait gallery, in
+which hang the portraits of my dearest friends. The marks and blots are
+intelligible to no eye but mine; they are the cherished hieroglyphics of
+the heart. I close the book; I lock up the hieroglyphics; I feel certain
+the book will last my time. Should it survive me and pass into new
+hands--into the hands of some boy now unborn, who may pluck out of it
+posies of love-phrases for his fresh-cheeked sweetheart--he will know
+nothing of the import these marginal notes bore to one who has gone
+before him; unless, indeed, out of some cemetery of ephemeral literature
+he digs up this key--this Rosetta stone.
+
+
+
+
+DECAY OF THE SUBLIME.
+
+
+The sublime is dying. It has been pining a long time. At last
+dissolution has set in. Nothing can save it but another incursion of
+Goths and Huns; and as there are no Goths and Huns handy just now, the
+sublime must die out, and die out soon. You can know what a man is by
+the company he keeps. You can judge a people by the ideas they retain
+more than by the ideas they acquire. The philology of a tongue, from its
+cradle to its grave, is the social history of the people who spoke it.
+To-day you may mark the progress of civilisation by the decay bf the
+sublime. Glance at a few of the nations of earth as they stand. Italy
+and Spain still hold with the sublime in literature and art, although,
+being exhausted stocks, they cannot produce it any longer. France is
+cynical, smart, artistic, but never was and never can be sublime, so
+long as vanity rules her; and yet, by the irony of selection, sublime is
+one of her favourite words. Central Europe has had her sublime phases,
+but cannot be even thought of now in connection with the quality; and
+Russia and Turkey are barbarous still. If we come to the active pair of
+nationalities in the progress of current civilisation, the United States
+and England, we find the sublime in very poor case.
+
+Young England across the water is the most progressive nation of our
+age, because it is the most practical. If ever there was a man who put
+his foot on the neck of the sublime, that man is Uncle Sam. His
+contribution to the arts is almost nothing. His outrages against
+established artistic canons have been innumerable. He owns a new land
+without traditions. He laughs at all traditions. He has never raised a
+saint or a mummy or a religion (Mormonism he stole from the East), a
+crusader, a tyrant, a painter, a sculptor, a musician, a dramatist, an
+inquisition, a star chamber, a council of ten. All his efforts have
+been in a strictly practical direction, and most of his efforts have
+been crowned with success. He has devoted his leisure time, the hours
+not spent in cutting down forests or drugging Indians with whisky, to
+laughing at the foolish old notions which the foolish old countries
+cherish. He had a wonderfully fertile estate of two thousand million
+acres, about only one fourth of which is even to this day under direct
+human management. In getting these five hundred million acres of land
+under him he had met all kinds of ground--valley, forest, mountain,
+plain. But in none of these did he find anything but axes and whisky of
+the least use. No mountain had been sanctified to him by first earthly
+contact with the two Tables of the Law. No plain had been rendered
+sacred as that upon which the miraculous manna fell to feed the chosen
+people. No inland sea had been the scene of a miraculous draught of
+fishes. All the land acquired and cultivated by Uncle Sam came to him by
+the right of whisky and the axe. The mountain was nothing more than so
+much land placed at a certain angle that made it of little use for
+tillage. The plains, the rivers, and inland seas had a simply commercial
+value in his eyes. He had no experience of a miracle of any kind, and he
+did not see why he should bow down and respect a mountain, that, to him,
+was no more than so many thousand acres on an incline unfavourable to
+cultivation. Such a condition of the ground was a bore, and he would
+have cut down the mountain as he had cut down the Indian and the forest,
+if he had known how to accomplish the feat. He saw nothing mystic in the
+waters or the moon. Were the rivers and lakes wholesome to drink and
+useful for carriage, and well stocked with fish? These were the
+questions he asked about the waters. Would there be moonlight enough for
+riding and working? was the only question he asked about that “orbèd
+maiden with white fire laden whom mortals call the moon.” His notions,
+his plains, his rivers, his lakes, were all “big,” but he never thought
+of calling them sublime. On his own farm he failed to find any present
+trace of the supernatural; and he discovered no trace of the
+supernatural in tradition, for there was no tradition once the red man
+had been washed into his grave with whisky. Hence Uncle Sam began
+treating the supernatural with familiarity, and matters built on the
+supernatural with levity. Now without the supernatural the sublime
+cannot exist any length of time, if at all.
+
+It may be urged it is unreasonable to hold that the Americans have done
+away with the sublime, since in the history of all nations the earlier
+centuries were, as in America, devoted to material affairs. There is one
+fact bearing on this which should not be left out of count, namely, that
+America did not start from barbarism, or was not raised on a site where
+barbarism had overrun a high state of civilisation. The barbarous hordes
+of the north effaced the civilisation of old Rome, and raised upon its
+ashes a new people, the Italians, who in time led the way in art, as the
+old Romans had before them. The Renaissance was a second crop raised off
+the same ground by new men. The arts Rome had borrowed from Greece had
+been trampled down by Goths, who, when they found themselves in the land
+of milk and honey, sat down to enjoy the milk and honey, until suddenly
+the germs of old art struck root, and once more all eyes turned to Italy
+for principles of beauty. But America started with the civilisation of a
+highly civilised age. She did not rear her own civilisation on her own
+soil. She did not borrow her arts from any one country. She simply
+peopled her virgin plains with the sons of all the earth, who brought
+with them the culture of their respective nationalities. She has not
+followed the ordinary course of nations, from conflict to power, from
+power to prosperity, from prosperity to the arts, luxury, and decay. She
+started with prosperity, and the first use she made of her prosperity
+was, not to cultivate the fine arts in her own people, but to laugh at
+them in others. In the individual man the sense of humour grows with
+years. In nations the sense of humour develops with centuries. The
+literature of nations begins with battle-songs and hymns, and ends with
+burlesques and blasphemies.
+
+Now although America has begun with burlesques and blasphemies, no one
+can for a moment imagine that America is not going to create a noble
+literature of her own. She is destined not only to found and build up a
+noble literature, but one which will be unique. When she has time, when
+she has let most of those idle one thousand five hundred million acres,
+she will begin writing her books. By that time she will have running in
+her veins choice blood from every race on earth, and it is a matter of
+certainty she will give the world many delights now undreamed of. No
+other nation on earth will have, or ever has had, such an opportunity of
+devoting attention to man in his purely domestic and social relations.
+The United States of to-day has, for practical purposes, no foreign
+policy. She has no foreign rivals, she is not likely to have foreign
+wars, while in her own country she has large bodies of men from every
+people on the world. She owns the largest assorted lot of mankind on the
+globe, and as years go by we may safely conclude she will add to the
+variety and number of her sons. In all this appears no hope for the
+sublime. There is no instance in literature of a nation going back from
+laughter to heroics. The two may exist side by side. But that is not the
+case in America. Up to this hour only one class of transatlantic writers
+has challenged the attention of Europe, and that class is humorous and
+profane. Emerson, Bryant, Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Lowell, Holmes, and
+Irving are merely Europeans born in America. But Ward, Harte, Twain, and
+Breitmann are original and American.
+
+America is undoubtedly the literary promise-land of the future. It has
+done nothing up to this. Its condition has forbidden it to achieve
+anything, but great triumphs may be anticipated from it. Crossing the
+Atlantic, what do we find in the other great branch of the
+English-speaking race? Religious publications head the list by a long
+way. They have nothing to do with this subject save in so far as they
+are in the line of the sublime. All forms of the Christian and Jewish
+creeds are sublime. Looking at the other walks of literature, we find
+the death sentence of the sublime written everywhere. With the
+exception of Mr. Browning, here or there we have no poet or dramatist
+who attempts it. We have elegant trifles and beautiful form in many
+volumes of second-rate contemporary verse. There never was a time when
+the science of poetry was understood until now. Our critics can tell you
+with mathematical certainty the number of poems as distinguished from
+pieces of verse every well-known man has written. But we are not
+producing any great poetry, and none of the sublime kind. This is the
+age of elegant poetic incentive, of exquisite culture, but it is too
+dainty. We do not rise much above a poem to a shoe, or an ode to a
+ringlet, perfumed with one of Mr. Rimmel’s best admired distillations.
+We have a few poets who are continually trying to find out who or what
+the deuce they are, and what they meant by being born, and so on; but
+then these men are for the eclectic, and not the herd of sensible
+people. We have two men who have done noble work, Browning and Tennyson;
+but, speaking broadly, we find the sublime nowhere. It is true you
+cannot force genius as you force asparagus; and these remarks are not
+intended to indict the age with having no poetic faculty or aspiration.
+Abundance of poetry of a new and beautiful kind does exist, but it is
+not of the lofty kind born to the men of old.
+
+Turning eyes away from literature, take a few more of the arts. Before
+we go farther, let us admit that one art at least never reached sublimer
+recorded heights than to-day. The music of the generation just past is,
+I believe, in the front rank of the art. It is an art now in the throes
+of an enormous transformation. Not using the phrase in its slangy
+meaning, the music of the future is sure to touch splendours never
+dreamed of by that Raphael of the lyre, Mozart. The only art-Titans now
+wrestling are the musicians; not those paltry souls that pad the poor
+words of inane burlesques, but the great spirits that sit apart, and
+have audiences of the angels. These men, out of their own mouths, assure
+us that they catch the far-off murmurs of such imperial tones as never
+filled the ear of man yet. They cannot gather up the broken chords they
+hear. They admit they have heard no more than a few bars of the great
+masters who are close upon us; but, they say, if they only reproduce the
+effect these preluding passages have upon them, “Such harmonious madness
+from their lips would flow, the world should listen then as they are
+listening now.”
+
+Go to the Royal Academy and look round you. How pretty! How nice! How
+pathetic! But would you like to lend your arm to Michael Angelo, and go
+round those walls with him? He would prefer the rack, the gridiron of
+St. Laurence. It is true there is no necessity for the sublime; but
+those men who have been in the awful presence of such dreams as _Night_
+and _Morning_, by that sculptor, must be pardoned if they prefer it to
+the art you find in Burlington House. One of our great English poets
+said, speaking of the trivial nature of conversation at the beginning of
+this century, that if Lord Bacon were alive now, and made a remark in an
+ordinary assembly, conversation would stop. If casts of _Night_ and
+_Morning_ were placed at the head of the staircase of Burlington House,
+no one with appreciation of art would enter the rooms; the strong would
+linger for ever round those stupendous groups, and the feeble would be
+frighted away. Of course, the vast crowd of art-patrons would pass the
+group with only a casual glance, and a protest against having plaster
+casts occupying ground which ought to be allotted to original work.
+
+Read any speech Burke or Grattan ever spoke, and then your _Times_ and
+the debate last night. How plain it becomes that from no art has the
+sublime so completely vanished as the orator’s. Take those two speakers
+above, and run your eye over Cicero and Demosthenes, the four are of the
+one school, in the great style. Theirs is the large and universal
+eloquence. It is as fresh and beautiful, as pathetic, as sublime now as
+when uttered, although the occasions and circumstances are no longer of
+interest to man. The statistician and the poltroon and the verbatim
+reporter have killed the orator. If any man were to rise in the House
+and make a speech in the manner of the ancients, the honourable members
+would hurry in from all sides to laugh. A few sessions ago a member rose
+in his place, and delivered an oration on a subject not popular with the
+House, but in a manner which echoed the grand old style. At once every
+seat for which there was a member present at the time was occupied; and
+the next morning the daily papers had articles which, while disposing of
+the speaker’s cause in a few lines, devoted columns to the manner in
+which he had pleaded it.
+
+To discover what has led to the decay of the sublime is not difficult,
+and even in an ignorant essay like this, it may be briefly indicated.
+Roughly speaking, it is attributable to the accumulation of certainties.
+Any handbook that cribs from Longinus or Burke will tell you the vague
+is essential to the sublime. To attain it there must be something half
+understood--not fully known, only partly revealed. To attain it detail
+must be lost, and only a totality presented to the mind. For instance,
+if a great lover of Roman history were suddenly to find himself on the
+top of the Coliseum, the most sublime result to be obtained from the
+situation would be produced by repeating to himself the simple words,
+“This is Rome.” By these words the totality of the city’s grandeur,
+influence, power, and enterprises would be vaguely presented to a
+scholar’s mind dim in the glow of a multitude of half-revealing
+side-lights. If a companion whispered in the scholar’s ears, “This place
+would at one time seat a hundred thousand people,” then the particular
+is reached, and the sublime vanishes like sunshine against a cloud. Most
+of North America has been explored. Africa and Australia have been
+traversed. The source of the Nile has been found. We can read the
+hieroglyphics. We know the elements now flaming in the sun. Many of the
+phenomena in all branches of physiology which were mysteries to our
+fathers are familiar commonplaces of knowledge now. We have learned to
+foretell the weather. We travel a thousand miles for the hundred
+travelled by our fathers. We have daily newspapers to discuss all
+matters, clear away mysteries. We have opened the grave for the sublime
+with the plough of progress. Though the words stick in my throat, I
+must, I daresay, cry, “God speed the plough!”
+
+
+
+
+A BORROWED POET.
+
+
+Twenty years ago I borrowed, and read for the first time, the poems of
+James Clarence Mangan. I then lived in a city containing not one-third
+as many people as yearly swell the population of London. The friend of
+whom I borrowed the volume in 1866 is still living in his old home, in
+the house from which I carried away the book then. I saw him last winter
+and he is almost as little aged as the hills he has fronted all that
+time. I have had in those years as many homes as an Arab nomad. He still
+stays in the old place, and in the gray twilight of dark summer mornings
+wakes to hear as of yore the twitter of sparrows and the cawing of rooks
+from the other side of the river, and the hoarse hooting of the
+steamboat hard by.
+
+The volume of Mangan now by me I borrowed of another old friend, who
+passes most of his day within sight of that familiar river not quite a
+hundred yards from the house of the lender of twenty years back. In the
+meantime I have seen no other copy of Mangan.
+
+This latest fact is not much to be wondered at, for I am not
+enterprising in the matter of books--rarely buy and rarely borrow, and
+have never been in the reading room of the British Museum in my life.
+The book may be common to those who know much about books; but I have
+seen only the two copies I speak of, and these are of the same edition
+and of American origin. I believe a selection from the poems was issued
+a few years ago in Dublin, but a copy has not drifted my way. The
+title-page of the volume before me is missing, but in a list of
+publications at the back I find “_The Poems of James Clarence Mangan_.
+Containing German Anthology, Irish Anthology, Apocrypha, and
+Miscellaneous Poems. With a Biographical and Critical Introduction, by
+John Mitchel. 1 vol. 12mo. Printed on tinted and calendered paper.
+Nearly 500 pages. $1.” Beyond all doubt this is the book, and it was
+published by Mr. P. M. Haverty, of New York.
+
+As far as I know, this is the only edition of Mangan which pretends to
+be even comprehensive. It does not lay claim to completeness. At the
+time the late John Mitchel wrote his introduction he was aware of but
+one other edition of Mangan’s poems--the German Anthology, published in
+Dublin many years ago. I am nearly sure that since the appearance of
+Mitchel’s edition there have been no verses of Mangan’s published in
+book form on this side of the Atlantic, except the selections I have
+already mentioned, and I do not think any edition whatever has been
+published in this country.
+
+During the twenty years which have elapsed since first I made the
+acquaintance of the poems of James Clarence Mangan, I have read much
+verse and many criticisms of verse, and yet I don’t remember to have
+seen one line about Mangan in any publication issued in England. I
+believe two magazine articles have appeared, but I never saw them.
+Almost during these years, or within a period which does not extend
+back far beyond them, criticism of verse has ceased to be a matter of
+personal opinion, and has been elevated or degraded, as you will, into
+an exact science. The opinions of old reviewers--the Jeffreys and
+Broughams--are now looked on as curiosities of literature. There is as
+wide a gulf between the mode of treating poetry now and eighty years ago
+as there is between the mode of travelling, or the guess-work that makes
+up the physician’s art; and if in a gathering of literary experts any
+one were now to apply to a new bard the dogmas of criticism quoted for
+or against Byron, Shelley, Keats, and the Lakers in their time, a
+silence the reverse of respectful would certainly follow.
+
+This is not the age of great poetry, but it is the age of “poetical
+poetry,” to quote the phrase of one of the finest critics using the
+English language--one who has, unfortunately for the culture of that
+tongue and those who use it, written lamentably little. The great danger
+by which we stand menaced at present is, that our perceptions may become
+too exquisite and our poetry too intellectual. This, anyway, is true of
+poetry which may at all claim to be an expression of thought. There are
+in our time supreme formists in small things, carvers of cameos and
+walnut shells, and musical conjurors who make sweet melodies with richly
+vowelled syllables. But unfortunately the tendency of the poetic men of
+to-day is towards intellectuality, and this is a humiliating decay. In
+the times of Queen Elizabeth, when all the poets were Shakespeares, they
+cared nothing for their intellects. The intellectual side of a poet’s
+mind is an impertinence in his art.
+
+I do not presume to say what place exactly James Clarence Mangan ought
+to occupy on the greater roll of verse-writers, and I am not sure that
+he is, in the finest sense of the phrase, a “poetical poet;” but he is,
+at all events, the most poetical poet Ireland has produced, when we take
+into account the volume and quality of his song. I shall purposely avoid
+any reference to him as a translator, except in acting on John Mitchel’s
+opinion, and treating one of his “translations” from the Arabic as an
+original poem; for during his lifetime he confessed that he had passed
+off original poems of his own as translations; and Mitchel assures us
+that Mangan did not know Arabic. As this essay does not profess to be
+orderly or dignified, or anything more than rambling gossip, put into
+writing for no other reason than to introduce to the reader a few pieces
+of verse he may not have met before, I cannot do better than insert here
+the lines of which I am now speaking:
+
+
+THE TIME OF THE BARMECIDES.
+
+
+I.
+
+    “My eyes are filmed, my beard is grey,
+       I am bowed with the weight of years;
+     I would I were stretched in my bed of clay
+       With my long-lost youth’s compeers!
+     For back to the past, though the thought brings woe,
+       My memory ever glides--
+     To the old, old time, long, long ago,
+       The time of the Barmecides!
+     To the old, old time, long, long ago,
+       The time of the Barmecides.
+
+
+II.
+
+    “Then youth was mine, and a fierce wild will,
+       And an iron arm in war,
+     And a fleet foot high upon Ishkar’s hill,
+       When the watch-lights glimmered afar,
+     And a barb as fiery as any I know
+       That Khoord or Beddaween rides,
+     Ere my friends lay low--long, long ago,
+       In the time of the Barmecides;
+     Ere my friends lay low--long, long ago,
+       In the time of the Barmecides.
+
+
+III.
+
+    “One golden goblet illumed my board,
+       One silver dish was there;
+     At hand my tried Karamanian sword
+       Lay always bright and bare;
+     For those were the days when the angry blow
+       Supplanted the word that chides--
+     When hearts could glow--long, long ago,
+       In the time of the Barmecides;
+     When hearts could glow--long, long ago,
+       In the time of the Barmecides.
+
+
+IV.
+
+    “Through city and desert my mates and I
+       Were free to rove and roam,
+     Our diapered canopy the deep of the sky,
+       Or the roof of the palace dome.
+     Oh, ours was the vivid life to and fro,
+       Which only sloth derides:
+     Men spent Life so--long, long ago,
+       In the time of the Barmecides;
+     Men spent Life so--long, long ago,
+       In the time of the Barmecides.
+
+
+V.
+
+    “I see rich Bagdad once again,
+       With its turrets of Moorish mould,
+     And the Kalif’s twice five hundred men
+       Whose binishes flamed with gold.
+     I call up many a gorgeous show
+       Which the Pall of Oblivion hides--
+     All passed like snow, long, long ago,
+       With the time of the Barmecides;
+     All passed like snow, long, long ago,
+       With the time of the Barmecides.
+
+
+VI.
+
+    “But mine eye is dim, and my beard is grey,
+       And I bend with the weight of years--
+     May I soon go down to the House of Clay,
+       Where slumber my Youth’s compeers!
+     For with them and the Past, though the thought wakes woe,
+       My memory ever abides,
+     And I mourn for the Times gone long ago,
+       For the Times of the Barmecides!
+     I mourn for the Times gone long ago,
+       For the Times of the Barmecides!”
+
+This is the poem claimed by Mangan to be from the Arabic. I have no
+means of knowing whether it is or not. There is one translation from the
+Persian, one from the Ottoman, and according to Mitchel, one from the
+Coptic. But seeing that he turned into verse a great number of Irish
+poems from prose translations done by another, and that he did not know
+a word of that language, I think it may be safely assumed that _The Last
+of the Barmecides_ is original. This poem is so old a favourite of mine
+that I cannot pretend to be an impartial judge of it. When I hear it (I
+can never see a poem I know well and love much) I listen as to the
+unchanged voice of an old friend; I wander in a maze of memories; “I see
+rich Bagdad once again;” I am once more owner of the magic carpet, and
+am floating irresponsibly and at will on the intoxicating atmosphere of
+the poets over the enchanted groves, and streams, and hills, and seas of
+fairyland, or harkening to voices that years ago ceased to stir in my
+ears, gazing at the faces that have long since moulded the face cloth
+into blunted memories of the face for the grave.
+
+On the 20th of June, 1849, Mangan died in the Meath Hospital, Dublin.
+Having been born in 1803, he was, in 1849, eight years older than Poe,
+who died destitute and forlorn at Baltimore in the same year. Both poets
+had been in abject poverty, both had been unfortunate in love, both had
+been consummate artists, both had been piteously unlucky in a thousand
+ways, and both had died the same year, and in common hospitals. Two more
+miserable stories it is impossible to find anywhere. I would recommend
+those of sensitive natures to confine their reading to the work these
+men did, and not to the misfortunes they laboured under, and the follies
+they committed. I think, of the two, Mangan suffered more acutely; for
+he never rose up in anger against the world, or those around him, but
+glided like an uncomplaining ghost into the grave, where, long before
+his death, all his hopes lay buried. He had only a half-hearted pity for
+himself. Poe, in his _Raven_, is, all the time of his most pathetic and
+terrible complaining, conscious that he complains as becomes a fine
+artist. But the raven’s croak does not touch the heart. It appeals to
+the intellect; it affects the fancy, the imagination, the ear, the eye.
+When Mangan opens his bosom and shows you the ravens that prey upon him,
+he cannot repress something like a laugh at the thought that any one
+could be interested in him and his woes. See:
+
+
+THE NAMELESS ONE.
+
+
+BALLAD.
+
+
+I.
+
+    “Roll forth, my song, like the rushing river,
+       That sweeps along to the mighty sea;
+     God will inspire me while I deliver
+                     My soul of thee!
+
+
+II.
+
+    “Tell thou the world, when my bones lie whitening
+       Amid the last homes of youth and eld,
+     That there was once one whose veins ran lightning
+                     No eye beheld.
+
+
+III.
+
+    “Tell how his boyhood was one drear night-hour,
+       How shone for _him_, through his griefs and gloom,
+     No star of all heaven sends to light our
+                     Path to the tomb.
+
+
+IV.
+
+    “Roll on, my song, and to after ages
+     Tell how, disdaining all earth can give,
+     He would have taught men from wisdom’s pages
+                     The way to live.
+
+
+V.
+
+    “And tell how, trampled, derided, hated,
+       And worn by weakness, disease, and wrong,
+     He fled for shelter to God, who mated
+                     His soul with song--
+
+
+VI.
+
+    “With song which alway, sublime or vapid,
+       Flowed like a rill in the morning beam,
+     Perchance not deep, but intense and rapid--
+                     A mountain stream.
+
+
+VII.
+
+    “Tell how the Nameless, condemned for years long
+       To herd with demons from hell beneath,
+     Saw things that made him, with groans and tears, long
+                     For even death.
+
+
+VIII.
+
+    “Go on to tell how, with genius wasted,
+       Betrayed in friendship, befooled in love,
+     With spirit shipwrecked and young hopes blasted,
+                     He still, still strove.
+
+
+IX.
+
+    “Till, spent with toil, dreeing death for others,
+       And some whose hands should have wrought for _him_
+     (If children live not for sires and mothers),
+                     His mind grew dim.
+
+
+X.
+
+    “And he fell far through the pit abysmal,
+       The gulf and grave of Maginn and Burns,
+     And pawned his soul for the devil’s dismal
+                     Stock of returns.
+
+
+XI.
+
+    “But yet redeemed it in days of darkness,
+       And shapes and signs of the final wrath,
+     Where death in hideous and ghastly starkness
+                     Stood in his path.
+
+
+XII.
+
+    “And tell how now, amid wreck and sorrow,
+       And want and sickness and houseless nights,
+     He bides in calmness the silent morrow
+                     That no ray lights.
+
+
+XIII.
+
+    “And lives he still, then? Yes! old and hoary
+       At thirty-nine, from despair and woe,
+     He lives enduring what future story
+                     Will never know.
+
+
+XIV.
+
+    “Him grant a grave to, ye pitying noble,
+       Deep in your bosoms! There let him dwell!
+     He, too, had tears for all souls in trouble,
+                     Here and in hell.”
+
+The burden of all his song is sad, and in his translations he has chosen
+chiefly themes which echoed the harpings of his own soul. He began life
+as a copying clerk in an attorney’s office, and had for some time to
+support wholly, or in the main, a mother and sister. In Mitchel’s
+preface there are many passages almost as fine as the verse of the poet.
+Here is one, long as it is, that must find a place. Mitchel is speaking
+of the days when Mangan was in the attorney’s office:--
+
+     “At what age he devoted himself to this drudgery, at what age he
+     left it, or was discharged from it, does not appear; for his whole
+     biography documents are wanting, the man having never, for one
+     moment, imagined that his poor life could interest any surviving
+     human being, and having never, accordingly, collected his
+     biographical assets, and appointed a literary executor to take care
+     of his posthumous fame. Neither did he ever acquire the habit,
+     common enough among literary men, of dwelling upon his own early
+     trials, struggles, and triumphs. But those who knew him in after
+     years can remember with what a shuddering and loathing horror he
+     spoke--when at rare intervals he could be induced to speak at
+     all--of his labours with the scrivener and attorney. He was shy and
+     sensitive, with exquisite sensibilities and fine impulses; eye,
+     ear, and soul open to all the beauty, music, and glory of heaven
+     and earth; humble, gentle, and unexacting; modestly craving nothing
+     in the world but celestial, glorified life, seraphic love, and a
+     throne among the immortal gods (that’s all); and he was eight or
+     ten years scribbling deeds, pleadings, and bills in Chancery.”
+
+There is, I believe, but one portrait of him in existence, and a copy of
+it hangs on the wall of the room in which I am writing, a few feet in
+front of my eyes. It is not a face easy to describe. Beauty is the chief
+characteristic of it. But it is not the beauty that men admire or that
+inspires love in women. It is not the face of a poet or a visionary or a
+thinker. There is no passion in it; not even the passionate sadness of
+his own verse. It is not the face of a man who has suffered greatly, or
+rejoiced in ecstasy. It is the face of a fleshless, worn man of forty,
+with hair pressed back from the forehead and ear. I have been looking at
+it for a long time, trying to find out something positive about it, and
+I have failed. It is not interesting. It is the face of a man who is
+done with the world and humanity. It is the face of a dead man whose
+spirit has passed away, while the body remains alive. The eyes are open,
+and have light in them; the face would be more complete if the light
+were out, and the lids drawn down and composed for the blind tomb.
+
+He gives a picture of his mental attitude at about the time this
+portrait was taken:--
+
+
+TWENTY GOLDEN YEARS AGO.
+
+
+I.
+
+    “Oh, the rain, the weary, dreary rain,
+       How it plashes on the window-sill!
+     Night, I guess too, must be on the wane,
+       Strass and Gass around are grown so still.
+     Here I sit with coffee in my cup--
+       Ah, ’twas rarely I beheld it flow
+     In the tavern where I loved to sup
+       Twenty golden years ago!
+
+
+II.
+
+    “Twenty years ago, alas!--but stay--
+       On my life, ’tis half-past twelve o’clock!
+     After all, the hours _do_ slip away--
+       Come, here goes to burn another block!
+     For the night, or morn, is wet and cold;
+       And my fire is dwindling rather low:
+     I had fire enough, when young and bold
+       Twenty golden years ago.
+
+
+III.
+
+    “Dear! I don’t feel well at all, somehow:
+       Few in Weimar dream how bad I am;
+     Floods of tears grow common with me now,
+       High-Dutch floods that Reason cannot dam.
+     Doctors think I’ll neither live nor thrive
+       If I mope at home so--I don’t know--
+     _Am_ I living _now_? I _was_ alive
+       Twenty golden years ago.
+
+
+IV.
+
+    “Wifeless, friendless, flagonless, alone,
+       Not quite bookless, though, unless I choose;
+     Left with naught to do, except to groan,
+       Not a soul to woo, except the Muse.
+     Oh, this is hard for _me_ to bear--
+       Me who whilom lived so much _en haut_--
+     Me who broke all hearts like china-ware,
+       Twenty golden years ago.
+
+
+V.
+
+    “Perhaps ’tis better;--time’s defacing waves
+       Long have quenched the radiance of my brow--
+     They who curse me nightly from their graves
+       Scarce could love me were they living now;
+     But my loneliness hath darker ills--
+       Such dun duns as Conscience, Thought, & Co.,
+     Awful Gorgons! Worse than tailors’ bills
+       Twenty golden years ago.
+
+
+VI.
+
+    “Did I paint a fifth of what I feel,
+       Oh, how plaintive you would ween I was!
+     But I won’t, albeit I have a deal
+       More to wail about than Kerner has!
+     Kerner’s tears are wept for withered flowers;
+       Mine for withered hopes; my scroll of woe
+     Dates, alas! from youth’s deserted bowers,
+       Twenty golden years ago.
+
+
+VII.
+
+    “Yet, may Deutschland’s bardlings flourish long!
+       Me, I tweak no beak among them;--hawks
+     Must not pounce on hawks: besides, in song
+       I could once beat all of them by chalks.
+     Though you find me, as I near my goal,
+       Sentimentalising like Rousseau,
+     Oh, I had a great Byronian soul
+       Twenty golden years ago!
+
+
+VIII.
+
+    “Tick-tick, tick-tick!--not a sound save Time’s,
+       And the wind gust as it drives the rain--
+     Tortured torturer of reluctant rhymes,
+       Go to bed and rest thine aching brain!
+     Sleep!--no more the dupe of hopes or schemes;
+       Soon thou sleepest where the thistles blow;
+     Curious anti-climax to thy dreams
+       Twenty golden years ago!”
+
+I find myself now in a great puzzle. I want, first of all, to say I
+think it most melancholy that Mangan, when of full age and judgment,
+should have thought Byron had “a great Byronian soul.” Observe, he does
+not mean that he had a soul greatly like Byron’s, but that he had a soul
+like the great soul of Byron. I do not believe Byron had a great soul at
+all. I believe he was simply a fine stage-manager of melodrama, the
+finest that ever lived, and that as a property-master he was unrivalled;
+but that to please no one, himself included, could he have written the
+play. I am not descending to so defiling a depth as to talk about
+plagiarism. What I wish to say is, that whether Byron stole or not made
+not the least difference in the world, for he never by the aid of his
+gifts or his thefts wrote a poem. I wanted further to say of Byron that
+there was nothing great about him except his vanity. Suddenly I
+remembered some words of the critic of whom I spoke a while back, in
+dealing with the question of poetical poetry and poems. I took down the
+printed page, where I found these lines:--
+
+     “Mr. Swinburne’s poetry is almost altogether poetical. Not all the
+     poetry of even the Poets is so, and to one who loves this dear and
+     intimate quality of which we speak, Coleridge, for instance, is a
+     poet of some four poems, Wordsworth of some sixteen, Keats of five,
+     Byron of none, though Byron is _great and eloquent_, but the thing
+     we prize so much is far away from eloquence. Poetical poetry is the
+     inner garden; there grows the ‘flower of the mind.’”
+
+Now, my difficulty is plain. My critic, who is also a poet, says Byron
+is great, and I find fault with Mangan for saying Byron had a great
+Byronian soul. Here are two of my select authors against me. Plainly,
+the best thing I can do is say nothing at all about the matter!
+
+_Twenty Golden Years Ago_ is by no means a poetical poem, but there is
+poetry in it. There is no poetical poem by Mangan. But he has written no
+serious verses in which there is not poetry.
+
+After giving Mangan’s own verse account of what he was like in his own
+regard at about forty years of age, I copy what Mitchel saw when the
+poet was first pointed out to him:--
+
+     “Being in the College Library [Trinity, Dublin], and having
+     occasion for a book in that gloomy apartment of the institution
+     called the ‘Fagal Library,’ which is the innermost recess of the
+     stately building, an acquaintance pointed out to me a man perched
+     on the top of a ladder, with the whispered information that the
+     figure was Clarence Mangan. It was an unearthly and ghostly figure,
+     in a brown garment; the same garment (to all appearance), which
+     lasted till the day of his death. The blanched hair was totally
+     unkempt; the corpse-like features still as marble; a large book was
+     in his arms, and all his soul was in the book. I had never heard of
+     Clarence Mangan before, and knew not for what he was celebrated,
+     whether as a magician, a poet, or a murderer; yet took a volume and
+     spread it on a table, not to read, but with the pretence of reading
+     to gaze on the spectral creature on the ladder.”
+
+I never met any one who had known Mangan. Mitchel did not know the name
+of the woman who lured him on with smiles that seemed to promise love.
+He always addressed her in his poems as Frances. Some time ago the name
+of the woman was divulged. It is ungallant of me to have forgotten it,
+but such is the case. The address at which Mangan visited her was in
+Mountpleasant Square, Dublin. At the time I saw the name of the lady I
+looked into a directory of 1848 which I happened to have by me, and
+found a different name at the address given in the Square. I know the
+love affair of the poet took place years before his death in 1849, but
+people in quiet and unpretentious houses in Dublin, or correctly
+Ranelagh, often live a whole generation in the same house.
+
+Here I find myself in a second puzzle. So long as I thought merely of
+writing this rambling account of “My Borrowed Poet,” I decided upon
+trying to say something about the stupidity of women and poets in
+general. But I don’t feel in case to do so when I glance up at the face
+of Mangan hanging on the wall, and bring myself to realise the fact
+that this face now looking so dead and unburied was young and bright and
+perhaps cheerful when he went wooing in Ranelagh.
+
+Instead of saying anything wise and stupid and commonplace about either
+poets or women, let me quote here stanzas which must have been written
+some day when he saw sunshine among the clouds:--
+
+
+THE MARINER’S BRIDE.
+
+    “Look, mother! the mariner’s rowing
+         His galley adown the tide;
+     I’ll go where the mariner’s going,
+         And be the mariner’s bride!
+
+    “I saw him one day through the wicket,
+         I opened the gate and we met--
+         As a bird in the fowler’s net,
+     Was I caught in my own green thicket.
+     O mother, my tears are flowing,
+         I’ve lost my maidenly pride--
+     I’ll go if the mariner’s going,
+         And be the mariner’s bride!
+
+    “This Love the tyrant winces,
+         Alas! an omnipotent might,
+     He darkens the mind like night,
+         He treads on the necks of Princes!
+     O mother, my bosom is glowing,
+         I’ll go whatever betide,
+     I’ll go where the mariners going,
+         And be the mariner’s bride!
+
+    “Yes, mother! the spoiler has reft me
+         Of reason and self-control;
+         Gone, gone is my wretched soul,
+     And only my body is left me!
+     The winds, O mother, are blowing,
+         The ocean is bright and wide;
+     I’ll go where the mariner’s going,
+         And be the mariner’s bride.”
+
+This appears among the Apocrypha, and is credited by Mangan to the
+“Spanish;” but it is safe to assume when he is so vague that the poem is
+original. It is one of the most bright and cheerful he has given us. The
+only touch of sorrow we feel is for the poor mother who is about to lose
+so impulsive and vivacious a daughter. The time of this delightful
+ballad is not clearly defined, but we may be absolutely certain that we
+of this moribund nineteenth century will never meet except at a function
+of a recondite spiritual medium even the great grandchild of the
+Mariner’s Bride. How much more is our devout gratitude due to a good and
+pious spiritualist than to any riotous and licentious poet! The former
+can give us intercourse with the illustrious defunct of history; the
+latter can give us no more than the image of a figment, the phantom of a
+shade, the echo of sounds that never vibrated in the ear of man. All
+persons who believe the evidence adduced by poets are the victims of
+subornation.
+
+A saw-mill does not seem a good subject for a “copy of verses.” Mangan
+died single and in poverty, and was buried by his friends. Listen:--
+
+
+THE SAW-MILL.
+
+    “My path lay towards the Mourne again,
+       But I stopped to rest by the hill-side
+     That glanced adown o’er the sunken glen
+       Which the Saw-and Water-mills hide,
+               Which now, as then,
+       The Saw-and Water-mills hide.
+
+    “And there, as I lay reclined on the hill,
+       Like a man made by sudden _qualm_ ill,
+     I heard the water in the Water-mill,
+       And I saw the saw in the Saw-mill!
+               As I thus lay still
+       I saw the saw in the Saw-mill!
+
+    “The saw, the breeze, and the humming bees,
+       Lulled me into a dreamy reverie,
+     Till the objects round me--hills, mills, trees,
+       Seemed grown alive all and every--
+               By slow degrees
+       Took life as it were, all and every!
+
+    “Anon the sound of the waters grew
+       To a Mourne-ful ditty,
+     And the song of the tree that the saw sawed through
+       Disturbed my spirit with pity,
+               Began to subdue
+       My spirit with tenderest pity!
+
+    “‘Oh, wanderer, the hour that brings thee back
+       Is of all meet hours the meetest.
+     Thou now, in sooth art on the Track,
+       And nigher to Home than thou weetest;
+               Thou hast thought Time slack,
+       But his flight has been of the fleetest!
+
+    “‘For this it is that I dree such pain
+       As, when wounded, even a plank will;
+     My bosom is pierced, is rent in twain,
+       That thine may ever bide tranquil.
+               May ever remain
+       Henceforward untroubled and tranquil.
+
+    “‘In a few days more, most Lonely One!
+       Shall I, as a narrow ark, veil
+     Thine eyes from the glare of the world and sun
+       ’Mong the urns of yonder dark vale--
+               In the cold and dun
+       Recesses of yonder dark vale!
+
+    “‘For this grieve not! Thou knowest what thanks
+       The Weary-souled and Meek owe
+     To Death!’ I awoke, and heard four planks
+       Fall down with a saddening echo.
+               _I heard four planks_
+       _Fall down with a hollow echo._”
+
+This was the epithalamium of James Clarence Mangan sung by himself.
+
+
+
+
+THE ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER.
+
+
+I bought my copy new for fourpence-halfpenny, in Holywell Street. It was
+published by George Routledge and Sons, of the Broadway, London. The
+little volume is made up of a “Preface,” by Thomas de Quincey;
+“Confessions of an English Opium-eater;” and “Notes from the Pocket-book
+of a late Opium-eater;” including “Walking Stewart,” “On the Knocking at
+the Gates in _Macbeth_,” and “On Suicide.” When it last left my hands it
+boasted a paper cover, on which appeared the head of the illustrious
+Laker. At my elbow now it lies, divested of its shield; and I sit face
+to face with the title-page, as though my author had taken off his hat
+and overcoat, and I were asking him which he preferred, clear or thick
+soup, while the servant stood behind filling his glass with
+Amontillado. How that cover came to be removed I do not know. The last
+borrower was of the less destructive sex, and I am at a great loss to
+account for the injury.
+
+I object to the presence of “Walking Stewart,” and “On Suicide,”
+otherwise I count my copy perfect. With the exception of _Robinson
+Crusoe_ and Poe’s _Tales_ I have read nothing so often as the
+_Opium-eater_. Only twice in my life up to five-and-twenty years of age
+did I sit up all night to read a book: once when about midnight I came
+into possession of _Enoch Arden_, and a second time when, at the same
+witching hour I drew a red cloth-bound edition of the _Opium-eater_ out
+of my pocket, in my lonely, dreary bedroom, five hundred miles from
+where I am now writing. The household were all asleep, and I by no means
+strong of nerve. The room was large, the dwelling ghostly. I sat in an
+embrasure of one of the windows, with a little table supporting the
+candles on one side, and on the other a small movable bookcase. Thus I
+was in a kind of dock, only open on one side, that fronting the room. It
+was in the beginning of autumn, and a low, warm wind blew the
+complaining rain against the pane on a level with my ear. At that time I
+had not seen London, and I remember being overpowered and broken before
+the spectacle of that sensitive and imaginative boy in the text, hungry
+and forlorn, in the unsympathetic mass of innumerable houses, every door
+of which was shut against him.
+
+As I read on and the hour grew late, the succession of splendours and
+terrors wrought on my imagination, until I felt cold and exhausted, and
+had scarcely strength to sit upright in my chair. My hand trembled, and
+my mind became tremulously apprehensive of something vague and awful; I
+could not tell what. Sounds of the night which I had heard a thousand
+times before, which were as familiar to me as the bell of my parish
+church, now assumed dire, uncertain imports. The rattling of the sash
+was not the work of the wind, not the work of ghostly hands, but worse
+still, of human hands belonging to men in some more dire extremity than
+the approach of death. The beating of the rain against the glass was
+made to cover voices trying to tell me secrets I could not hear and
+live, and which yet I would have given my life to know.
+
+I cannot tell why I was so exhilarated by terror. The _Confessions_
+alone are not calculated to produce inexplicable disturbance of the
+mind. It may be I had eaten little or nothing that day; it may be I had
+steeped myself too deeply in nicotine. All I know for certain is that I
+was in such a state of abject panic I had not courage to cross the room
+to my bed. It was in the dreary, pitiless, raw hour before the dawn I
+finished the book. Then I found I durst not rise. I put down the book
+and looked at the candles. They would last till daylight.
+
+I would have given all the world to lie on that bed over there, with my
+back secure against it, warmed by it, comforted by it. But that open
+space was more terrible to me than if it were filled with flame. I
+should have been much more at my ease in the dark, yet I could not bring
+myself to blow out the lights; not because I dreaded the darkness, but
+because I shrank from encountering the possibilities of that awful
+moment of twilight between the full light of the candles and the blank
+gloom.
+
+When I thought of blowing out the lights and imagined the dread of
+catching a glimpse of some spectacle of supreme horror, I imprudently
+gave my imagination rein, and set myself to find out what would terrify
+me most. All at once, and before I had made more than the inquiry of my
+mind, I saw in fancy between me and the bed, a thing of unapproachable
+terror; I had not been recently reading _Christabel_, and yet it must
+have been remotely from that poem I conjured the spectre which so awed
+me. I placed out in the open of the room on the floor, between me and
+the door, and close to a straight line drawn between me and the bed, a
+figure shrouded in a black cloak, from hidden shoulder to invisible
+feet. Over the head of this figure was cast a cowl, which completely
+concealed the head and face. At any moment the cloak might open and
+disclose the body of that figure. I knew the body of that figure was a
+“thing to dream of, not to see.” I felt sure I should lose my reason if
+the cloak opened and discovered the loathsome body. I had no idea what I
+should see, but I knew I should go mad.
+
+In my dock by the window, and with the light behind my eyes I felt
+secure. But at that moment no earthly consideration, no consideration
+whatever, would have induced me to face that ghostly form in the flicker
+of expiring light. I was not under any delusion. I knew then as well as
+I know now that there was no object on which the normal human eye could
+exercise itself between me and the bed. I deliberately willed the figure
+to appear, and although once I had summoned it I could not dismiss it, I
+had complete and self-possessed knowledge that I saw nothing with my
+physical eye. Moreover, full of potentiality for terror as that figure
+was in its present shape and attitude, it had no dread for me. I was
+fascinated by considering possibilities which I knew could not arise so
+long as the present circumstances remained unchanged. In other words, I
+knew I could trust my reason to keep my imagination in subjection, so
+long as my senses were not confused or my attention scared. If I
+attempted to extinguish the candles that figure might waver! if I moved
+across the floor it might get behind my back, and as I caught sight of
+it over my shoulder, the cloak might fall aside! Then I should go mad.
+Thus I sat and waited until daylight came. Then I fell asleep in my
+chair.
+
+As I have said, the copy of the _Opium-eater_ I then had was bound in
+red cloth. It was a much handsomer book than the humble one published by
+Routledge. Since that memorable night many years ago in my high, dreary,
+lonely bedroom, I cannot tell you all the copies of the _Opium-eater_
+which have been mine. I remember another, bound in dark blue cloth, with
+copious notes. There was a third, the outside seeming of which I forget,
+but which I think formed part of two volumes of selections from De
+Quincey. I love my little sixpenny volume for one reason chiefly. I can
+lend it without fear, and lose it without a pang. Why, the beggarliest
+miser alive can’t think much of fourpence-halfpenny! I have already
+dispensed a few copies of the _Opium-eater_, price fourpence-halfpenny.
+As it lies on my table now, I take no more care of it than one does of
+yesterday’s morning paper. When I read it I double it back, to show to
+myself how little I value the gross material of the book. Any one coming
+in likely to appreciate the book, and who has not read it is welcome to
+carry it off as a gift. Yet if I am free with the volume, I am jealous
+of the author. I do not mention his name to people I believe unwilling
+or unable to worship him becomingly.
+
+But when I meet a true disciple what prodigal joy environs and suffuses
+me! What talks of him I have had, and speechless raptures in hearing of
+him! How thick with gold the air of evenings has been, spent with him
+and one who loved him! I recall one glorious summer’s day, when an old
+friend and I (we were then, alas! years and years younger than we are
+to-day), had toiled on through mountain heather for hours, until we were
+half-baked by the sun and famished with thirst. Suddenly we came upon
+the topmost peak of all the hills, and saw, many miles away, the
+unexpected sea. As we stood, shading our eyes with our hands, my
+companion chanted out, “Obliquely to the right lay the many-languaged
+town of Liverpool; obliquely to the left ‘the multitudinous sea.’”
+“Whose is that?” I asked eagerly, notwithstanding my drought. “What
+isn’t Shakespeare’s is De Quincey’s.” “Where did you find it?” “In the
+_Opium-eater_.” I remember cursing my memory because I had forgotten
+that passage. When I got home I looked through the copy I then had, and
+could not find the sentence. I wrote to my friend, saying I could not
+come upon his quotation. He answered that he now believed it did not
+occur in the body of the _Confessions_, but in a note in some edition,
+he could not remember which. What a sense of miserable desolation I had
+that this edition had never come my way!
+
+There are only three marks of any kind in my present copy of the
+_Confessions_, one dealing with the semi-voluntary power children have
+over the coming and going of phantoms painted on the darkness. This mark
+is very indistinct, and, as I remember nothing about it, I think it must
+have been made by accident. The part indicated by it is only
+introductory to an unmarked passage immediately following which has
+always fascinated my imagination. It is in the “Pains of Opium,” and
+runs:--
+
+     “In the middle of 1817, I think it was, that this faculty became
+     positively distressing to me: at night, when I lay awake in bed,
+     vast processions passed along in mournful pomp, friezes of
+     never-ending stories, that to my feelings were as sad and solemn as
+     if they were stories drawn from times before Œdipus and
+     Priam--before Tyre--before Memphis. And at the same time a
+     corresponding change took place in my dreams: a theatre seemed
+     suddenly opened and lighted up within my brain, which presented
+     nightly spectacles of more than earthly splendour.”
+
+How thankful we ought to be that it has never been our fate to sit in
+that awful theatre of prehistoric woes! There is surely nothing more
+appalling in the past than the interminably vain activities of that
+mysterious atomie, Egyptian man. Who could bear to look upon the three
+hundred thousand ant-like slaves swarming among the colossal monoliths
+piled up in thousands for the pyramid of Cheops! The bare thought makes
+one start back aghast and shudder.
+
+I find the next mark opposite another awful passage dealing with
+infinity, on this occasion infinity of numbers, not of time:--
+
+     “The waters now changed their character,--from translucent lakes,
+     shining like mirrors, they now became seas and oceans. And now came
+     a tremendous change, which, unfolding itself slowly like a scroll,
+     through many months, promised an abiding torment; and, in fact, it
+     never left me until the winding-up of my case. Hitherto the human
+     face had mixed often in my dreams, but not despotically, not with
+     any special power of tormenting. But now, that which I have called
+     the tyranny of the human face began to unfold itself. Perhaps some
+     part of my London life might be answerable for this. Be that as it
+     may, now it was that upon the rocking waters of the ocean the human
+     face began to appear: the sea appeared paved with innumerable
+     faces, upturned to the heavens--faces imploring, wrathful,
+     despairing, surged upwards by thousands, by myriads, by
+     generations, by centuries.”
+
+Upon closer looking, I see an attempt has been made to erase the mark
+opposite this passage. Joining the fact with the faintness of the line
+opposite the former quotation I am driven to the conclusion that there
+is only one “stetted” note of admiration in the book. It is a whole page
+of the little volume. It begins on page 91, and ends on page 92. To show
+you how little I care for my copy of the _Confessions_, I shall cut it
+out. Even a lawyer would pay me more than fourpence-halfpenny for
+copying a page of the book, and, as I have said before, the volume has
+no extrinsic value for me. Excepting the Bible, I am not familiar with
+any finer passage of so great length in prose in the English language:--
+
+     “The dream commenced with a music which now I often heard in
+     dreams; a music of preparation and awakening suspense; a music like
+     the opening of the Coronation Anthem, and which, like _that_, gave
+     the feeling of a vast march--of infinite cavalcades filing off--and
+     the tread of innumerable armies. The morning was come of a mighty
+     day--a day of crisis and of final hope for human nature, then
+     suffering some mysterious eclipse, and labouring in some dread
+     extremity. Somewhere, I knew not where--somehow, I knew not
+     how--by some beings, I knew not whom--a battle, a strife, an agony
+     was conducting, was evolving like a great drama, or piece of music;
+     with which my sympathy was the more insupportable from my confusion
+     as to its place, its cause, its nature, and its possible issue. I,
+     as is usual in dreams (where, of necessity, we make ourselves
+     central to every movement), had the power and yet had not the
+     power, to decide it. I had the power, if I could raise myself, to
+     will it; and yet again had not the power, for the weight of twenty
+     Atlantics was upon me, or the oppression of inexpiable guilt.
+     ‘Deeper than ever plummet sounded,’ I lay inactive. Then, like a
+     chorus, the passion deepened. Some greater interest was at stake;
+     some mightier cause than ever yet the sword had pleaded or trumpet
+     had proclaimed. Then came sudden alarms; hurryings to and fro;
+     trepidations of innumerable fugitives, I knew not whether from the
+     good cause or the bad; darkness and lights; tempest and human
+     faces; and at last, with the sense that all was lost, female forms,
+     and the features that were all the world to me, and but a moment
+     allowed, and clasped hands, and heart-breaking partings, and
+     then--everlasting farewells! and with a sigh such as the caves of
+     hell sighed when the incestuous mother uttered the abhorred name of
+     death, the sound was reverberated--everlasting farewells! and again
+     and yet again reverberated--everlasting farewells! And I awoke in
+     struggles, and cried aloud, ‘I will sleep no more!’”
+
+Upon reading this passage over I am glad I am not familiar with any
+finer one in English prose--it would be impossible to endure it. In
+these sentences it is not the consummate style alone that overwhelms
+one, the matter is nearly as fine as the manner. How tremendously the
+numbers and sentences are marshalled! How inevitable, overbearing,
+breathless is the onward movement! What awful expectations are aroused,
+and shadowy fears vaguely realized! As the spectral pageant moves on
+other cohorts of trembling shades join the ghostly legion on the blind
+march! All is vaporous, spectral, spiritual, until when we are wound up
+to the highest pitch of physical awe and apprehension, we stop suddenly,
+arrested by failure of the ground, insufficiency of the road, and are
+recalled to life and light and truth and fellowship with the kindly race
+of man by the despairing human shriek of incommunicable, inarticulable
+agony in the words, “I will sleep no more!” In that despairing cry the
+tortured soul abjectly confesses that it has been vanquished and driven
+wild by the spirit-world. It is when you contrast the finest passages
+in Macaulay with such a passage as this, that you recognise the
+difference between a clever writer and a great stylist.
+
+
+
+
+A GUIDE TO IGNORANCE.
+
+
+For a long time I have had it in my mind to write a guide to ignorance.
+I have been withheld partly by a feeling of diffidence and partly by a
+want of encouragement from those to whom I mentioned the scheme. I have
+submitted a plan of my book to a couple of publishers, but each of these
+assured me that such a work would not be popular. In their
+straightforward commercial way they told me they could see “no money in
+the idea.” I differ from them; I think the book would be greeted with
+acclaim and bought with avidity.
+
+Novelties are, I know, always dangerous speculations except in the form
+of clothes, when they are certain of instant and immense adoption. The
+mind of man cannot conceive the pattern for trousers’ cloth or the
+design for a bonnet that will not be worn. There is nothing too high or
+too low to set the fashion to men and women in dress. Conquerors were
+crowned with mural wreaths, of which the chimney-pot hat is the lineal
+descendant; pigs started the notion of wearing rings in their noses, and
+man in the southern seas followed the example; kangaroos were the
+earliest pouch-makers and ladies took to carrying reticules.
+
+But an innovation in the domain of education or thought is a widely
+different thing from a frolic in gear. It is easy to set going any craze
+which depends merely or mostly on the way of wearing the hair or the
+height of the cincture. Hence æstheticism gained many followers in a
+little time. But remember it took ages and ages to reconcile people to
+wearing any clothes at all. Once you break the ice the immersion in a
+new custom may become as rapid as the descent of a round shot into the
+sea. The great step was, so to speak, from woad to wampum, with just an
+Atlantic of time between the two. If you went to Poole any day this
+week and asked him to make you a suit of wampum he would plead no
+insuperable difficulty. If you asked him to make you a suit of woad he
+would certainly detain you while he inquired as to your sanity and sent
+for your friends. Yet it is only one step, one film, from woad to
+wampum.
+
+Up to this time in the history of man there has, with few exceptions,
+been an infatuated pursuit of this will-o’-the-wisp, knowledge. Why
+should not man now turn his glance to ignorance, if it were only for a
+little while and for the sake of fair play? The idea is of course
+revolutionary, so also is every other new idea revolutionary, and (I am
+not now referring to politics) it is only from revolutionary ideas we
+derive what we regard as advantages. The earth and heavens themselves
+are revolutionary. Why then should we not fairly examine the chance of a
+revolution in the aim of man?
+
+The disinclination to face new attitudes of thought comes from the
+inherent laziness of man, and hence at the outset of my career towards
+that guide I should find nearly the whole race against me. Humboldt, who
+met people of all climes and races and colours, declares laziness to be
+the most common vice of human nature. Hence the initial obstacle is
+almost insuperable. But it is only almost, not quite insuperable. Men
+can be stirred from indolence only by a prospect of profit in some form.
+Even in the Civil Service they are incited to make the effort to
+continue living by the hope of greater leisure later in life, for with
+years comes promotion and promotion means less labour.
+
+By a little industry in the pursuit of ignorance greater repose would be
+attained in the immediate future. It would be very difficult to prove
+that up to this hour progress has been of the slightest use or pleasure
+to man. Higher pleasures, higher pains. Complexities of consciousness
+are merely a source of distraction from centralisation. The jelly fish
+may, after all, be the highest ideal of living things, and we may, if
+the phrase be admitted, have been developing backward from him. Of all
+the creatures on earth man is the most stuck up. He arrogates
+everything to himself and because he can split a flint or make a bow or
+gun-barrel he thinks he centres the universe, and insists that the
+illimitable deeps of space are focused upon him. Astronomers, a highly
+respectable class of people, assert there are now visible to us one
+hundred million fixed stars, one hundred million suns like our own. Each
+may have its system of planets, such as earth, and each planet again its
+attendant satellites. With that splendid magnanimity characteristic of
+our race, man would rather pitch the hundred million suns into chaos
+than for a moment entertain the idea that he is a humbug and of no use
+whatever. And yet after all the jelly-fish may be a worthier fellow than
+the best of us.
+
+I do not of course insist on reversion to the jelly-fish. In this
+climate his habits of life are too suggestive of ague and rheumatism. In
+fact I do not know that I am urging reversion to anything, even to the
+flocks of pastoral man. But I am saying that as myriads of facilities
+are given for acquiring knowledge, one humble means ought to be devised
+for acquiring ignorance. If I had anywhere met with the encouragement
+which I think I merited, I should have undertaken to write the book
+myself.
+
+I should open by saying it was not until I had concluded a long and
+painful investigation that I considered myself in any way qualified to
+undertake so grave and important a task as writing a guide to ignorance:
+that I had not only inquired curiously into my own fitness, but had also
+looked about carefully among my friends in the hope of finding some one
+better qualified to carry out this important undertaking. But upon
+gauging the depth of my own knowledge and considering conscientiously
+the capacity of my acquaintances, I came to the conclusion that no man I
+knew personally had so close a personal intimacy with ignorance as
+myself. There are few branches, I may say no branch, of knowledge except
+that of ignorance in which any one of my friends was not more learned
+than myself. I was born in such profound ignorance that I had no
+personal knowledge of the fact at the time. I had existed for a long
+time before I could distinguish between myself and things which were
+not.
+
+As a boy I was averse from study; and since I have grown to manhood I
+have acquired so little substantive information that I could write down
+in a bold hand on one page of this book every single fact, outside facts
+of personal experience, of which I am possessed.
+
+I know that the Norman invasion occurred in 1066, and the Great Fire in
+1666. I know that gunpowder is composed of saltpetre, sulphur, and
+charcoal, and sausages of minced meat and bread under the name of Tommy.
+I am aware Milton and Shakespeare were poets, and that needle-grinders
+are short lived. I know that the primest brands of three-shilling
+champagnes are made in London. I can give the Latin for seven words, and
+the French for four. I can repeat the multiplication table (with the
+pence) up to six times. I know the mere names of a number of people and
+things; but, as far as clear and definite information goes, I don’t
+believe I could double the above brief list. I am, I think, therefore,
+warranted in concluding that few men can have a more close or exhaustive
+personal acquaintance with ignorance. If you want learning at secondhand
+you must go to the learned: if you want ignorance at first hand you
+cannot possibly do better than come to me.
+
+In the first place let us consider the “Injury of Knowledge.” How much
+better off the king would be if he had no knowledge! Suppose his mental
+ken had never been directed to any period before the dawn of his own
+memory, he would have no disquieting thoughts of the trouble into which
+Charles I. or Richard II. drifted. He would be filled with no envy of
+the good old King John, who, from four or five ounces of iron in the
+form of thumb-screws, and a few hundredweight of rich Jew, filled up the
+royal pockets as often as they showed any signs of growing empty. And,
+above all, he would be spared the misery of committing dates to memory.
+How it must limit the happiness of a constitutional sovereign to know
+anything about the constitution! Why should he be burdened with the
+consciousness of rights and prerogatives? Would he not be much happier
+if he might smoke his cigar in his garden without the fear of the
+Speaker or the Lord Chancellor before his eyes? The Commons want their
+Speaker, the Lords want their Lord Chancellor--let them have them. The
+king wants neither. Why should he be troubled with any knowledge of
+either? Although he is a king is he not a man and a brother also? Why
+should he be worried out of his life with reasons for all he does? The
+king feels he can do no wrong. That ought to be enough for him. Most men
+believe the same thing of themselves, but few others share the faith.
+The king can do no wrong, then in mercy’s name let the man alone.
+Suppose it is a part of my duty to look out of the oriel window at dawn,
+noon, and sunset, why should I be bored with cause, reason, and
+precedent for this? Let me look out of window if it is my duty to do so;
+but, before and after looking out of the window, let me enjoy my life.
+
+Take the statesman. How knowledge must hamper him! He is absolutely
+precluded from acting with decision by the consciousness of the
+difficulties which lay in the path of his predecessors. He has to make
+up his subject, to get facts and figures from his subordinates and
+others. He has to arrange the party manœuvres before he launches his
+scheme, by which time all the energy is gone out of him, and he has not
+half as much faith in his bill as if he had never looked at the _pros_
+and _cons_. “Never mind manœuvring, but go at them,” said Nelson. The
+moment you begin to manœuvre you confess your doubtfulness of
+success, unless you can take your adversary at a disadvantage; but if
+you fly headlong at his throat, you terrify him by the display of your
+confidence and valour.
+
+The words of Nelson apply still more closely to the general. His
+knowledge that fifty years ago the British army was worsted on this
+field, unnerves, paralyses him. If he did not know that shells are
+explosive and bullets deadly, he would make his dispositions with twice
+the confidence, and his temerity would fill the foe with panic. His
+simple duty is to defeat the enemy, and knowing anything beyond this
+only tends to distract his mind and weaken his arm. In the middle of one
+of his Indian battles, and when he thought the conflict had been decided
+in favour of British arms, a messenger rode hastily up to the general in
+command, who was wiping his reeking forehead on his coat-sleeve: “A
+large fresh force of the enemy has appeared in such a place; what is to
+be done?” Gough rubbed his forehead with the other sleeve, and shouted
+out, “Beat ’em!” Obviously no better command could have been given. What
+the English nation wanted the English army to do with the enemy was to
+“beat ’em.” In the pictures of the Victoria Cross there is one of a
+young dandy officer with an eyeglass in his eye and a sword in his hand,
+among the thick of the foe. He knows he is in that place to kill some
+one. He is quite ignorant of the fact that the enemy is there to kill
+him, and he is taking his time and looking through his eyeglass to try
+to find some enticing man through whom to run his sword. One of
+Wellington’s most fervent prayers was, “Oh, spare me my dandy officers!”
+Now dandies are never very full of knowledge, and yet the greatest Duke
+thought more of them than of your learning-begrimed sappers or your
+science-bespattered gunners.
+
+If an advocate at the bar knew one quarter of the law of the land, he
+could never get on. In the first place, he would know more than the
+judges, and this would prejudice the bench against him. With regard to a
+barrister, the best position for him to assume, if he is addressing a
+jury, is, “Gentlemen, the indisputable facts of the case, as stated to
+you by the witnesses, are so-and-so. In presence of so distinguished a
+lawyer as occupies the bench in this court, I do not feel myself
+qualified to tell you what the law is; that will be the easy duty of his
+lordship.” Even in Chancery cases, the barrister would best insure
+success by merely citing the precedent cases, in an off-hand way, “Does
+not your lordship think the case of Burke _v._ Hare meets the exact
+conditions of the one under consideration?” The indices are all the
+pleader need look at. The judge will surely strain a point for one who
+does not bore him with extracts and arguments, but leaves all to
+himself, and lets the work of the court run smoothly and just as the
+president wishes.
+
+Knowledge is an absolute hindrance to the doctor of medicine. Supposing
+he is a man of average intelligence (some doctors are), he is able to
+diagnose, let me say, fever. You or I could diagnose fever pretty
+well--quick pulse, dry skin, thirst, and so on. But as the doctor leans
+over the patient, he is paralysed by the complication of his knowledge.
+Such a theory is against feeding up, such a theory against slops, such a
+theory against bleeding, such a theory in favour of phlebotomy; there
+are the wet and the dry, the hot and the cold methods; and while the
+doctor is deliberating, vacillating, or speculating, the patient has
+ample opportunity of dying, or nature of stepping in and curing the man,
+and thus foiling the doctor. Is there not much more sense and candour in
+the method adopted by the Irish hunting dispensary doctor, who, before
+starting with the hounds, locked up all drugs, except the Glauber’s
+salts, a stone or two of which he left in charge of his servant, with
+instructions it was to be meted out impartially to all comers, each
+patient receiving an honest fistful as a dose? It is a remarkable fact
+that within this century homœopathy has gained a firm hold on an
+important section of the community, and yet, notwithstanding the growth
+of what the allopathists or regular profession regard as ignorant
+quackery, the span of human life has had six years added to it in eighty
+years. Still homœopathy is a practical confession of ignorance; for
+it says, in effect, “We don’t know exactly what Nature is trying to do,
+but let us give her a little help, and trust in luck.” Whereas allopathy
+pretended to know everything and to fight Nature. Here, in the result of
+years added to man’s life by the development of the ignorant system, we
+see once more the superiority of ignorance over knowledge.
+
+How full of danger to the unwedded men is knowledge owned by the widow!
+She has knowledge of the married state, in which she was far removed
+from all the troubles and responsibilities of life. She had her
+pin-money, her bills paid, stalls taken for her at the opera, agreeable
+company around her board, no occasion to face money difficulties. Now
+all that is changed. There is no elasticity in her revenue, no margin
+for the gratification of her whims; she has to pay her own bills, secure
+her own stalls; she cannot very well entertain company often, and all
+the unpleasantnesses of business matters press her sorely. Her knowledge
+tells her that, if she could secure a second husband, all would be
+pleasant again. It may be said that here knowledge is in favour of the
+widow. Yes; but it is against the “Community.” Remember, the “Community”
+is always a male.
+
+There is hardly any class or member of the community that does not
+suffer drawback or injury from knowledge. As I am giving only a crude
+outline of a design, I leave a great deal to the imagination of the
+reader. He will easily perceive how much happier and more free would be
+the man of business, the girl, the boy, the scientist, the
+controversialist, and, above all, the literary man, if each knew little
+or nothing, instead of having pressed upon the attention from youth
+accumulated experiences, traditions, discoveries, and reasonings of many
+centuries.
+
+To the “Delights of Ignorance,” I should devote the consideration of man
+devoid of knowledge under various circumstances and in various
+positions.
+
+By the sea who does not love to lie “propt on beds of amaranth and moly,
+how sweet (while warm airs lull, blowing lowly), with half-dropt eyelids
+still, beneath a heaven dark and holy, to watch the long bright river
+drawing slowly his waters from the purple hill--to hear the dewy echoes
+calling from cave to cave through the thick-twined vine--to watch the
+emerald-coloured waters falling through many a woven acanthus wreath
+divine! Only to see and hear the far-off sparkling brine, only to hear
+were sweet, stretched out beneath the pine.” Just so! Is not that much
+better than bothering about gravitation and that wretched old clinker
+the moon, and the tides, and how sea-water is made up of oxygen and
+hydrogen and chloride of sodium and bromide of something else, and fifty
+other things, not one of which has a tolerable smell when you meet it in
+a laboratory? Isn’t it better than thinking of the number of lighthouses
+built on the coast of Albion, and the tonnage which yearly is reported
+and cleared at the custom-houses of London, Liverpool, and that
+prosperous seaport of Bohemia! Isn’t it much better than improving the
+occasion by reading a hand-book on hydraulics or hydrostatics? Who on
+the seashore wants to know anything? There will always, down to the last
+syllable of recorded time, be finer things unknown about the sea than
+can be said about all other matters in the world. Trying to know
+anything about the sea is like shooting into the air an arrow attached
+to a pennyworth of string with a view to sounding space. If we threw all
+the knowledge we have into the ocean the Admiralty standards of
+high-water mark would not have to be altered one-millionth part of a
+line.
+
+What a blessing ignorance would be in an inn! Who would not dispense
+with a knowledge of all the miseries that follow in the wake of the vat
+when one is thirsty, and has before him amber sunset-coloured ale, and
+in his hand a capacious, long, cool-meaning churchwarden? Who would at
+such a moment cumber his mind with the unit of specific gravity used by
+excisemen in testing beer? Who would at such a moment care to calculate
+the toll exacted by the Chancellor of the Exchequer before each cool
+gulp may thrill with amazing joy the parched gullet?
+
+Who, when upon a journey, would care to know the precise pressure
+required to blow the boiler of the engine to pieces, or the number of
+people killed in collisions during the corresponding quarter of last
+year? Should we not be better in sickness for not knowing the exact
+percentage of deaths in cases of our class? In adversity should we not
+be infinitely happier were we in ignorance of the chance we ran of
+gaining a good position or of cutting our throats? Should we not enjoy
+our prosperity all the more if we were not, morning and evening,
+exercised by the fluctuations of the share-list, fluctuations in all
+likelihood destined never to increase or diminish our fortunes one
+penny? And oh, for ignorance in sleep! For sleep without dream, or
+nightmare, or memory! For sleep such as falls upon the body when the
+soul is done with it and away!
+
+But all this is only rambling talk and likely to come to nothing. I fear
+I shall never find a publisher for my great work. Upon reading over what
+I have written I am impressed by the faintness of the outline it
+displays of the book. In fact there is hardly any outline at all. It is
+no more clear than the figures thrown by a magic-lantern upon a fog. I
+have done nothing more than wave the sacred lamp of ignorance before
+your eyes. I daresay my friend the jelly-fish would shake his fat sides
+with laughter if he became aware of this futile effort to show how far
+we are removed from his state of blissful calm. I feel infinitely
+depressed and discouraged. I feel that not only will I not be hailed as
+a prophet in my own country, but that the age will have nothing to do
+with my scheme. It may be thought by many that there is something like
+treason in thus enrolling oneself under the banner of the jelly-fish.
+Egypt, Assyria, Greece, Carthage, and Rome have gone back from
+knowledge, and even the jelly-fish does not flourish on their sites. But
+is the condition of their sites the worse for lacking the jelly-fish?
+Perhaps the “silence, and desolation, and dim night” are better in those
+places than the blare of trumpets and the tramp of man. So far as we
+know man is the only being capable of doing evil or offending heaven.
+His absence may by nature be considered very good company. Whatever part
+of earth he can handle and move he has turned topsy-turvy. One day earth
+will turn on him and wipe him out altogether.
+
+For me and my great scheme for the book there is no hope. Man has always
+been accounted a poor creature when judged by a fellow man whom he does
+not appreciate. How can I be expected to go on taking an interest in
+man when not the most credulous or the most crafty publisher in London
+will as much as look at my _Guide to Ignorance_? I feel that my life is
+wasted and that my functions have been usurped by the School Board. I
+cool the air with sighs for the days when a philosopher might teach his
+disciples in the porch or the grove. I feel as if I could anticipate
+earth and turn on man. But some of the genial good nature of the
+jelly-fish still lingers in my veins. I will not finally desert man
+until man has finally deserted me. I had by me a few scattered essays in
+the style of the book I projected in vain. If in them the reader has not
+found ample proof of my fitness to inculcate the philosophy of Ignorance
+I shall abandon Man to his fate. I have relieved my mind of some of its
+teeming store of vacuity. I can scarcely hope I have added to the
+reader’s hoard. But it would be consoling to fancy that upon laying down
+this book the reader’s mind will if possible be still more empty than
+when he took it up.
+
+                        RICHARD CLAY AND SONS,
+                          LONDON AND BUNGAY.
+
+
+Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
+
+the face of a charletan=> the face of a charlatan {pg 13}
+
+acccording to Mitchel=> acccording to Mitchel {pg 140}
+
+are focussed upon him.=> are focused upon him. {pg 179}
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Ignorant Essays, by Richard Dowling
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 53169 ***
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-The Project Gutenberg EBook of Ignorant Essays, by Richard Dowling

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-<hr class="full" />

-

-<div class="figcenter">

-<img src="images/cover.jpg" alt="" title="" />

-</div>

-

-<p class="c">IGNORANT ESSAYS.</p>

-

-<h1>IGNORANT<br /><br />

-<span style="margin-left: 5em;">ESSAYS.</span></h1>

-

-<p class="cb"><img src="images/colophon.jpg"

-width="200"

-alt="text decoration unavailable." /><br />

-<br /><br />

-LONDON:<br />

-<br />

-WARD AND DOWNEY,<br />

-<br />

-12, YORK STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C.<br />

-<br />

-1887.<br />

-<br />

-[<i>All Rights Reserved.</i>]<br />

-<br /><br />

-<small><span class="smcap">Richard Clay and Sons</span>,<br />

-

-LONDON AND BUNGAY.</small></p>

-

-<h2><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS"></a>CONTENTS.</h2>

-

-<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">

-

-<tr><td>&nbsp;</td><td class="rt"><small>PAGE</small></td></tr>

-<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#THE_ONLY_REAL_GHOST_IN_FICTION">THE ONLY REAL GHOST IN FICTION</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_1">1</a></td></tr>

-<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#THE_BEST_TWO_BOOKS">THE BEST TWO BOOKS</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_30">30</a></td></tr>

-<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#LIES_OF_FABLE_AND_ALLEGORY">LIES OF FABLE AND ALLEGORY</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_55">55</a></td></tr>

-<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#MY_COPY_OF_KEATS">MY COPY OF KEATS</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_83">83</a></td></tr>

-<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#DECAY_OF_THE_SUBLIME">DECAY OF THE SUBLIME</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_117">117</a></td></tr>

-<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#A_BORROWED_POET">A BORROWED POET</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_132">132</a></td></tr>

-<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#THE_ENGLISH_OPIUM-EATER">THE ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_160">160</a></td></tr>

-<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#A_GUIDE_TO_IGNORANCE">A GUIDE TO IGNORANCE</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_175">175</a></td></tr>

-</table>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_1" id="page_1"></a>{1}</span>&nbsp; </p>

-

-<p class="cb"><big><big>IGNORANT ESSAYS.</big></big></p>

-

-<h2><a name="THE_ONLY_REAL_GHOST_IN_FICTION" id="THE_ONLY_REAL_GHOST_IN_FICTION"></a>THE ONLY REAL GHOST IN FICTION.</h2>

-

-<p><span class="smcap">My</span> most ingenious friend met me one day, and asked me whether I

-considered I should be richer if I had the ghost of sixpence or if I had

-not the ghost of sixpence.</p>

-

-<p>“What side do you take?” I inquired, for I knew his disputatious turn.</p>

-

-<p>“I am ready to take either,” he answered; “but I give preference to the

-ghost.”</p>

-

-<p>“What!” I said. “Give preference to the ghost!”</p>

-

-<p>“Yes. You see, if I haven’t the ghost of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_2" id="page_2"></a>{2}</span> sixpence I have nothing at

-all; but if I have the ghost of a sixpence&mdash;&mdash;”</p>

-

-<p>“Well?”</p>

-

-<p>“Well, I am the richer by having the ghost of a sixpence.”</p>

-

-<p>“And do you think when you add one more delusion to those under which

-you already labour”&mdash;he and I could never agree about the difference

-between infinity and zero&mdash;“that you will be the better off?”</p>

-

-<p>“I have not admitted a ghost is a delusion; and even if I had I am not

-prepared to grant that a delusion may not be a source of wealth. Look at

-the South Sea Bubble.”</p>

-

-<p>I was willing, so there and then we fell to and were at the question&mdash;or

-rather, the questions to which it led&mdash;for hours, until we finally

-emerged upon the crystallization of cast-iron, the possibility of a

-Napoleonic restoration, or some other kindred matter. How we wandered

-about and writhed in that talk I can no more remember than I can recall

-the first articulate words that fell into my life. I know we handled

-ghosts (it was broad day and in a public street)<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_3" id="page_3"></a>{3}</span> with a freedom and

-familiarity that must have been painful to spirits of refinement and

-reserve. I know we said much about dreams, and compared the phantoms of

-the open lids with the phantoms of the closed eyes, and pitted them one

-against another like cocks in a main, and I remember that the case of

-the dreamer in Boswell’s Johnson came up between us. The case in Boswell

-submitted to Johnson as an argument in favour of a man’s reason being

-more acute in sleep than in waking, showed the phantom antagonistic able

-to floor the dreamer in his proper person. Johnson laughed at such a

-delusion, for, he pointed out, only the dreamer was besotted with sleep

-he would have perceived that he himself had furnished the confounding

-arguments to the shadowy disputant. That is very good, and seems quite

-conclusive as far as it goes; but is there nothing beyond what Johnson

-saw? Was there no ghostly prompter in the scene? No <i>suggeritore</i>

-invisible and inaudible to the dreamer, who put words and notes into the

-mouth of the opponent? No thinner shade than the spectral being visible

-in the dream? If in our waking<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_4" id="page_4"></a>{4}</span> hours we are subject to phantoms which

-sometimes can be seen and sometimes cannot, why not in our sleeping

-hours also? Are all ghosts of like grossness, or do some exist so fine

-as to be beyond our carnal apprehension, and within the ken only of the

-people of our sleep? If we ponderable mortals are haunted, who can say

-that our insubstantial midnight visitors may not know wraiths finer and

-subtler than we, may not be haunted as we are? In physical life

-parasites have parasites. Why in phantom life should not ghosts have

-ghosts?</p>

-

-<p>The firm, familiar earth&mdash;our earth of this time, the earth upon which

-we each of us stand at this moment&mdash;is thickly peopled with living

-tangible folk who can eat, and drink, and talk, and sing, and walk, and

-draw cheques, and perform a number of other useful, and hateful, and

-amusing actions. In the course of a day a man meets, let us say, forty

-people, with whom he exchanges speech. If a man is a busy dreamer, with

-how many people in the course of one night does he exchange speech? Ten,

-a hundred, a thousand? In the dreaming of one<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_5" id="page_5"></a>{5}</span> minute by the clock a man

-may converse with half the children of Adam since the Fall! The command

-of the greatest general alive would not furnish sentries and vedettes

-for the army of spirits that might visit one man in the interval between

-one beat of the pendulum of Big Ben and another!</p>

-

-<p>Shortly after that talk with my friend about the ghost of the sixpence,

-I was walking alone through one of the narrow lanes in the tangle of

-ways between Holborn and Fleet Street, when my eye was caught by the

-staring white word “Dreams” on a black ground. The word is, so to speak,

-printed in white on the black cover of a paper-bound book, and under the

-word “Dreams” are three faces, also printed in white on a black ground.

-Two of the faces are those of women: one of a young woman, purporting to

-be beautiful, with a star close to her forehead, and the other of a

-witch with the long hair and disordered eyes becoming to a person of her

-occupation. I dare say these two women are capable not only of

-justification, but of the simplest explanation. For all I know<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_6" id="page_6"></a>{6}</span> to the

-contrary, the composition may be taken wholly, or in part, from a

-well-known picture, or perhaps some canon of ghostly lore would be

-violated if any other design appeared on the cover. About such matters I

-know absolutely nothing. The word “Dreams” and the two female faces are

-now much less prominent than when I saw the book first, for, Goth that I

-am, long ago I dipped a brush in ink and ran a thin wash over the

-letters and the two faces; as they were, to use artist’s phrases, in

-front of the third face, and killing it.</p>

-

-<p>The third face is that of a man, a young man clean shaven and handsome,

-with no ghastliness or look of austerity. His arms are resting on a

-ledge, and extend from one side of the picture to the other. The left

-arm lies partly under the right, and the left hand is clenched softly

-and retired in half shadow. The right arm rises slightly as it crosses

-the picture, and the right wrist and hand ride on the left. The fore and

-middle fingers are apart, and point forward and a little downward,

-following the sleeve of the other arm. The third finger droops<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_7" id="page_7"></a>{7}</span> still

-more downward, and the little finger, with a ring on it, lies directly

-perpendicular along the cuff of the sleeve beneath. The hand is not well

-drawn, and yet there is some weird suggestiveness in the purposeless

-dispersion of the fingers.</p>

-

-<p>Fortunately upon my coming across the book, the original cost of which

-was one shilling, I had more than the ghost of a sixpence, and for

-two-thirds of that sum the book became mine. It is the only art purchase

-I ever made on the spur of the moment; I knew nothing of the book then,

-and know little of it now. It says it is the cut-down edition of a much

-larger work, and what I have read of it is foolish. The worst of the

-book is that it does not afford subject for a laugh. Thomas Carlyle is

-reported to have said in conversation respecting one of George Eliot’s

-latest stories that “it was not amusing, and it was not instructive; it

-was only dull&mdash;dull.” This book of dreams is only dull. However, there

-are some points in it that may be referred to, as this is an idle time.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_8" id="page_8"></a>{8}</span></p>

-

-<p>“To dream you see an angel or angels is very good, and to dream that you

-yourself are one is much better.” The noteworthy thing in connection

-with this passage being that nothing is said of the complexion of the

-angel or angels! Black or white it is all the same. You have only to

-dream of them and be happy. “To dream that you play upon bagpipes,

-signifies trouble, contention, and being overthrown at law.” Doubtless

-from the certainty, in civilised parts, of being prosecuted by your

-neighbours as a public nuisance. I would give a trifle to know a man who

-did dream that he played upon the bagpipes. Of course, it is quite

-possible he might be an amiable man in other ways.</p>

-

-<p>“To dream you have a beard long, thick, and unhandsome is of a good

-signification to an orator, or an ambassador, lawyer, philosopher or any

-who desires to speak well or to learn arts and sciences.” That

-“ambassador” gleams like a jewel among the other homely folk. I remember

-once seeing a newspaper contents-bill after a dreadful accident with the

-words<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_9" id="page_9"></a>{9}</span> “Death of fifty-seven people and a peer.” “To dream that you have

-a brow of brass, copper, marble, or iron signifies irreconcilable hatred

-against your enemies.” The man capable of such a dream I should like to

-see&mdash;but through bars of metal made from his own sleep-zoned forehead.

-“If any one dreams that he hath encountered a cat or killed one, he will

-commit a thief to prison and prosecute him to the death; for the cat

-signifies a common thief.” Mercy on us! Does the magistrate who commits

-usually prosecute, and is thieving a hanging matter now? This is

-necromancy or nothing; prophecy, inspiration, or something out of the

-common indeed.</p>

-

-<p>“To dream one plays or sees another play on a clavicord, shows the death

-of relations, or funeral obsequies.” I now say with feelings of the most

-profound gratitude that I never to my knowledge even saw a clavicord. I

-do not know what the beastly, ill-omened contrivance is like. The most

-recondite musical instrument I ever remember to have performed on is the

-Jew’s harp; and although there seems to be something<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_10" id="page_10"></a>{10}</span> weak, uncandid and

-treacherous in the spelling of “clavicord,” I presume the two are not

-identical. In any case I am safe, for I have never dreamed of playing

-even on the Jew’s harp. Here however is a cheerful promise from a

-painful experience&mdash;one wants something encouraging after that

-terrifying “clavicord.” “For a man to dream that his flesh is full of

-corns, shows that a man will grow rich proportionately to his corns.” I

-can breathe freely once more, having got away from outlandish musical

-instruments and within the influence of the familiar horn.</p>

-

-<p>As might be expected, it is not useful to dream about the devil. Let

-sleeping dogs lie. “To dream of eating human flesh” is also a bad way of

-spending the hours of darkness. It is lucky to dream you are a fool. You

-see, even in sleep, the virtue of candour brings reward. “To dream that

-you lose your keys signifies anger.” And very naturally too. “To dream

-you kill your father is a bad sign.” I had made up my mind not to go

-beyond the parricide, but I am lured on to quote this, “To dream of

-eating<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_11" id="page_11"></a>{11}</span> mallows, signifies exemption from trouble and dispatch of

-business, because this herb renders the body soluble.” I will not say

-that Nebuchadnezzar may not at one time have eaten mallows among other

-unusual herbs, but I never did. That however is not where the wonder

-creeps in. It is at the reason. If you eat mallows you will have no

-trouble <i>because</i> this herb renders the body <i>soluble</i>. Why is it good

-to render the body soluble, and what is the body soluble in? One more

-and I am done. “To dream one plays, or sees another play, upon the

-virginals, signifies the death of relations, or funeral obsequies.” From

-bagpipes, clavicords, and virginals, we hope we may be protected. And

-yet if these are the only instruments banned, a person having an

-extensive acquaintance with wind and string instruments of the orchestra

-may be musical in slumber without harm to himself or threat to his

-friends.</p>

-

-<p>In the interpretation of dreams Artemidorus was the most learned man

-that ever lived. He gave the best part of his life to collecting matter

-about dreams, and this he afterwards<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_12" id="page_12"></a>{12}</span> put together in five books. He

-might better have spent his time in bottling shadows of the moon.</p>

-

-<p>It was however for the face of the man on the cover that I bought and

-have kept the book. The face is that of a man between thirty and

-thirty-five years of age. It is regular and handsome. The forehead leans

-slightly forward, and the lower part of the face is therefore a little

-foreshortened. It is looking straight out of the picture; the shadows

-fall on the left of the face, on the right as it fronts you. The nose is

-as long and broad-backed as the nose of the Antinous. The mouth is large

-and firm and well-shaping with lips neither thick nor thin. The interval

-between the nostrils and verge of the upper lip is short. The chin is

-gently pointed and prominent. The outline of the jaws square. The

-modelling of the left cheek is defectively emphasised at the line from

-above the hollow of the nostrils downward and backward. The brows are

-straight, the left one being slightly more arched than the right. The

-forehead is low, broad, compact, hard, with<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_13" id="page_13"></a>{13}</span> clear lines. The lower line

-of the temples projects beyond the perpendicular. The hair is thick and

-wavy and divided at the left side, depressed rather than divided, for

-the parting is visible no further up the head than a splay letter V.</p>

-

-<p>The eyes are wide open, and notwithstanding the obtuse angle made by the

-facial line in the forward pose of the head, they are looking out level

-with their own height upon the horizon. There is no curiosity or

-speculation in the eyes. There is no wonder or doubt; no fear or joy.

-The gaze is heavy. There is a faint smile, the faintest smile the human

-face is capable of displaying, about the mouth. There is no light in the

-eyes. The expression of the whole face is infinitely removed from

-sinister. In it there is kindliness with a touch of wisdom and pity. It

-asks no question; desires to say no word. It is the face of one who

-beyond all doubt knows things we do not know, things which can scarcely

-be shaped into words, things we are in ignorance of. It is not the face

-of a charlatan, a seer, or a prophet.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_14" id="page_14"></a>{14}</span></p>

-

-<p>It is the face of a man once ardent and hopeful, to whom everything that

-is to be known has lately been revealed, and who has come away from the

-revelation with feelings of unassuageable regret and sorrow for Man. It

-says with terrible calmness, “I have seen all, and there is nothing in

-it. For your own sakes let me be mute. Live you your lives. <i>Miserere

-nobis!</i>”</p>

-

-<p>My belief is that the extraordinary expression of that face is an

-accident, a happy chance, a result that the artist never foresaw. Who

-drew the cover I cannot tell. No initials appear on it and I have never

-made inquiries. Remember that in pictures and poems (I know nothing of

-music), what is a miracle to you, has in most cases been a miracle to

-the painter or poet also. Any poet can explain how he makes a poem, but

-no poet can explain how he makes poetry. He is simply writing a poem and

-the poetry glides or rushes in. When it comes he is as much astonished

-by it as you are. The poem may cost him infinite trouble, the poetry he

-gets as a free gift. He begins a poem to prepare himself<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_15" id="page_15"></a>{15}</span> for the

-reception of poetry or to induce its flow. His poem is only a

-lightning-rod to attract a fluid over which he has no control before it

-comes to him. There may be a poetic art, such as verse-making, but to

-talk about the art of poetry is to talk nonsense. It is men of genteel

-intellects who speak of the art of poetry. The man who wrote the <i>Art of

-Poetry</i> knew better than to credit the possible existence of any such

-art. He himself says the poet is born, not made.</p>

-

-<p>I am very bad at dates, but I think Le Fanu wrote <i>Green Tea</i> before a

-whole community of Canadian nuns were thrown into the most horrible

-state of nervous misery by excessive indulgence in that drug. Of all the

-horrible tales that are not revolting, <i>Green Tea</i> is I think the most

-horrible. The bare statement that an estimable and pious man is haunted

-by the ghost of a monkey is at the first blush funny. But if you have

-not read the story read it, and see how little of fun is in it. The

-horror of the tale lies in the fact that this apparition of a monkey is

-the only <i>probable</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_16" id="page_16"></a>{16}</span> ghost in fiction. I have not the book by me as I

-write, and I cannot recall the victim’s name, but he is a clergyman,

-and, as far as we know to the contrary, a saint. There is no reason <i>on

-earth</i> why he should be pursued by this malignant spectre. He has

-committed no crime, no sin even. He labours with all the sincerity of a

-holy man to regain his health and exorcise his foe. He is as crimeless

-as you or I and infinitely more faultless. He has not deserved his fate,

-yet he is driven in the end to cut his throat, and you excuse <i>that</i>

-crime by saying he is mad.</p>

-

-<p>I do not think any additional force is gained in the course of this

-unique story by the importation of malignant irreverence to Christianity

-in the latter manifestations of the ape. I think the apparition is at

-its best and most terrible when it is simply an indifferent pagan,

-before it assumes the <i>rôle</i> of antichrist. This ape is at his best as a

-mind-destroyer when the clergyman, going down the avenue in the

-twilight, raised his eyes and finds the awful presence preceding him

-along the top of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_17" id="page_17"></a>{17}</span> wall. There the clergyman reaches the acme of

-piteous, unsupportable horror. In the pulpit with the brute, the priest

-is fighting against the devil. In the avenue he has not the

-strengthening or consoling reflection that he is defending a cause,

-struggling against hell. The instant motive enters into the story the

-situation ceases to be dramatic and becomes merely theatrical. Every

-“converted” tinker will tell you stirring stories of his wrestling with

-Satan, forgetting that it takes two to fight, and what a loathsome

-creature he himself is. But the conflict between a good man and the

-unnecessary apparition of this ape is pathetic, horribly pathetic, and

-full of the dramatic despair of the finest tragedy.</p>

-

-<p>It is desirable at this point to focus some scattered words that have

-been set down above. The reason this apparition of the ape appears

-probable is <i>because</i> it is unnecessary. Any one can understand why

-Macbeth should see that awful vision at the banquet. The apparition of

-the murdered dead is little more than was to be expected, and can be

-explained<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_18" id="page_18"></a>{18}</span> in an easy fashion. You or I never committed murder,

-therefore we are not liable to be troubled by the ghost of Banquo. In

-your life or mine Nemesis is not likely to take heroic dimensions. The

-spectres of books, as a rule, only excite our imaginative fears, not our

-personal terrors. The spectres of books have and can have nothing to do

-with us any more than the sufferings of the Israelites in the desert.

-When a person of our acquaintance dies, we inquire the particulars of

-his disease, and then discover the predisposing causes, so that we may

-prove to ourselves we are not in the same category with him. We do not

-deny our liability to contract the disease, we deny our likelihood to

-supply the predisposing causes. He died of aneurysm of the aorta: Ah, we

-say, induced by the violent exercise he took&mdash;we never take violent

-exercise. If not of aneurysm of the aorta, but fatty degeneration of the

-heart: Ah, induced by the sedentary habits of his latter years&mdash;we take

-care to secure plenty of exercise. If a man has been careful of his

-health and dies, we allege that he took all the robustness out of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_19" id="page_19"></a>{19}</span> his

-constitution by over-heedfulness; if he has been careless, we say he

-took no precautions at all; and from either of these extremes we are

-exempt, and therefore we shall live for ever.</p>

-

-<p>Now here in this story of <i>Green Tea</i> is a ghost which is possible,

-probable, almost familiar. It is a ghost without genesis or

-justification. The gods have nothing to do with it. Something, an

-accident due partly to excessive tea-drinking, has happened to the

-clergyman’s nerves, and the ghost of this ape glides into his life and

-sits down and abides with him. There is no reason why the ghost should

-be an ape. When the victim sees the apparition first he does not know it

-to be an ape. He is coming home in an omnibus one night and descries two

-gleaming spots of fire in the dark, and from that moment the life of the

-poor gentleman becomes a ruin. It is a thing that may happen to you or

-me any day, any hour. That is why Le Fanu’s ghost is so horrible. You

-and I might drink green tea to the end of our days and suffer from

-nothing more than ordinary impaired digestion. But you or I may get a

-fall, or a sunstroke, and ever afterwards<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_20" id="page_20"></a>{20}</span> have some hideous familiar.

-To say there can be no such things as ghosts is a paltry blasphemy. It

-is a theory of the smug, comfortable kind. A ghost need not wear a white

-sheet and have intelligible designs on personal property. A ghost need

-not be the spirit of a dead person. A ghost need have no moral mission

-whatever.</p>

-

-<p>I once met a haunted man, a man who had seen a real ghost; a ghost that

-had, as the ape, no ascertainable moral mission but to drive his victim

-mad. In this case too the victim was a clergyman. He is, I believe,

-alive and well now. He has shaken off the incubus and walks a free man.

-I was travelling at the time, and accidentally got into chat with him on

-the deck of a steamboat by night. We were quite alone in the darkness

-and far from land when he told me his extraordinary story. I do not of

-course intend retailing it here. I look on it as a private

-communication. I asked him what brought him to the mental plight in

-which he had found himself, and he answered briefly, “Overwork.” He was

-then convalescent, and had been assured by his physicians that with

-care<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_21" id="page_21"></a>{21}</span> the ghost which had been laid would appear no more. The spectre he

-saw threatened physical harm, and while he was haunted by it he went in

-constant dread of death by violence. It had nothing good or bad to do

-with his ordinary life or his sacred calling. It had no foundation on

-fact, no basis on justice. He had been for months pursued by the figure

-of a man threatening to take away his life. He did not believe this man

-had any corporeal existence. He did not know whether the creature had

-the power to kill him or not. The figure was there in the attitude of

-menace and would not be banished. He knew that no one but himself could

-see the murderous being. That ghost was there for him, and there for him

-alone.</p>

-

-<p>Respecting the Canadian nuns whose convent was beleaguered and infested

-by ghostly enemies that came not by ones or twos but in battalions, I

-had a fancy at the time. I do not intend using the terminologies or

-theories of the dissecting room, or the language of physiology found in

-books. I am not sure the fancy is wholly my own, but some of it is

-original.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_22" id="page_22"></a>{22}</span> I shall suppose that the nerves are not only capable of

-various conditions of health and disease, but of large structural

-alteration in life; structural alteration not yet recorded or observed

-in fact; structural alteration which, if you will, exists in life but

-disappears instantly at death. In fine, I mean rather to illustrate my

-fancy than to describe anything that exists or could exist. Before

-letting go the last strand of sense, let me say that talking of nerves

-being highly strung is sheer nonsense, and not good nonsense either. The

-muscles it is that are highly strung. The poor nerves are merely

-insulated wires from the battery in the head. Their tension is no more

-affected by the messages that go over them, than an Atlantic cable is

-tightened or loosened by the signals indicating fluctuations in the

-Stock Exchanges of London and New York.</p>

-

-<p>The nerves, let us suppose, in their normal condition of health have

-three skins over the absolute sentient tissue. In the ideal man in

-perfect health, let us say Hodge, the man whose privilege it is to “draw

-nutrition, propagate, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_23" id="page_23"></a>{23}</span> rot,” the three skins are always at their

-thickest and toughest. Now genius is a disease, and it falls, as ladies

-of Mrs. Gamp’s degree say, “on the nerves.” That is, the first of these

-skins having been worn away or never supplied by nature, the patient

-“sees visions and dreams dreams.” The man of genius is not exactly under

-delusions. He does not think he is in China because he is writing of

-Canton in London, but his optic nerve, wanting the outer coating, can

-build up images out of statistics until the images are as full of line

-and colour and as incapable of change at will as the image of a barrel

-of cider which occupies Hodge’s retina when it is imminent to his

-desires, present to his touch. The sensibility of the nerves of genius

-is greater than the sensibility of the nerves of Hodge. Not all the

-eloquence of an unabridged dictionary could create an image in Hodge’s

-mind of a thing he had never seen. From a brief description a painter of

-genius could make a picture&mdash;not a likeness of course&mdash;of Canton,

-although he had never been outside the four corners of these kingdoms.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_24" id="page_24"></a>{24}</span>

-The painting would not, in all likelihood, be in the least like Canton,

-but it would be very like the image formed in the painter’s mind of that

-city. In the painter such an image comes and goes at will. He can either

-see it or not see it as he pleases. It is the result of the brain

-reacting on the nerve. It relies on data and combination. It is his

-slave, not his master. Before it can be formed there must be great

-increase of sensibility. Hodge is crude silver, the painter is the

-polished mirror. The painter can see things which are not, things which

-he himself makes in his mind. His invention is at least as vivid as his

-memory.</p>

-

-<p>I suppose then that the man of genius, the painter or poet, is one who,

-having lost the first skin, or portion of the first skin of his nerves,

-can create and see in his mind’s eye things never seen by the eye of any

-other man, and see them as vividly as men of no genius can see objects

-of memory.</p>

-

-<p>Now peel off the second skin. The more exquisitely sensitive or the

-innermost skin of the nerve is exposed. Things which the eye of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_25" id="page_25"></a>{25}</span> genius

-could not invent or even dream of are revealed. A drop of putrid water

-under the microscope becomes a lake full of terrifying monsters large

-enough to destroy man. Heard through the microphone the sap ascending a

-tree becomes loud as a torrent. Seen through a telescope nebulous spots

-in the sky become clusters of constellations. Divested of its second

-skin the nerve becomes sensitive to influences too rare and fine for the

-perception of the optic nerve in a more protected state. Beings that

-bear no relation whatever to weight or the law of impenetrability, float

-about and flash hither and thither swifter than lightning. The air and

-other ponderable matter are nothing to them. They are no more than the

-shadows or reflections of action, the imperishable progeny of thought.

-Here lies disclosed to the partly emancipated nerve the Canton of the

-painter’s vision. Here the city he made to himself is as firm and sturdy

-and solid and full of life as the Canton of this day on the southern

-coast of China. Here throng the unrecorded visions of all the poets.

-Here are the counterfeits of all<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_26" id="page_26"></a>{26}</span> the dead in all their phases. Here

-float the dreams of men, the unbroken scrolls of life and action and

-thought complete of all beings, man and beast, that have lived since

-time began. In the world of matter nothing is lost; in the world of

-spirit nothing is lost either.</p>

-

-<p>If instead of taking the whole of this imaginary skin off the optic

-nerve, we simply injure it ever so slightly, the nerve may become alive

-to some of these spirits; and this premature perception of what is

-around all of us, but perceived by few, we call seeing ghosts. It may be

-objected that all space is not vast enough to afford room for such a

-stupendous panorama. When we begin to talk of limits of space to

-anything beyond our knowledge and the touch of our inch-tape, we talk

-like fools. There is no good in allotting space with a two-foot rule. It

-is all the same whether we divide zero into infinity or infinity into

-zero. The answer is the same; “I don’t know how many times it goes.”

-Take a cubic inch of air outside your window and see the things packed

-into it. Here interblent we find all together resistance and light and

-sound and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_27" id="page_27"></a>{27}</span> odour and flavour. We must stop there, for we have got to the

-end, not of what <i>is</i> packed into that cubic inch of air, but to the end

-of the things in it revealed to our senses. If we had five more senses

-we should find five more qualities; if we had five thousand senses, five

-thousand qualities. But even if we had only our own senses in higher

-form we should see ghosts.</p>

-

-<p>If the third skin were removed from the optic nerve all things we now

-call opaque would become transparent, owing to the naked nerve being

-sensitive to the latent light in every body. The whole round world would

-become a crystal ball, the different degrees of what we now call opacity

-being indicated merely by a faint chromatic modification. What we now

-regard as brilliant sunlight would then be dense shadow. Apocalyptic

-ranges of colour would be disclosed, beginning with what is in our

-present condition the least faint trace of tint and ascending through a

-thousand grades to white, white brighter far than the sun our present

-eyes blink upon. Burnished<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_28" id="page_28"></a>{28}</span> brass flaming in our present sun would then

-be the beginning of the chromatic scale descending in the shadow of

-yellow, burnished copper of red, burnished tin of black, burnished steel

-of blue. So intense then would the sensibility of the optic nerve become

-that the satellites attendant on the planets in the system of the suns,

-called fixed stars, would blaze brighter than our own moon reflected in

-the sea. To the eye matter would cease to be matter in its present,

-gross obstructive sense. It would be no more than a delicate transparent

-pigment in the wash of a water-colour artist. The gross rotundity of the

-earth would be, in the field of the human eye, a variegated transparent

-globe of reduced luminousness and enormous scales and chords of colour.

-The Milky Way would then be a concave measureless ocean of prismatic

-light with pendulous opaline spheres.</p>

-

-<p>The figures of dreams and ghosts may be as real as we are pleased to

-consider ourselves. What arrogance of us to say they are our own

-creation! They may look upon themselves as superior to us, as we look

-upon ourselves as<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_29" id="page_29"></a>{29}</span> superior to the jelly-fish. No doubt we are to ghosts

-the baser order, the spirits stained with the woad of earth, low

-creatures who give much heed to heat and cold, and food and motion. They

-are the sky-children, the chosen people. They are nothing but

-circumscribed will wedded to incorporeal reasons of the nobler kind, and

-with scopes the contemplation of which would split our tenement of clay.

-They are the arch-angelic hierarchs of man, the ultimate condition of

-the race, the spirit of this planet distilled by the sun.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_30" id="page_30"></a>{30}</span></p>

-

-<h2><a name="THE_BEST_TWO_BOOKS" id="THE_BEST_TWO_BOOKS"></a>THE BEST TWO BOOKS.</h2>

-

-<p><span class="smcap">In</span> no list I met of the best hundred books, when that craze took the

-place of spelling-bees and the fifteen puzzle, do I recollect seeing

-mention made of my two favourite works. These two books stand completely

-apart in my esteem, and if I were asked to name the volume that comes

-third, I should have to make a speech of explanation. The first of them

-is not in prose or verse, it is not a work of theology or philosophy or

-science or art or history or fiction or general literature. It is at

-once the most comprehensive and impartial book I know. This paragraph is

-assuming the aspect of a riddle. Being in a mild and passionless way a

-lover of my species, I am a loather of riddles. So I will go<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_31" id="page_31"></a>{31}</span> no further

-on the downward way, but declare the name, title, and style of my book

-to be Nuttall’s <i>Standard Dictionary</i>.</p>

-

-<p>I am well aware there is a great deal to be said against Nuttall’s

-<i>Dictionary</i> as a dictionary, but I am not speaking of it in that sense.

-I am treating it as a dear companion, a true friend, a <i>vade mecum</i>. Let

-those who have a liking for discovering spots in the sun glare at the

-orb until they have a taste for nothing else but spots in the sun. I

-find Nuttall so close to my affections that I can perceive no defects in

-him. I cannot bear to hold him at arm’s length, for critical

-examination. I hug him close to me, and feel that while I have him I am

-almost independent of all other books printed in the English language.</p>

-

-<p>Cast your eyes along your own bookshelves of English authors; every

-word, liberally speaking, that is in each and every volume on your

-shelves is in my Nuttall! Here is the juice of the language, from

-Shakespeare to Huxley, in a concentrated solution. Here is a book that

-starts by telling you that A is a vowel, and does not<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_32" id="page_32"></a>{32}</span> desert you until

-it informs you that zythum is a beverage, a liquor made from malt and

-wheat; a fact, I will wager, you never dreamed of before! And between A

-and zythum, what a boundless store of learning is disclosed! This is the

-only single-volume book I know of which no man living is or ever can be

-the master. Charles Lamb would not allow that dictionaries are books at

-all. In his days they were white-livered charlatans compared with the

-full-blooded enthusiast, Nuttall.</p>

-

-<p>If such an unkind thing were desirable as to diminish the conceit of a

-man of average reading and intelligence, there is no book could be used

-with such paralysing effect upon him as this one. It is almost

-impossible for any student to realise the infinite capacity for

-ignorance with which man is gifted until he is brought face to face with

-such a book as Nuttall. The list of words whose meanings are given

-occupies 771 very closely printed pages of small type in double column.

-The letter A takes up from 1 to 52. How many words unfamiliar to the

-ordinary man are to be found in this fifteenth part of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_33" id="page_33"></a>{33}</span> the dictionary!

-On the top of every folio there occur four words, one at the head of

-each column. Barring the right of the candidates in ignorance to guess

-from the roots how many well-informed people know or would use any of

-the following words&mdash;absciss, acidimeter, acroteleutic, adminicular,

-adminiculator, adustion, aerie, agrestic, allignment, allision,

-ambreine, ampulla, ampullaceous, android, antiphonary, antiphony,

-apanthropy, aponeurosis, appellor, aramaic, aretology, armilla,

-armillary, asiarch, assentation, asymptote, asymptotical, aurate,

-averruncator, aversant, axotomous, or axunge? And yet all these are at

-the heads of columns under A alone! Take, now, one column haphazard

-perpendicularly, and with the same reservation as before, who would use

-antimaniac, antimask, antimasonic, antimeter, antimonite, antinephritic,

-antinomian, antinomy, antipathous, antipedobaptist, antiperistaltic,

-antiperistasis, or antiphlogistic? The letter A taken along the top of

-the pages or down one column is not a good letter for the confusion of

-the conceited; because viewed across the top of the page it is pitifully

-the prey of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_34" id="page_34"></a>{34}</span> prefixes which lead to large families of words, and viewed

-down the column (honestly selected at haphazard), it is the bondslave of

-one prefix. When, however, one starts a theory, it is not fair to pick

-and choose. I have, of course, eschewed derivatives in coming down the

-column; across the column I did not do so, as the chance of a prime word

-being at the bottom of one column and its derivate at the top of the

-next ought to count two in my favour. I am aware this claim may be

-disputed; I have disputed it with myself at much too great length to

-record here, and I have decided in my own favour.</p>

-

-<p>Of course the mere reading of the dictionary in a mechanical way would

-produce no more effect than the repetition of numerals abstracted from

-things. There is no greater suggestiveness in saying a million than in

-saying one. But what an enlargement of the human capacity takes place

-when a person passes from the idea of one man to the idea of a million

-men. Take the first word quoted from the head of the column. I had

-wholly forgotten the meaning of absciss. I cannot even now remember<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_35" id="page_35"></a>{35}</span>

-that I ever knew the meaning of it, though of course I must, for I was

-supposed to have learned conic sections once. Why any one should be

-expected to learn conic sections I cannot guess. As far as I can now

-recall, they are the study of certain possible systems and schemes of

-lines in a wholly unnecessary figure. I believe the cone was invented by

-some one who had conic sections up his sleeve, and devised the miserable

-spinning of the triangle merely to gratify his lust of cruelty to the

-young. The only one use to which cones are put, as far as I am aware, is

-for a weather signal on the sea coast. The only section of a cone put to

-any pleasant use is a frustum when it appears in the bark of the cork

-tree; and even this conic section is not of much use to pleasure until

-it is removed from the bottle. Conic sections are reprehensible in

-another way. They are, in the matter of difficulty, nothing better than

-impostors. They are really “childlike and bland,” and will, when you

-have conquered your schoolboy terror of them, be found agreeable

-after-dinner reading.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_36" id="page_36"></a>{36}</span></p>

-

-<p>But I must return to Nuttall. The systematic study of the book is to be

-deplored. It is, like the Essays of Elia, not to be read through at a

-sitting, but to be dipped into curiously when one is in the vein. The

-charm of Lamb is in the flavour; and one cannot reach the more remote

-and finer joys of taste if one eats quickly. There is no cohesion, and

-but little thought in Nuttall. It is as a spur, an incentive, to thought

-I worship the book, and as a storehouse for elemental lore. You have

-known a thing all your life, let us say, and have called it by a

-makeshift name. You feel in your heart and soul there must be a more

-close-fitting appellation than you employ for it, and you endure a sense

-of feebleness and dispersion of mind. One day you are idly glancing

-through your Nuttall, and suddenly the clouds, the nebulous mists of a

-generalized term, roll away, and out shines, clear and sharply defined,

-the particular definition of the thing. From childhood I have, for

-example, known a pile-driver, and called it a pile-driver for years and

-years. All along something told me pile-driver<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_37" id="page_37"></a>{37}</span> was no better than a

-loose and off-hand way of describing the machine. It partook of the

-barbarous nature of a hieroglyphic. You drew, as it were, the figure of

-a post, and of a weight descending upon it. The device was much too

-pictorial and crude. Moreover, it was, so described, a thing without a

-history. To call a pile-driver a pile-driver is no more than to describe

-a barn-door cock onomatopoetically as cock-a-doodle-doo&mdash;a thing

-repellent to a pensive mind. But in looking over Nuttall I accidentally

-alighted on this: “Fistuca, fis’&mdash;tu-ka, <i>s.</i> A machine which is raised

-to a given height by pulleys, and then allowed suddenly to fall on the

-head of a pile; a monkey (L. a rammer).” Henceforth there is, in my

-mind, no need of a picture for the machine. So to speak, the abstract

-has become concrete. I would not, of course, dream of using the word

-fistuca, but it is a great source of internal consolation to me.

-Besides, I attain with it to other eminences of curiosity, which show me

-fields of inquiry I never dreamed of before.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_38" id="page_38"></a>{38}</span></p>

-

-<p>I have not met the word monkey in this sense until now. I look out

-monkey in my book, and find one of the meanings “a pile-driver,” and

-that the word is derived from the Italian “<i>monna</i>, contraction for

-<i>madonna</i>.” Up to this moment I did not know from what monkey was

-derived, although I had heard that from monkey man was derived. All this

-sets one off into a delicious doze of thought and keeps one carefully

-apart from his work. For “who would fardels bear to groan and sweat

-under a weary” load of even pens, when he might lie back and close his

-eyes, and drift off to the Rome of Augustus or the Venice of to-day?

-Philology as mere philology is colourless, but if one uses the records

-of verbal changes as glasses to the past and present, what panchromatic

-hues sweep into the pale field of the dictionary! What myriads of dead

-men stand up out of their graves, and move once more through scenes of

-their former activities! What reimpositions of old times on old earth

-take place! What bravery of arms and beauty of women are renewed; what

-glowing argosies, long mouldered,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_39" id="page_39"></a>{39}</span> sparkle once more in the sun! What

-brazen trumpets blare of conquest, and dust of battle roll along the

-plain! What plenitude of life, of movement, of man is revealed! A

-dictionary is to me the key-note in the orchestra where mankind sit

-tuning their reeds for the overture to the final cataclysm of the world.</p>

-

-<p>My second book would be Whitaker’s <i>Almanack</i>. Owing to miserable

-ill-luck I have not been able to get a copy of the almanac for this

-year. I offered fair round coin of the realm for it before the Jubilee

-plague of ugliness fell upon the broad pieces of her most gracious

-Majesty. But, alas! no copy was to be had. I was too late in the race.

-All the issue had been sold. The last edition of which I have a copy is

-that for 1886. I have one for each year of the ten preceding, and I

-cannot tell how crippled and humiliated I feel in being without one for

-1887.</p>

-

-<p>This is another of the books that Charles Lamb classes among the

-no-books. As in the case of Nuttall, there was no Whitaker in his<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_40" id="page_40"></a>{40}</span> day,

-and certainly no almanac at all as good. At first glance this book may

-seem dry and sapless as the elm ready sawn for conversion into parish

-coffins. But how can anything be considered dry or dead when two hundred

-thousand of its own brothers are at this moment dwelling in useful amity

-among our fellowmen? It in one way contrasts unfavourably with almanacs

-which can claim a longer life, there are no vaticinations in it. But if

-the gift of prophecy were possessed by other almanacs, why did they not

-foretell that they would be in the end known as humbugs, and cut their

-conceited throats? I freely own I am a bigot in this matter; I have

-never given any other almanac a fair chance, and, what is worse, I have

-firmly made up my mind not to give any other one any chance at all. What

-is the good of being loyal to one’s friends if one’s loyalty is at the

-beck of every upstart acquaintance, no matter how great his merits or

-how long his purse? I place my faith in Whitaker, and am ready to go to

-the stake (provided it is understood that nothing unpleasant takes place

-there)<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_41" id="page_41"></a>{41}</span> chaunting my belief and glorying in my doom.</p>

-

-<p>If you took away Whitaker’s <i>Almanack</i> from me I do not know how I

-should get on. It is a book for diurnal use and permanent reference. One

-edition of it ought to be printed on bank note paper for the pocket, and

-another on bronze for friezes for the temple of history. It is worth all

-the Livys and Tacituses that ever breathed and lied. It is more truthful

-than the sun, for that luminary is always eight minutes in advance of

-where it seems to be. It is as impartial and veracious as fossilising

-mud. It contains infinitely more figures than Madame Tussaud’s, and

-teaches of everything above and under the sun, from stellar influences

-to sewage.</p>

-

-<p>How is the daily paper to be understood lacking the aid of Whitaker? Who

-is the honourable member for Berborough, of whom the Chanceller of the

-Exchequer spoke in such sarcastic terms last night? For what place sits

-Mr. Snivel, who made that most edifying speech yesterday? How old is

-the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_42" id="page_42"></a>{42}</span> Earl of Champagne, who has been appointed Governor of Labuan? Where

-is Labuan? What is the value in English money of £T97,000, and 2,784,000

-roubles? What are the chances of a man of forty (yourself) living to be

-a hundred? and what is the chance of a woman of sixty-four (your

-mother-in-law) dying next year? How much may one deduct from one’s

-income with a view to income tax before one needs begin to lie? What

-annuity ought a man of your age be able to get for the five thousand

-pounds you expect on the death of your mother-in-law? How much will you

-have to pay to the state if you article your son to a solicitor or give

-him a little capital and start him in an honest business as a

-pawnbroker? How old is the judge that charged dead against the prisoner

-whom the jury acquitted without leaving the box? What railway company

-spends the most money in coal? legal charges? palm oil? Is there

-anything now worth a gentleman’s while to smuggle on his return from the

-Continent? What is the tonnage of the ironclad rammed yesterday morning

-by another ironclad<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_43" id="page_43"></a>{43}</span> of the Channel squadron? When may one begin to eat

-oysters? What was the most remarkable event last year? How much longer

-is it likely to pay to breed farmers in England?</p>

-

-<p>These are only a few, very few, of the queries Whitaker will answer

-cheerfully for you. Indeed, you can scarcely frame any questions to

-which it will not make a reply of some kind or other. It contains,

-moreover, either direct or indirect reference to every man in the United

-Kingdoms of Great Britain and Ireland. If you occupy a prominent

-official position in any walk in life, you will find yourself herein

-mentioned by name. If you are a simple and prudent trader, you will have

-your name and your goods described elaborately among the advertisements.

-If you come under neither of these heads you are sure to be included,

-not distinguished perhaps personally, under the statistics of the Insane

-or Criminal classes.</p>

-

-<p>All the information on the points indicated may be said to lie within

-the parochial domain of the book. But it has a larger, a universal

-scope, and takes into view all the civilized and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_44" id="page_44"></a>{44}</span> half civilized nations

-of all the earth. It contains multitudinous facts and figures about

-Abyssinia, Afghanistan, Annam, Argentine Republic, Austro-Hungary,

-Baluchistan, Belgium, Bokhara, Bolivia, Borneo, Brazil, Bulgaria,

-Eastern Roumelia, Burmah, Corea, Central America, Chili, China, Cochin

-China, Colombia, Congo State, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador,

-Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Hawaiian Islands, Hayti, Italy, Japan,

-Liberia, Madagascar, Mexico, Montenegro, Morocco, Nepal, Netherlands,

-Oman, Orange Free State, Paraguay, Persia, Peru, Portugal, Roumania,

-Russia, Sarawak, Servia, Siam, Sokoto, Spain, Sweden and Norway,

-Switzerland, Tibet, Transvaal, Tripoli, Tunis, Turkey, United States,

-Uruguay, Venezuela, and Zanzibar!</p>

-

-<p>The list takes away one’s breath. The mere recital of it leaves one

-faint and exhausted. Passing the most elementary knowledge of these

-nations and countries through the mind is like looking at a varying

-rainbow while the ears are solicited by a thousand tunes. The names, the

-mere names, of Mexico and Brazil stop my heart<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_45" id="page_45"></a>{45}</span> with amazement. The

-Aztecs and the Amazon call up such visions of man in decay and nature in

-naked strength that I pause like one in a gorgeous wood held in fear by

-its unfamiliarity. What has the Amazon done in the ages of its

-unlettered history? What did the Aztecs know before they began to revert

-to birds? Then Morocco and Tripoli, what memories and mysteries of man!

-And Sokoto&mdash;of which little is known but the name; and that man was here

-before England was dissevered from the mainland of Europe. Turkey, as it

-even now lies crippled and shorn, embraces within its stupendous arms

-the tombs of the greatest empire of antiquity. Only to think of China is

-to grow old beyond the reach of chroniclers. Compared with China,

-Turkey, India, and Russia, even Greece and Rome are mushroom states, and

-Germany and France virgin soil.</p>

-

-<p>But when I am in no humour for contemplation and alarms of eld I take up

-my Whitaker for 1886, and open it at page 285. There begins the most

-incredible romance<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_46" id="page_46"></a>{46}</span> ever written by man, and what increases its

-incredibility is that it happens to be all true.</p>

-

-<p>At page 285 opens an account of the British Empire. The first article is

-on India, and as one reads, taking in history and statistics with

-alternate breaths, the heart grows afraid to beat in the breast lest its

-motion and sound might dispel the enchantment and bring this “miracle of

-rare device” down about one’s head. The opening statement forbids

-further progress for a time. When one hears that “the British Empire in

-India extends over a territory as large as the continent of Europe

-without Russia,” it is necessary to pause and let the capacity of the

-mind enlarge in order to take in this stupendous fact with its

-stupendous significances.</p>

-

-<p>Here are 254 millions of people living under the flag of Britain! Here

-is a vast country of the East whose history goes back for a thousand

-years from this era, which knew Alexander the Great and was the scene of

-Tamerlane’s exploits, subject to the little island on the western verge

-of modern Europe. Here,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_47" id="page_47"></a>{47}</span> paraded in the directest and most prosaic

-fashion, are facts and figures that swell out the fancy almost

-intolerably. Here is one feudatory state, one dependent province, almost

-as populous as the whole empire over which Don Pedro II. reigns in South

-America. Here is a public revenue of eighty millions sterling a year,

-and Calcutta, including suburbs, with a population close upon a million.

-Here are no fewer than fifty-three towns and cities of more than fifty

-thousand people each. Here is a gross number of seven hundred and

-fourteen thousand towns and villages! Is not this one item incredible?

-Just three quarters of a million, not of people or even houses, but of

-“towns and villages!” The population of Madras alone is five-sixths of

-that of the United Kingdom, that of the North-West Provinces and Oudh

-considerably more, and that of Bengal nearly twice as much as England,

-Ireland, Scotland, and Wales together. The Native States have many more

-inhabitants than any country in Europe, except Russia. Bombay equals

-Spain. The Punjaub exceeds Turkey in Asia. Assam exceeds Turkey in<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_48" id="page_48"></a>{48}</span>

-Europe. The Central Provinces about equal Belgium and Holland together;

-British Burmah, Switzerland. Berar exceeds Denmark, and all taken

-together contain more than the combined populations of the United States

-of America, Austria, Germany, France, Turkey, Italy, Spain, Portugal,

-Holland, and Belgium! All ours absolutely, or in the feudatory leash;

-with more Mohammedans than are to be found in the Sultan’s dominions,

-and a larger revenue than is enjoyed by any country on earth except

-England, France, United States of America, Austria, and Russia!</p>

-

-<p>These are facts and figures enough to set one dreaming for a month. This

-is not an age for epic poetry. It is exceedingly unlikely any poet in

-the present age will seek the framework for his great work in the past.

-The past was all very well in its own day until it was found out.

-Certitudes in bygone centuries have been shaken. The present time is

-wildly volcanic. Now the hidden, throbbing, mad, fierce, upheaving fires

-bulge out the crust of earth under fabrics whilom regarded as

-indestructible, and split their<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_49" id="page_49"></a>{49}</span> walls, and warp their pillars, and

-choke their domes. It was a good thing for Milton and Dante they lived

-and wrote long ago, for the iconoclasts of to-day are trying to build a

-great wall across heaven and tear up the sacred pavement of hell. They

-tell us the Greek armies were a mob of disorderly and timid cits, and

-that speculations as to the reported dealings of Dr. Faustus with any

-folk but respectable druggists are too childish for the nursery or

-Kaffirs. The golden age is no longer the time that will never come

-again. The past is a fire that has burnt out, a flame that has vanished.

-To kneel before what has been is to worship impotent shadows. Up to this

-man has been wandering in the desert, and until now there have not been

-even trustworthy rumours of the land of promise. But to us has come a

-voice prophesying good things. The Canaan of the ages is in the future

-of time. Taking this age at its own estimate I have long thought the

-subject for the finest epic lying within possibility in our era is the

-building of the railway to India. Into a history of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_50" id="page_50"></a>{50}</span> that undertaking

-would flow all the affluents of the ancient world. The stories of

-Baalbec and Nineveh that are finished, and of Aleppo and Damascus that

-survive, would fall into this prodigious tale of peaceful conquest. The

-line would have for marge Assyria on one hand, Egypt on the other; it

-would reach from the land of the Buddhist through the land of the

-Mohammedan to the land of the Christian. It would be a work undertaken

-in honour of the modern god, Progress, through the graves of the oldest

-peoples, to link the three great forms of faith. All the action of the

-epic would take place on earth, and all the actors would be men. There

-would be no need for evolving the god from the machine, for the machine

-itself would be the god. It would be the history of man from his birth

-till this hour. It would be most fitly written in English, for English

-is the most capacious and virile language yet invented by man.</p>

-

-<p>But a mere mortal, such as I, cannot stay in India always, or even abide

-for ever by the way. Although I have <i>Whitaker’s Almanack</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_51" id="page_51"></a>{51}</span> before me

-all the time, I have strayed a little from it. In thinking of the lands

-through which that heroic line of railway would pass, I have almost

-forgotten the modest volume at my elbow. Yet fragile as it looks, one

-volume similar to it will last as long as the Pyramids, will come in

-time to be as old as the oldest memory is now; that is, if the ruins of

-England endure as long as those of Egypt, for a copy of it lies built up

-under Cleopatra’s Needle.</p>

-

-<p>I turn over the last page of “British India” in my <i>Almanack</i>. We are

-not yet done with orient lands and seas. The article over-leaf is headed

-“Other British Possessions in the East.” Here, if one wants incitement

-towards prose or verse, dreaming or doing, commerce or pillage, is

-matter to his hand. The places one may read of are&mdash;Aden, Socotra,

-Ceylon, Hong-Kong, Labuan, British North Borneo, and Cyprus. Then in my

-book comes “The Dominion of Canada,” with its territory “about as large

-as Europe”! and a revenue equal to Portugal, which discovered<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_52" id="page_52"></a>{52}</span> and once

-held India. After Canada come “Other American Possessions,” including

-British Guiana, which, except for the sugar of Demerara, is little heard

-of; it occupies a space of earth as large as all Great Britain. So

-little do people of inferior education know of this dependency, that

-once, when a speaker in the House of Commons spoke of the “island of

-Demerara,” there was not a single member present who knew that Demerara

-was not an island, but part of the mainland of South America. Last in

-the list comes British Honduras, about as big as Wales.</p>

-

-<p>After America, we have our enormous outlying farm in the southern

-hemisphere, “British Possessions in Australasia.” There the land owned

-by England is again about the size of Europe! Then follow “British

-Possessions in the West Indies,” small in mileage, great in fertility

-and richness of produce, and with a population twice that of Eastern

-Roumelia. The “British Possessions in Africa” are considerably larger

-than France, with about half as many inhabitants as Denmark. The

-territories owned in<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_53" id="page_53"></a>{53}</span> the Southern Atlantic are Ascension, the Falkland

-Islands, South Georgia, and St. Helena. This prodigious list ends with

-the European Possessions, namely, Malta, Gibraltar, Heligoland, the

-Channel Islands, and Isle of Man.</p>

-

-<p>By this time the hand is tired writing down the mere names of the riches

-belonging to Great Britain. Towards the close of my list from Whitaker

-my energy drooped, and a feeling of enervating satiety came upon me. I

-am surfeited with splendours, and, like a tiger filled with flesh, I

-must sleep. But in that sleep what dreams may come! How the imagination

-expands and aspires under the stimulus of a page of tabulated figures!

-How the fancy is excited, provoked, by the spectacle of an endless sea

-in which every quarter of the globe affords a bower for Britannia when

-it pleases her aquatic highness to adventure abroad upon the deep, into

-the farthest realms of the morning, into the regions of the dropping

-sun. Here, in my best two books, are the words of the most copious

-language that man ever spoke, and the facts and figures of the greatest

-realm over<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_54" id="page_54"></a>{54}</span> which man ever ruled. <i>Civis Romanus sum!</i> I will sleep. I

-will dream that I am alone with my two books. I will speak in this

-imperial, this dominant dialect, as I move by sea and land among the

-peoples who live under the flag flying above me now. Who would encumber

-himself with finite poetry or romance when he may take with him the

-uncombined vocabulary, with its infinite possibilities of affinities,

-and the history of the countries and the peoples that lie beneath this

-flag, and bear in his heart the astounding and exalting

-consciousness&mdash;<i>Civis Romanus sum!</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_55" id="page_55"></a>{55}</span></p>

-

-<h2><a name="LIES_OF_FABLE_AND_ALLEGORY" id="LIES_OF_FABLE_AND_ALLEGORY"></a>LIES OF FABLE AND ALLEGORY.</h2>

-

-<p><span class="smcap">Some</span> little while ago the battered and shattered remains of an old

-bookcase with the sedimentary deposit of my own books, reached me after

-a journey of many hundred miles from its former resting place. The front

-of the bookcase is twisted wirework, which, when I remember it first,

-was lined with pink silk. Not a vestige, not a shred of the silk remains

-and the half dozen shelves now depend for preservation in position on a

-frame as crazy as Her Majesty’s ship <i>Victory</i>, and certainly older. The

-bookcase had belonged to my grandfather before Trafalgar, and some of

-the books I found in it among the sediment were printed before the Great

-Fire of London. In all there were about a couple or three hundred books,

-none<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_56" id="page_56"></a>{56}</span> of which would be highly valued by a bibliophile. Owing to my

-being in a very modest way a wanderer on the face of the realm, these

-books had been out of my possession for nearly twenty years, and dusty

-and dilapidated as they were when they reached me I took them in my arms

-as long-lost friends. I had finished the last sentence with the word

-children, but that would not do for two reasons. These books were not

-mine as this one I am now writing is, and long-lost children change more

-than they have changed, or more than friends change. Children grow and

-outpace us and leave us behind and are not so full of companionable

-memories as friends. There is hardly time to make friends of our adult

-children before we are beckoned away. The friends we make and keep when

-we are young have always twenty years’ start of our children in

-friendship. A man may be friendly with his son of five but a father and

-son cannot be full friends until the son is twenty years older.</p>

-

-<p>Again, as to the impropriety of speaking of the books as long-lost

-children I have<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_57" id="page_57"></a>{57}</span> another scruple. I am in great doubt as to whether the

-recovery of a long-lost child is at all desirable. A long-lost child

-means a young girl or boy of our own who is lost when under ten years of

-age and recovered years afterwards. I do not know that the recovery of

-the missing one is a cause of gratitude. Remember it is not at all the

-child we lost. It is a child alleged or alleging itself to be the child

-we lost. It is more correctly not a child at all, but a lad or lass whom

-we knew when young, and whose acquaintance we have to make over again.

-Our personality has become dim to it, and we have to occupy ourselves

-seriously in trying to identify the unwieldy bulk of the stranger with

-our memory of the wanderer. When the boy went from us we mourned for him

-as dead, and now he comes back to us from the tomb altered all out of

-memory. He is not wholly our child. There is an interregnum in our reign

-over him and we do not know what manner of king has held sway in our

-stead, or, if knowing the usurper, we cannot measure the extent or force

-of his<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_58" id="page_58"></a>{58}</span> influence. How much of this young person is really our very own?

-how much the development of untoward fate? Is the memory of our lost one

-dearer than the presence of this lad who is half stranger? What we lost

-and mourned was ours surely; how much of what we have regained belongs

-to us?</p>

-

-<p>With books no such question arises. They are our very own. They have

-suffered no increment, but rather loss. What we remember of them and

-find again in them fills us with joy; what we have forgotten and recall

-excites a surprise which makes us feel rich. We reproach ourselves with

-not having loved them sufficiently well, and swear upon them to endow

-them with warmer affection henceforth. In turning over the books in the

-old case I lighted upon one which I believe to be the volume that came

-earliest into my possession. It is Cobbett’s <i>Spelling-Book</i>, and by the

-writing on the title page I see it was given to me by my father on the

-second of February, 1854. It is in a very battered and tattered

-condition. I find a youthful autograph of my own on the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_59" id="page_59"></a>{59}</span> fly-leaf, the

-Christian name occupying one line, the surname the second; on a third

-line is the name of the town, and on a fourth the number of the street

-and part of the name of the street, the last being, I blush to say,

-ill-spelt. Surely there never was a book hated as I hated this one! At

-that time I had declared my unalterable determination of never learning

-to read. I possessed, until recently, a copy of Valpy’s Latin Grammar of

-about the same date, and I remember I worshipped the Latin Grammar

-compared with the Spelling-Book. I knew <i>rosa</i> before I could read words

-of two syllables, and at this moment I do not know much more Latin than

-I did then. The Spelling-Book was published by Anne Cobbett, at 137,

-Strand, in 1849. It is almost incredible that so short a time ago the

-atrocious woodcuts could be got in England for love or money. There is

-no attempt whatever at overlaying in the printing; the cut pages are all

-what are called “flat pulls.” Here and there through the pages of

-chilling columns of words of one, two, three or more syllables are

-pencil marks<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_60" id="page_60"></a>{60}</span> indicating the limits of a day’s lesson. What a ruthless

-way they had with us children in those days! When I look at those

-appalling columns of arid words I applaud my childish determination of

-never learning to read if the art were to be acquired only by traversing

-those fearful deserts of unintelligible verbiage. Fancy a child of

-tender years confronted with antitrinitarian, consubstantiality,

-discontinuation, excommunication, extraordinarily, immateriality,

-impenetrability, indivisibility, naturalization, plenipotentiary,

-recapitulation, supererogation, transubstantiation, valetudinarian, and

-volatilization, not one of which is as difficult to spell as one quarter

-the words of one syllable, and not one of which could be understood by a

-child or would be used by a single man out of a thousand in all his

-life. The country had penal settlements then, why in the name of mercy

-did they not send children to the settlements and give them a chance to

-keep their reason and become useful citizens when their time of

-punishment had expired? I am happy to say I find no pencil marks among<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_61" id="page_61"></a>{61}</span>

-those leviathan words above. I suppose I never got into the deep waters

-where they “wallowing unwieldy in their gait tempest the ocean.”</p>

-

-<p>I wonder was the foundation of a lifelong dislike to Cobbett’s writings

-laid in me at that early time of my existence? Anyway I do not remember

-the day when I did not dislike everything I read of Cobbett’s, and I

-dislike everything of his I read now. I wonder, also, was it at that

-early date the seed of my hatred of fable or allegory was sown? To me

-the fables in the back of that Spelling-Book were always odious, now

-they are loathsome. With the cold-blooded “morals” attendant upon them

-they are the worst form of literary torture I know. I am aware that the

-bulk of them are not original, but Cobbett inserted them in his book,

-and I give him full credit for evil intention. Yet in later years it was

-not his taste for fable that repelled me but his intense combativeness.

-He is never comfortable unless he is mangling some one. It was a pity he

-ever left the army. He would have been a credit to his corps at close

-quarters with a clubbed musket. Even in<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_62" id="page_62"></a>{62}</span> the Spelling-Book, intended for

-young children, his “Stepping-Stone to Cobbett’s English Grammar” takes

-the form of a dialogue, in which he, the “Teacher,” smashes the

-unfortunate Scholar and Mr. William. Cobbett sprang from the people and

-was a Saxon pure and simple, and the Saxon is the element in the English

-people which has been most undistinguished when unmingled with other

-blood. The Saxon of fifteen hundred years ago is the yokel of to-day,

-and he never was more than a yokel intellectually. The enormous

-intellectual fertility of England is owing to successive invasions, and

-chiefly to the Norman Conquest. All the great and noble and sweet faces

-in English history are Norman, or largely Norman. The awful faces of the

-Gibbon type make periods of English history like a night spectral with

-evil dreams.</p>

-

-<p>Does any one past the condition of childhood really like fables? Mind, I

-do not say past the years of childhood. But does any one of fully mature

-intellect like fables or pleasantly endure allegories? I think not. In

-the vigour of all lives there must be <i>lacunæ</i> of intense indolence,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_63" id="page_63"></a>{63}</span>

-backwaters of the mind, where one is willing to float effortless and

-take the things that come as though they were good things rather than

-work at the oars in pursuit of novelties. At such times it is easier to

-persuade ourselves we are amused by books that we admired when we lacked

-experience and discernment than to break new ground and encounter fresh

-obstacles. I am leaving out of account the dull worthy people who say

-they like a book because other people say they like it. These good

-people live in a continual state of self-justification. They are much

-more serenely secure in what they imagine to be their opinions than

-those travailing souls that really have opinions of their own. Their

-life is easy, and in lazy moments one sighs for the repose they enjoy.

-But do not the people with active minds often adhere to childish likings

-merely from indolence? A certain question they settled in their own

-minds when they were ten; it is too much trouble to treat it as an open

-matter at thirty. Consistency in a politician is invariably a sign of

-stupidity, because no man (outside fundamental questions<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_64" id="page_64"></a>{64}</span> of morals) can

-with credit to his sense remain stationary in opinion for thirty years

-where all is change. The very data on which he based an opinion in the

-year one are vapourized in the year thirty. The foundation of all

-political theories is first principles of some kind, and the only

-support a philosophic mind rejects with disdain is a first principle of

-any kind. Now, the fables we tolerate, nay, admire as children, are in

-imaginative literature what first principles are in that branch of

-imaginary philanthropy called politics. It is much easier to say every

-man has a right to eight shillings a day than to find out what each

-particular man has a right to, or if man has a right to anything at all.

-It is much easier to say one does like Fontaine than at thirty years of

-age to acquire a disgust of him and his fables.</p>

-

-<p>The lying insincerity of fables and their morals always shocks me, and

-the gross blindness of the fabulist to any view of transactions but that

-adopted by him to point his precept, fills me with contempt for him as

-an artist.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_65" id="page_65"></a>{65}</span> In the Spelling-Book I do not feel myself at liberty to

-select the fables as I choose. I will take only one, the first that

-comes. It is about the swallow and the sparrow. It is a very bad

-specimen for my contention, but as I am the challenger I have not the

-choice of weapons, and I accept the first presented by Cobbett.</p>

-

-<p>A swallow coming back to her old nest in the spring finds it occupied by

-a sparrow and his brood of young ones. The swallow demands possession on

-the grounds of having built the nest and brought up three broods in it.

-The sparrow will not budge. The swallow summons a number of swallows,

-and they wall up the sparrow and he and his brood die of hunger.</p>

-

-<p>The first notice of bias the reader gets is that the swallow is called

-she, and the sparrow he. Why? For the dishonest purpose of enlisting

-sympathy with the swallow. There is no evidence or statement the sparrow

-was aware when taking possession of the nest that it would be reclaimed

-by the swallow. How was the sparrow to know that the swallow was not

-dead and buried by the mole? The nest was<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_66" id="page_66"></a>{66}</span> derelict. Again, when the

-swallow returned the sparrow had young ones, which it would be dangerous

-to remove from the nest. How was the sparrow to know the swallow was

-telling the truth, and that the nest was hers? Then, even supposing the

-sparrow to be all in the wrong, the punishment was out of all proportion

-to the offence. The sparrow had done no harm beyond intruding. He had

-not injured the furniture, or burned any of the swallow’s gas, or broken

-into the wine-cellar. Justice would have been vindicated by the

-expulsion of the intruder and his brood. But what takes place instead?

-The door is built up, and the sparrow with his innocent young is

-murdered! Surely if this is a fruitful fable, the moral is immoral. This

-is the old Mosaic theory of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,

-and a little, or rather a great deal more. It is hideously un-Christian.

-I believe Cobbett professed Christianity. Why did he put this odious

-vengeful story in the forefront of his exemplars of righteous doing?<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_67" id="page_67"></a>{67}</span></p>

-

-<p>But the worst part of the story is in the Moral. “Thus it always is with

-the unjust,” says the Chorus of the fabulist. He means that the unjust

-are always nailed up in their houses with their blameless children and

-starved to death. Now neither Cobbett nor any other sane preacher

-believes anything of the kind. This is a lie, pure and simple; a lie no

-doubt told with a good object, but a lie all the same. Cobbett had too

-much common-sense not to know that it is not always “thus” with the

-“unjust.” As a rule, the unjust go scot free when they stop short of

-crime. The people who say otherwise are yielding to a feminine,

-sentimental weakness. Poetic justice no doubt does exist&mdash;in poetry.

-Most men are as unjust as they dare be, and most men get on comfortably

-from their cradles to their graves. It is only the fools, the men of

-ungovernable passions and impulses and the blunderers who suffer. Man is

-at heart a rapacious brute. All his centuries of civilization have not

-quelled the predatory spirit in him. Any man will become a thief if he

-only be sufficiently tempted when he is sufficiently<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_68" id="page_68"></a>{68}</span> desperate. The

-crime of the sparrow in appropriating the swallow’s nest is

-intelligible, the crime of the swallow in murdering the sparrow and his

-brood is intelligible, the crime of lying committed by the moralist is

-abominable. When the child to whom Cobbett lied grows up, he will know

-the lie, despise the liar, and have nothing left of the precious fable

-but a shaken faith in the words of all men, whether they be liars like

-Cobbett and the other moralists, or truth-tellers like the ordinary

-everyday folk, who do not pose as teachers and latter-day prophets. It

-is very improving to reflect on the freedom these teachers give

-themselves in act when enforcing their theories in writing. In order

-that Cobbett might exemplify his principles against the credit system,

-he signed his name across the face of acceptances for seventy thousand

-pounds!</p>

-

-<p>Cobbett’s Grammar was written for sailors and soldiers and such men. I

-gave the only copy of it I ever had to a sailor who had abandoned living

-on the sea to live by the sea, who had<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_69" id="page_69"></a>{69}</span> eschewed the paint-pot and the

-stage aboard the merchant service for the palette and stool of the

-studio. It is years since I have seen the book, but I remember the

-contemptuous way in which the ex-soldier disposes of prosody. He says to

-his pupil in effect: You need pay no attention to this branch of

-grammar, as it deals only with the <i>noise</i> made by words. Cobbett’s

-treatment of prosody does not occupy more than one line or one line and

-a half of print. It is briefer than Dr. Johnson’s Syntax:</p>

-

-<div class="blockquot"><p>“The established practice of grammarians requires that I should

-here treat of the Syntax; but our language has so little inflexion,

-or variety of terminations, that its construction neither requires

-nor admits many rules. Wallis, therefore, has totally neglected it;

-and Jonson, whose desire of following the writers upon the learned

-languages made him think a syntax indispensably necessary, has

-published such petty observations as were better omitted.</p>

-

-<p>“The verb, as in other languages, agrees with the nominative in

-number and person; as <i>Thou fliest from good; He runs to death</i>.</p>

-

-<p>“Our adjectives are invariable.</p>

-

-<p>“Of two substantives the noun possessive is the genitive; as <i>His

-father’s glory; the sun’s heat</i>.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_70" id="page_70"></a>{70}</span></p>

-

-<p>“Verbs transitive require an oblique case; as <i>He loves me; You

-fear him</i>.</p>

-

-<p>“All prepositions require an oblique case: <i>He gave this to me; He

-took this from me; He says this of me; He came with me</i>.”</p></div>

-

-<p>That is all the merciful Dr. Samuel Johnson has to say about syntax. Oh,

-Lindley Murray! Oh, memories of youth! Does it seem possible that

-Johnson could have enjoyed the luxury of speaking in this light and airy

-and debonair way of English grammar in his day, and that Lindley Murray

-could have matured his awful Grammar in so few years afterwards?

-Recollect there were not forty years between the lexicographer and the

-grammarian. Could not Lindley Murray have left the unfortunate English

-language alone? Johnson says no one need bother about syntax, and

-Cobbett says no one need bother about prosody. Thus we have only

-orthography and etymology to look after, when in comes Murray and spoils

-all! It is doubtful if the language will ever recover the interference

-of that Yankee merchant who invented syntax and made the life of dull

-school boys and girls a path of thorns and agony.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_71" id="page_71"></a>{71}</span></p>

-

-<p>An allegory is a fable for fools of larger growth. I am writing in an

-off-hand way, and I will not pause to examine the question nicely; but

-is there any such thing as a successful allegory? I have no experience

-of one. I seem to hear a loud shout of “<i>The Pilgrim’s Progress</i>.” Well,

-I never could read the book through, and I have tried at least twenty

-times. I have put the reading of that book before myself in the most

-solemn manner. I have told myself over and over again that I ought to

-read it as an educational exercise. In vain. How any man with

-imagination can bear the book I do not know. Bunyan had inexhaustible

-invention, but no imagination. He saw a reason for things, not the

-things themselves. No creation of the imagination can lack consequence

-or verisimilitude. On almost every page of the <i>Progress</i> there is

-violation of sequence, outrage against verisimilitude. Christian has a

-great burden on his back and is in rags. He cannot remove the burden.

-(Why?) He is put to bed (with the burden on his back), then he is

-troubled in his mind (the burden is forgotten, and the vision altered

-completely and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_72" id="page_72"></a>{72}</span> fatally); again we are reminded that he has the burden

-on his back when he tells Evangelist of it. Why can he not loose the

-burden on his back? How is it secured so that he cannot remove it? He

-cannot see a wicket gate across a very wide field, but he sees a shining

-light (where?), and then he begins to run (burden and all) away from his

-wife and children (which is immoral and abhorrent to the laws of God and

-man). For the mere selfish ease of his body he deserts his wife and

-children, who must be left miserably poor, for is he not in rags? The

-neighbours come out and mock at him for running across a field. Why? How

-do they know why he runs, and what neighbours are there to come out and

-mock at one when one is running across a large field? The Slough of

-Despond is in this field (for he has not passed through the wicket

-gate), and he does not seem to know of the Slough, or think of avoiding

-it. Fancy any man not knowing of such a filthy hole within a field of

-his home! How is it that Pliable and Obstinate have no burdens on their

-backs? It is not the will of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_73" id="page_73"></a>{73}</span> the King that the Slough should be

-dangerous to wayfarers: this surely is blasphemy. The whole thing is

-grotesquely absurd and impossible to imagine. There is no sobriety in

-it, no sobriety of keeping in it; and no matter how wild the effort or

-vision of imagination may be there must always be sobriety of keeping in

-it or it is delirium not imagination, disease not inspiration. As far as

-I can see there is no trace of imagination, or even fancy, in the

-<i>Pilgrim’s Progress</i>. The story never happened at all. It is a horrible

-attempt to tinkerise the Bible.</p>

-

-<p>One of the things I cannot understand about Macaulay is that he stands

-by Bunyan’s silly book. Macaulay was a man of vast reading and

-acquirements and of common-sense tastes. He was not a poet, but he was

-very nearly one, and ought to have responded in sympathy with poets. In

-politics he belonged to that most melancholy of all sects, the Whigs,

-and it may be that the spirit of political compromise to which he had

-familiarised himself in public life had slipped unknown to him into his

-literary<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_74" id="page_74"></a>{74}</span> briefs. Anyway, he himself says that the <i>Pilgrim’s Progress</i>

-is the only book which was promoted from the kitchen to the

-drawing-room. There is no difficulty in accounting for the fact that the

-book was popular among scullions and cooks, but how it ever gained

-currency among people of moderate education and taste cannot be

-explained. It is the most dull and tedious and monstrous book of any

-note in the English language, and how any man with a gleam of

-imagination can like it is more than I can understand. If one has been

-familiar with it when young, one may tolerate it on the score of

-tenderness&mdash;tenderness for memories and laziness in new enterprises; but

-I never yet knew any one with even fancy who, meeting it for the first

-time after the dawn of adolescence, could even endure it.</p>

-

-<p>It is like celebrating one’s own apotheosis to drop Bunyan and take up

-Spenser. Here we share the air with an immortal god and not a bilious

-enthusiast. When I have laid aside the <i>Spelling-Book</i> and the

-<i>Pilgrim’s Progress</i>, and opened the <i>Faerie Queen</i>, I feel as though

-the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_75" id="page_75"></a>{75}</span> leaden clouds of the north had rolled away, disclosing the blue of

-Ægean skies; as though for squalid porridge and buttermilk had been

-substituted ambrosia and nectar; as though for fallow and stubble had

-drifted under my feet soft meadow-grass dense with flowers; as though

-the moist and clayey crags had changed into purple hills, the

-green-mantled pools to azure lakes, the narrow waters of a stagnant mere

-to the free imperial waves and tides of the ocean. It is better than

-escaping out of an East-end slum into the green lanes and roads of

-Warwickshire.</p>

-

-<p>And yet, melancholy truth! the <i>Faerie Queen</i> is most unpopular and most

-unreadable. It has with justice, I think, been said that of ten thousand

-people who begin the <i>Faerie Queen</i>, not ten read half way through it,

-and only one arrives at the end. I find by a mark in my copy that I have

-got a good deal more than half through it, but that I have not reached

-the last line of this most colossal fragment of a poem. What a mercy the

-rest of it was drowned in the Irish sea! My <i>Faerie Queen</i> occupies<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_76" id="page_76"></a>{76}</span> 792

-pages of five stanzas to the page; that is, between thirty-five and

-thirty-six thousand verses, two hundred and sixty to seventy thousand

-words, or equal in length to a couple of ordinary three-volume novels!

-And still it is <i>unperfite</i>! I find that although I have owned the book

-for twenty years, I have got no further than page 472, so that I have

-read only three-fifths of the fragment of this stupendous poem.</p>

-

-<p>It is not the length alone that defeats the reader. In all the field of

-English verse there is no poem of great length that comes upon the mind

-with more full and easy flow. The stanza after a long while becomes, no

-doubt, monotonous, but it is the monotony of a vast and freightful river

-that moves majestically, bearing interminable argosies of infinite

-beauty and variety and significance. After one hundred pages one might

-put down the book, wearied by the melodious monotony of the imperial

-chords. I have never been able to read anything like a hundred, anything

-like fifty pages at a time. I think I have rarely exceeded as many

-stanzas. Spenser is the poets’ poet, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_77" id="page_77"></a>{77}</span> the <i>Faerie Queen</i> the poets’

-poem, and yet even the poets cannot read it freely and fully, as one

-reads Milton or Shakespeare or Shelley or Keats or the readable parts of

-Coleridge, all of whom are poets’ poets also.</p>

-

-<p>The allegory bars the way. One reads on smoothly and joyously about a

-wood or a nymph, or a knight or a lady, or a castle or a dragon, and is

-half drunk on the wealthy poet’s mead (is not Spenser the wealthiest of

-English poets?), when suddenly Dan Allegory comes along and assures you

-that it is not a wood or a nymph, or a knight or lady, or a castle or

-dragon, but a virtue or a vice posing in property clothes; that in fact

-things are not what they seem, but visions are about. Cobbett intended

-his fables for little children, and Bunyan his allegory for the company

-of the stewpans, but Spenser’s story is for the ears of ladies and of

-knights; why then does he try to spoon-feed them with virtuous

-sentiment? There is not, as far as I know, a trace of dyspepsia in all

-the <i>Faerie Queen</i>, and yet he has sicklied it over “with the pale cast

-of thought.” In this Vale of Tears<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_78" id="page_78"></a>{78}</span> there are quite as many virtuous

-persons as any reasonable man can desire. Why should our poets&mdash;those

-rare and exquisite manifestations of our possibilities&mdash;turn themselves

-into moralists, who are, bless you, as common as grocers, as plentiful

-as mediocrity. In fact, nine-tenths of the civilised race of man are

-moralists. But poets ought not to be theorists. They are not sent to us

-for the purpose of converting us, but for the purpose of delighting us.

-They ought to be catholic and pagan. They are among the settled property

-of joy to which all mankind are heirs. They come in among the flowers

-and colours of the sky and earth, and the vocal rapture of the birds,

-and the perfumes of the breeze, and the love of woman and children and

-friends and kind. They are sent to us for our mere delight. They never

-grow less or fade away or change. They have nothing to do with dynasties

-or creeds or codes of manners. They are apart from all bias and strife.

-The will of Heaven itself is against poets preaching, for no poet has

-ever written hymns that were not a burden upon his reputation as a

-singer,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_79" id="page_79"></a>{79}</span> and did not weigh him to the ground, compared with his flight

-when free and catholic and pagan.</p>

-

-<p>After entertaining the nightmares of dulness born of Cobbett and Bunyan,

-how one’s shoulders swing back, one’s chest opens, and one’s breath

-comes with large and ample coolness and joy as one reads&mdash;</p>

-

-<div class="poetry">

-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">“The ioyous day gan early to appeare;<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">And fayre Aurora from the deawy bed<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">Of aged Tithone gan herselfe to reare<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">With rosy cheekes, for shame as blushing red:<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">Her golden locks, for hast, were loosely shed<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">About her eares, when Una her did marke<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">Clymbe to her charet, all with flowers spred,<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">From heven high to chace the chearelesse darke;<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">With mery note her lowd salutes the mountain larke.”<br /></span>

-</div></div>

-</div>

-

-<p class="nind">Or again here&mdash;</p>

-

-<div class="poetry">

-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">“Then forth he called that his daughter fayre,<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">The fairest Un’, his onely daughter deare,<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">His onely daughter and his onely hayre;<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">Who forth proceeding with sad sober cheare,<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">As bright as doth the morning starre appeare<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">Out of the east with flaming lockes bedight,<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">To tell that dawning day is drawing neare<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">And to the world does bring long wished light:<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">So fair and fresh that lady shewd herselfe in sight.”<br /></span>

-</div></div>

-</div>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_80" id="page_80"></a>{80}</span></p>

-

-<p>Is it not a miserable destiny to be obliged to read stanza after stanza

-redolent of such rich perfumed words about the lady, and then to find

-that Una is not a mortal or a spirit even&mdash;but Truth! An abstraction! A

-whim of degrading reason! A figment of a moralist’s heated and

-disordered brain. Any Lie of a poet is better than any Truth of a

-moralist. Why did Spenser stoop to run on the same intellectual plain as

-the accidental teacher? The teacher would have done admirably for Truth,

-but all the worthy essayists of England in the “spacious days of Queen

-Elizabeth,” put together, could not have written the stanzas about Una

-as Spenser saw her. This poaching of poets on the preserves of moralists

-is one of the most shameful things in the history of art.</p>

-

-<p>There are few poets it is harder to select quotations from than Spenser.

-The fact is, all the <i>Faerie Queen</i> ought to be quoted except the

-blinding allegory. I find that in years of my movement from the opening

-of the poem to page 472, the limit I have reached, I have marked a

-hundred passages at least, some<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_81" id="page_81"></a>{81}</span> of them running through pages. In no

-other poem&mdash;except Shelley’s <i>Alastor</i>&mdash;do I notice such grievous,

-continuous pencil scores. What is one to do? Whither is one to turn? As

-I handle the book I am lost in a deeper forest of delight than ever

-knight of Gloriana’s trod. Here I find a passage of several stanzas

-marked. I am much too lazy to copy them, and the spelling is troublesome

-often. But who can resist this?&mdash;</p>

-

-<div class="poetry">

-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i8">“&mdash;&mdash; And, when she spake,<br /></span>

-<span class="i0">Sweete wordes, like dropping honny, she did shed,<br /></span>

-<span class="i0">And twixt the perles and rubins softly brake<br /></span>

-<span class="i0">A silver sound, that heavenly musicke seemed to make.<br /></span>

-<span style="margin-left: 4em;">. . . . . . . . . .</span><br />

-<span class="i0">Upon her eyelids many graces sate<br /></span>

-<span class="i0">Under the shadow of her even browes.”<br /></span>

-</div></div>

-</div>

-

-<p>I have quoted the three lines and a half of the earlier stanza merely

-that they may act as an overture to the last two lines. Surely there are

-no two lovelier lines in the language! In the last line the words seem

-to melt together of their own propinquity.</p>

-

-<p>Here is an alexandrine that haunts me night and day&mdash;</p>

-

-<div class="poetry">

-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">“Sweete is the love that comes alone with willingnesse.”<br /></span>

-</div></div>

-</div>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_82" id="page_82"></a>{82}</span></p>

-

-<p>As a rule, I hate writing with the books I am speaking of near me; they

-fetter one cruelly when they are at hand. There is a tendency to verify

-one’s memory, and read up the context of favourite lines. This is

-checking to the speed and chilling to the spirits. When I was saying

-something about the <i>Spelling-Book</i> and the <i>Pilgrim’s Progress</i>, I had

-the copies within arm’s length, for I did not know either well enough to

-trust to memory. Since I got done with them I have placed them in

-distant safety. But one likes to handle Spenser&mdash;to have it nigh. My

-copy is lying at my left elbow in the blazing sun as I write now. It

-seems to me I shall never again look into the <i>Spelling-Book</i> or the

-<i>Pilgrim’s Progress</i>. Fables and allegories are only foolishnesses fit

-for people of weak intellect and children. Well, when I put down this

-pen, and before this ink is dry, I shall have resumed my interrupted

-reading of the <i>Faerie Queen</i> at page 473. My intellect is too weak and

-my heart too childish to resist the seduction of Spenser’s verse. So

-much for my own theory of allegory and my respect for my own theory.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_83" id="page_83"></a>{83}</span></p>

-

-<h2><a name="MY_COPY_OF_KEATS" id="MY_COPY_OF_KEATS"></a>MY COPY OF KEATS.</h2>

-

-<p><span class="smcap">The</span> only copy of Keats I ever owned is a modest volume published by

-Edward Moxon and Co. in the year 1861. By writing on its yellow fly-leaf

-I find it was given to me four years later, in September 1865. At that

-time it was clean and bright, opened with strict impartiality when set

-upon its back, and had not learned to respond with alacrity to hasty

-searches for favourite passages.</p>

-

-<p>The binding is now racked and feeble from use; and if, as in army

-regulations, service under warm suns is to be taken for longer service

-in cooler climes, it may be said that to the exhaustion following

-overwork have been added the prejudices of premature age.</p>

-

-<p>It is not bound as books were bound once upon a time, when they

-outlasted the tables and chairs,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_84" id="page_84"></a>{84}</span> even the walls; ay, the very races and

-names of their owners. The cover is simple plain blue cloth; on the back

-is a little patch of printing in gold, with the words Keats’s <i>Poetical

-Works</i> in the centre of a twined gilt ribbon and twisted gilt flowers.

-The welt at the back is bleached and frayed; the corners of the cover

-are battered and turned in. There is a chink between the cover and the

-arched back; and the once proud Norman line of that arc is flattened and

-degraded, retaining no more of its pristine look of sturdy strength than

-a wheaten straw after the threshing.</p>

-

-<p>In a list of new books preceding the biography of the poet I find the

-volume I speak of under the head “<span class="smcap">Poetry</span>&mdash;<i>Pocket Editions</i>;” described

-as “Keats’s <i>Poetical Works</i>. With a Memoir by R. M. Milnes. Price 3<i>s.</i>

-6<i>d.</i> cloth.” It was from no desire to look my gift-horse in the mouth I

-alighted upon the penultimate fact disclosed in the description. When I

-become owner of any volume my first delight in it is to read the

-catalogue of new books annexed, if there be any, before breaking my fast

-upon the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_85" id="page_85"></a>{85}</span> subject-matter of the writer in my hand&mdash;as a poor gentleman

-in a spacious restaurant, who, having ordered luncheon, consisting of

-bread and cheese, butter, and a half-pint of bitter ale, takes up the

-bill of fare and the list of wines, and designs for his imagination a

-feast his purse denies to his lips.</p>

-

-<p>If any owner of a cart of old books in Farringdon Street asked you a

-shilling for such a copy of Keats as mine, you would smile at him. You

-would think he had acquired the books merely to satisfy his own taste,

-and now displayed them to gratify a vanity that was intelligible; you

-would feel assured no motive towards commerce could underlie ever so

-deeply such a preposterous demand.</p>

-

-<p>My copy will, I think, last my time. Already it has been in my hands

-more than half the years of a generation; and I feel that its severest

-trials are over. In days gone by it made journeys with me by sea and

-land, and paid long visits to some friends, both when I went myself, and

-when I did not go. Change of air and scene have had no beneficial effect

-upon it. Journey after<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_86" id="page_86"></a>{86}</span> journey, and visit after visit, the full cobalt

-of the cloth grew darker and dingier, the boards of the cover became

-limper and limper, and the stitching at the back more apparent between

-the sheets, like the bones and sinews growing outward through the flesh

-of a hand waxing old.</p>

-

-<p>Once, when the book had been on a prolonged excursion away from me, it

-returned sadly out of sorts. Had it been a dear friend come back from

-India on sick-leave, after an absence from temperate skies of twenty

-years, I could not have observed a more disquieting change. The cover

-was darkened so that the original hue had almost wholly disappeared,

-save at the edges, that, like the Indian veteran’s forehead, were of

-startling and unwholesome pallor. Its presence in such guise aroused a

-gnawing solicitude which undermined all peace. I could not endure the

-symptoms of its speedy decline, the prospect of its dissolution; and to

-shield its case from harm and my sensibilities from continual assault, I

-wrapped it with sighs and travail of heart in a gritty cover of

-substantial brown paper.</p>

-

-<p>For a while, the consciousness that my book<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_87" id="page_87"></a>{87}</span> was safe compensated for

-the unfamiliarity of its appearance and my constitutional antipathy to

-contact with brown paper, even a lively image of which makes me cringe.</p>

-

-<p>But as days went on the brown paper entered into my soul and rankled.

-What! was my Keats to be clad in that wretched union garb, that livery

-of poverty acknowledged, that corduroy of the bookshelf? Intolerable!

-Should I, who had, like other men, only my time to live, be denied all

-friendly sight of the natural seeming of my prime friend? My Keats would

-last my time; and why should I hide my friend in an unparticularised

-garb, the uniform of the mean or the needy, merely that those who came

-after me might enjoy a privilege of which senseless timidity sought to

-rob me? No; that should not be. I would cast away the badge of beggary,

-and, like a man, face the daily decay of my old companion. I tore the

-paper off, threw it upon the fire, and set my disenthralled Keats in its

-own proper vesture on the shelf among its comrades and its peers.</p>

-

-<p>There is no man, how poor soever, who has<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_88" id="page_88"></a>{88}</span> not some taste which, for his

-circumstances, must be regarded as expensive; and in that “sweet

-unreasonableness” of human nature, not at all limited to “the Celt,” men

-take a kind of foolish pride in their particular extravagances. You know

-a man that declares he would sooner go without his dinner than a clean

-shirt; another who would prefer one good cigar to a pound of cavendish;

-one who would rather travel to the City of winter mornings by train

-without an overcoat than by vulgar tramcar in fur and pilot cloth; a

-fourth who would more gladly give his right hand than forget his Greek;

-a fifth who pays the hire of a piano and does without the beer which as

-a Briton is his birthright; a sixth who starves himself and stints his

-family for the love of a garden. For my own part, I felt the using of my

-Keats without protection of any kind to be beyond my means, but I

-gloried in this extravagance. It seemed rich to be thus hand and glove

-with the book: to touch it when and where I would, and as much as ever I

-liked: to feel assured that even with free using and free lending it

-would outlast my short stay here, as the blossoms<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_89" id="page_89"></a>{89}</span> of the roses in a

-friend’s hedge outlast your summer visit. Was it not fine, did it not

-strike a chord of kingly generosity, to be able to say to a friend,

-“Here is my copy of Keats. Take it, use it, read it. There is plenty of

-it for you and me”? I would rather have the lending of my Keats than the

-bidding to a banquet.</p>

-

-<p>So it fell out that my favourite went more among my friends than ever,

-and accumulated at a usurious rate all manner of marks and stains, and

-defacements, and dog-ears, and other unworded comments, as well as

-verbal comments expressed in pencil and ink. It is true that a rolling

-stone gathers no moss, but a rolling snowball gathers more snow, and

-moss and snow are of about equal value. Oliver Wendell Holmes says, if I

-may trust my memory, that only three things improve with years: violins,

-wine, and meerschaum pipes. He loves books, and knows books as well as

-any man now living&mdash;almost as well as Charles Lamb did when he was with

-us; and yet Dr. Holmes does not think books worthy of being included in

-the list of things that time ripens. Is this ingratitude<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_90" id="page_90"></a>{90}</span> or

-carelessness, or does it mean that books dwell apart, and are no more to

-be classed with mere tangible things than angels, or mathematical

-points, or the winds of last winter? Is a book to him an ethereal record

-of a divine trance? an insubstantial painting of a splendid dream? the

-music of a yesterday fruitful in heavenly melody? the echo of a syren’s

-song haunting a sea shell?</p>

-

-<p>Does not De Quincey tell us that, having lent some books to Coleridge,

-the poet not only wrote the lender’s name in them, but enriched the

-margins with observations and comments on the texts? Who would not give

-a tithe of the books he has for one volume so gloriously illuminated? I

-remember when I was a lad, among lads, a friend of ours picked up

-secondhand Cary’s Dante, in which was written the name of a poet still

-living, but who is almost unknown. We loved the living poet for his

-work, and when the buyer told us that the Dante bore not only the poet’s

-name, but numerous marginal notes and hints in his handwriting, we all

-looked upon the happy possessor with eyes of envious<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_91" id="page_91"></a>{91}</span> respect. The

-precious volume was shown to us, not in groups, for in gatherings there

-is peril of a profaning laugh, or an unsympathetic sneer. One by one we

-were handed the book, on still country roads, upon the tranquil heights

-of hills, where we were alone with the brown heather and the plover, or

-on some barren cliff above the summer sea. The familiar printed text

-sank into insignificance beside the blurred pencil lines. Any one might

-buy a fair uncut copy for a crown piece. The text was common

-property&mdash;“<span class="leftspc">’</span>twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands.” But

-here before us lay revealed the private workings of a poetic

-imagination, fired by contact with a master of the craft. To us this

-volume disclosed one of our heroes, clad in the homely garb of prose,

-speaking in his own everyday speech, and lifting up his voice in

-admiration, wonder, awe, to the colossal demi-god, in whose presence we

-had stood humiliated and afeard.</p>

-

-<p>My Keats has suffered from many pipes, many thumbs, many pencils, many

-quills, many pockets. Not one stain, one gape, one<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_92" id="page_92"></a>{92}</span> blot of these would

-I forego for a spick and span copy in all the gorgeous pomp of the

-bookbinder’s millinery. These blemishes are aureolæ to me. They are

-nimbi around the brows of the gods and demi-gods, who walk in the

-triumph of their paternal despot on the clouds metropolitan that

-embattle the heights of Parnassus.</p>

-

-<p>What a harvest of happy memories is garnered in its leaves! How well I

-remember the day it got that faint yellow stain on the page where begins

-the <i>Ode on a Grecian Urn</i>. It was a clear, bright, warm, sunshiny

-afternoon late in the month of May. Three of us took a boat and rowed

-down a broad blue river, ran the nose of the boat ashore on the gravel

-beach of a sequestered island and landed. Pulling was warm work, and we

-all climbed a slope, reached the summit, and cast ourselves down on the

-long lush cool grass, in the shade of whispering sycamores, and in a

-stream of air that came fresh with the cheering spices of the hawthorn

-blossom.</p>

-

-<p>One of our company was the best chamber reader I have ever heard. His

-voice was<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_93" id="page_93"></a>{93}</span> neither very melodious nor very full. Perhaps he was all the

-better for this because he made no effort at display. As he read, the

-book vanished from his sight, and he leaned over the poet’s shoulder,

-saw what the poet saw, and in a voice timid with the sense of

-responsibility, and yet elated with a kind of fearing joy, told of what

-he saw in words that never hurried, and that, when uttered, always

-seemed to hang substantially in the air like banners.</p>

-

-<p>He discovered and related the poet’s vision rather than simulated

-passion to suit the scene. I remember well his reading of the passage:</p>

-

-<div class="poetry">

-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">“Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">Though winning near the goal&mdash;yet, do not grieve;<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">She cannot fade though thou hast not thy bliss,<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">For ever wilt thou love and she be fair!”<br /></span>

-</div></div>

-</div>

-

-<p>He rehearsed the whole of the ode over and over again as we lay on the

-grass watching the vast chestnuts and oaks bending over the river, as

-though they had grown aweary of the sun, and longed to glide into the

-broad full stream.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_94" id="page_94"></a>{94}</span></p>

-

-<p>As he read the lines just quoted, he gave us time to hear the murmur,

-and to breathe the fragrance of those immortal trees. “Nor ever can

-those trees be bare,” in the text has only a semicolon after it. Yet

-here he paused, while three wavelets broke upon the beach, as if he

-could not tear himself away from contemplating the deathless verdure,

-and realising the prodigious edict pronounced upon it. “Bold lover,

-never, never canst thou kiss, though winning near the goal.” At the

-terrible decree he raised his eyes and gazed with heavy-lidded, hopeless

-commiseration at this being, who, still more unhappy than Tithonus, had

-to immortality added perpetual youth, with passion for ever strong, and

-denial for ever final.</p>

-

-<p>“Yet do not grieve.” This he uttered as one who pleads forgiveness of a

-corpse&mdash;merely to try to soothe a conscience sensible of an obligation

-that can never now be discharged. “She cannot fade, though thou hast not

-thy bliss, for ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!” Here the reader,

-with eyes fixed and rayless, seemed by voice and pose to be sunk,

-beyond<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_95" id="page_95"></a>{95}</span> all power of hope, in an abyss of despair. The barren

-immutability of the spectacle appeared to weigh upon him more

-intolerably than the wreck of a people. He spoke the words in a long

-drawn-out whisper, and, after a pause, dropped his head, and did not

-resume.</p>

-

-<p>I recollect that when the illusion he wrought up so fully in my mind had

-passed away in that long pause, and when I remembered that the fancy of

-the poet was expending itself, not on beings whom he conceived

-originally as human, but on the figures of a mere vase, I was seized

-with a fierce desire to get up and seek that vase through all the world

-until I found it, and then smash it into ten thousand atoms.</p>

-

-<p>When I had written the last sentence, I took up the volume to decide

-where I should recommence, and I “turned the page, and turned the page.”

-I lived over again the days not forgotten, but laid aside in memory to

-be borne forth in periods of high festival. I could not bring myself

-back from the comrades of old, and the marvels of the great magician, to

-this poor street, this solitude, and this squalid company of my<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_96" id="page_96"></a>{96}</span> own

-thoughts&mdash;thoughts so trivial and so mean compared with the imperial

-visions into which I had been gazing, that I was glad for the weariness

-which came upon me, and grateful to gray dawn that glimmered against the

-blind and absolved me from further obligation for that sitting.</p>

-

-<p>On turning over the leaves without reading, I find <i>Hyperion</i> opens most

-readily of all, and seems to have fared worst from deliberate and

-unintentional comment. Much of the wear and tear and pencil marks are to

-be set down against myself; for when I take the book with no definite

-purpose I turn to <i>Hyperion</i>, as a blind man to the warmth of the sun.

-Some qualities of the poem I can feel and appreciate; but always in its

-presence I am weighed down by the consciousness that my deficiency in

-some attribute of perception debars me from undreamed-of privileges.</p>

-

-<p>I recall one evening in a pine glen, with one man and <i>Hyperion</i>. It

-would be difficult to match this man or me as readers. I don’t think

-there can be ten worse employing the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_97" id="page_97"></a>{97}</span> English language to-day. I not

-only do not by any inflection of voice expound what I utter, but I am

-often incapable of speaking the words before me. I take in a line at a

-glance, see its import with my own imagination apart from the verbiage,

-which leaves not a shadow of an impression on my mind. When I come to

-the next line I grow suddenly alive to the fact that I have to speak off

-the former one. I am in a hurry to see what line two has to show; so,

-instead of giving the poet’s words for line one, I give my own

-description of the vision it has conjured up in my mind. This is bad

-enough in all conscience; but the friend of whom I speak now, behaves

-even worse. His plan of reading is to stop his voice in the middle of

-line one, and proceed to discuss the merits of line two, which he had

-read with his eye, but not with his lips, and of which the listener is

-ignorant, unless he happen to know the poem by rote.</p>

-

-<p>On that evening in the glen I pulled out Keats, and turned, at my

-friend’s request, to <i>Hyperion</i>, and began to read aloud. He was more

-patient than mercy’s self; but occasionally,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_98" id="page_98"></a>{98}</span> when I did a most

-exceptionally bad murder on the text, he would writhe and cry out, and I

-would go back and correct myself, and start afresh.</p>

-

-<p>He had a big burly frame, and a deep full voice that shouted easily, and

-some of the comments shouted as I read are indicated by pencil marks in

-the margin. The writing was not done then, but much later, when he and I

-had shaken hands, and he had gone sixteen thousand miles away. As he was

-about to set out on that long journey, he said, “In seven years more

-I’ll drop in and have a pipe with you.” It had been seven years since I

-saw him before. The notes on the margin are only keys to what was said;

-for I fear the comment made was more bulky than the text, and the text

-and comment together would far exceed the limits of such an essay as

-this. I therefore curtail greatly, and omit much.</p>

-

-<p>I read down the first page without meeting any interruption; but when I

-came in page two on</p>

-

-<div class="poetry">

-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i10">“She would have ta’en<br /></span>

-<span class="i0">Achilles by the hair and bent his neck,”<br /></span>

-</div></div>

-</div>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_99" id="page_99"></a>{99}</span></p>

-

-<p class="nind">he cried out, “Stop! Don’t read the line following. It is bathos

-compared with that line and a half. It is paltry and weak beside what

-you have read. ‘Ta’en Achilles by the hair and bent his neck.’ By Jove!

-can you not see the white muscles start out in his throat, and the look

-of rage, defeat and agony on the face of the Greek bruiser? But how flat

-falls the next line: ‘Or with a finger stay’d Ixion’s wheel.’ What’s the

-good of stopping Ixion’s wheel? Besides, a crowbar would be much better

-than a finger. It is a line for children, not for grown men. It exhausts

-the subject. It is too literal. There is no question left to ask. But

-the vague ‘Ta’en Achilles by the hair and <i>bent</i> his neck’ is perfect.

-You can see her knee in the hollow of his back, and her fingers twisted

-in his hair. But the image of the goddess dabbling in that river of hell

-after Ixion’s wheel is contemptible.”</p>

-

-<p>He next stopped me at</p>

-

-<div class="poetry">

-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">“Until at length old Saturn lifted up<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">His faded eyes, and saw his kingdom gone.”<br /></span>

-</div></div>

-</div>

-

-<p>“What an immeasurable vision Keats must<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_100" id="page_100"></a>{100}</span> have had of the old bankrupt

-Titan, when he wrote the second line! Taken in the context it is simply

-overwhelming. Keats must have sprung up out of his chair as he saw the

-gigantic head upraised, and the prodigious grief of the grey-haired god.

-But Keats was not happy in the matter of full stops. Here again what

-comes after weakens. We get no additional strength out of</p>

-

-<div class="poetry">

-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">“<span class="leftspc">‘</span>And all the gloom and sorrow of the place<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">And that fair kneeling Goddess.’<br /></span>

-</div></div>

-</div>

-

-<p class="nind">The ‘gloom and sorrow’ and the ‘goddess’ are abominably

-anticlimacteric.”</p>

-

-<div class="poetry">

-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">“Yes, there must be a golden victory;<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">There must be gods thrown down and trumpets blown<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">Of triumph calm, and hymns of festival<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">Upon the gold clouds metropolitan,<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">Voices of soft proclaim, and silver stir<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">Of strings in hollow shells; and there shall be<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">Beautiful things made new, for the surprise<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">Of the sky-children; I will give command:<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">Thea! Thea! Thea! where is Saturn?”<br /></span>

-</div></div>

-</div>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_101" id="page_101"></a>{101}</span></p>

-

-<p>“Read that again!” cried my friend, clinging to the grass and breathing

-hard. “Again!” he cried, when I had finished the second time. And then,

-before I could proceed, he sprang to his feet, carrying out the action

-in the text immediately following:</p>

-

-<div class="poetry">

-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i2">“This passion lifted him upon his feet,<br /></span>

-<span class="i0">And made his hands to struggle in the air.”<br /></span>

-</div></div>

-</div>

-

-<p>“Come on, John Milton,” cried my friend, excitedly sparring at the

-winds,&mdash;“come on, and beat that, and we’ll let you put all your

-adjectives behind your nouns, and your verb last, and your nominative

-nowhere! Why man,”&mdash;this being addressed to the Puritan poet&mdash;“it

-carried Keats himself off his legs; that’s more than anything you ever

-wrote when you were old did for you. There’s the smell of midnight oil

-off your later spontaneous efforts, John Milton.</p>

-

-<p>“When Milton went loafing about and didn’t mind much what he was writing

-he could give any of them points”&mdash;(I deplore the language) “any of

-them, ay, Shakespeare himself<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_102" id="page_102"></a>{102}</span> points in a poem. In a poem, sir” (this

-to me), “Milton could give Shakespeare a hundred and one out of a

-hundred and lick the Bard easily. How the man who was such a fool as to

-write Shakespeare’s poems had the good sense to write Shakespeare’s

-plays I can never understand. The most un-Shakesperian poems in the

-language are Shakespeare’s. I never read Cowley, but it seems to me

-Cowley ought to have written Shakespeare’s poems, and then his obscurity

-would have been complete. If Milton only didn’t take the trouble to be

-great he would have been greater. As far as I know there are no English

-poets who improved when they ceased to be amateurs and became

-professional poets, except Wordsworth and Tennyson. Shelley and Keats

-were never regular race-horses. They were colts that bolted in their

-first race and ran until they dropped. It was a good job Shakespeare

-gave up writing rhymes and posing as a poet. It was not until he

-despaired of becoming one and took to the drama that he began to feel

-his feet and show his pace. If he had suspected he was a great poet he

-would have adopted the airs of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_103" id="page_103"></a>{103}</span> the profession and been ruined. In his

-time no one thought of calling a play a poem&mdash;that was what saved the

-greatest of all our poets to us. The only two things Shakespeare didn’t

-know is that a play may be a poem and that his plays are the finest

-poems finite man as he is now constructed can endure. It is all nonsense

-to say man shall never look on the like of Shakespeare again. It is not

-the poet superior to Shakespeare man now lacks, but the man to apprehend

-him.”</p>

-

-<p>I looked around uneasily, and found, to my great satisfaction, that

-there was no stranger in view. My friend occupied a position of

-responsibility and trust, and it would be most injurious if a rumour got

-abroad that not only did he read and admire verse, but that he held

-converse with the shades of departed poets as well. In old days men who

-spoke to the vacant air were convicted of necromancy and burned; in our

-times men offending in this manner are suspected of poetry and

-ostracized.</p>

-

-<p>As soon as my friend was somewhat calmed, and had cast himself down

-again and lit a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_104" id="page_104"></a>{104}</span> pipe, I resumed my reading. He allowed me to proceed

-without interruption until I came to:</p>

-

-<div class="poetry">

-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i10">“His palace bright,<br /></span>

-<span class="i0">Bastion’d with pyramids of glowing gold,<br /></span>

-<span class="i0">And touch’d with shade of bronzed obelisks,<br /></span>

-<span class="i0">Glared a blood-red through all its thousand courts,<br /></span>

-<span class="i0">Arches, and domes, and fiery galleries;<br /></span>

-<span class="i0">And all its curtains of Aurorian clouds<br /></span>

-<span class="i0">Flushed angerly: while sometimes eagles’ wings,<br /></span>

-<span class="i0">Unseen before by Gods or wondering men,<br /></span>

-<span class="i0">Darken’d the place; and neighing steeds were heard,<br /></span>

-<span class="i0">Not heard before by Gods or wondering men.”<br /></span>

-</div></div>

-</div>

-

-<p>“Prodigious!” he shouted. “Go over that again. Keep the syllables wide

-apart. It is a good rule of water-colour sketching not to be too nice

-about joining the edges of the tints; this lets the light in. Keep the

-syllables as far apart as ever you can, and let the silentness in

-between to clear up the music. How the gods and the wondering men must

-have wondered! Do you know, I am sure Keats often frightened, terrified

-himself with his own visions. You remember he says somewhere he doesn’t

-think any one could dare to read some one or another aloud at<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_105" id="page_105"></a>{105}</span> midnight.

-I believe that often in the midnight he sat and cowered before the

-gigantic sights and sounds that reigned despotically over his fancy.”</p>

-

-<div class="poetry">

-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i8">“O dreams of day and night!<br /></span>

-<span class="i0">O monstrous forms! O effigies of pain!<br /></span>

-<span class="i0">O spectres busy in a cold, cold gloom!<br /></span>

-<span class="i0">O lank-ear’d Phantoms of black-weeded pools!<br /></span>

-<span class="i0">Why do I know ye? why have I seen ye? why<br /></span>

-<span class="i0">Is my eternal essence thus distraught<br /></span>

-<span class="i0">To see and to behold these horrors new?<br /></span>

-<span class="i0">Saturn is fallen, am I too to fall?<br /></span>

-<span class="i0">Am I to leave this haven of my rest,<br /></span>

-<span class="i0">This cradle of my glory, this soft clime,<br /></span>

-<span class="i0">This calm luxuriance of blissful light,<br /></span>

-<span class="i0">These crystalline pavilions, and pure fanes,<br /></span>

-<span class="i0">Of all my lucent empire? It is left<br /></span>

-<span class="i0">Deserted, void, nor any haunt of mine.<br /></span>

-<span class="i0">The blaze, the splendour, and the symmetry<br /></span>

-<span class="i0">I cannot see&mdash;but darkness, death and darkness.<br /></span>

-<span class="i0">Even here, into my centre of repose,<br /></span>

-<span class="i0">The shady visions come to domineer,<br /></span>

-<span class="i0">Insult, and blind and stifle up my pomp&mdash;<br /></span>

-<span class="i0">Fall!&mdash;No, by Tellus and her briny robes!<br /></span>

-<span class="i0">Over the fiery frontier of my realms<br /></span>

-<span class="i0">I will advance a terrible right arm<br /></span>

-<span class="i0">Shall scare that infant thunderer, rebel Jove,<br /></span>

-<span class="i0">And bid old Saturn take his throne again.”<br /></span>

-</div></div>

-</div>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_106" id="page_106"></a>{106}</span></p>

-

-<p>“What more magnificent prelude ever was uttered to oath than the portion

-of this speech preceding ‘No, by Tellus’! What more overpowering,

-leading up to an overwhelming threat, than the whole passage going

-before ‘Over the fiery frontier of my realms I will advance a terrible

-right arm’! What menacing deliberativeness there is in this whole

-speech, and what utter completeness of ruin to come is indicated by

-those words, ‘I will advance a terrible right arm’! You feel no sooner

-shall that arm move than ‘rebel Jove’s’ reign will be at an end, and

-that chaos will be left for Saturn to rule and fashion once more into

-order. Shut up the poem now. That’s plenty of <i>Hyperion</i>, and the other

-books of it are inferior. There is more labour and more likeness to

-<i>Paradise Lost</i>.” And so my friend, who is 16,000 miles away, and I

-turned from the Titanic theme, and spoke of the local board of

-guardians, or some young girl whose beauty was making rich misery in the

-hearts of young men in those old days.</p>

-

-<p>There is no other long poem in the volume<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_107" id="page_107"></a>{107}</span> bearing any marks which

-indicate such close connection with any individual reader as in the case

-of <i>Hyperion</i>. <i>Endymion</i> boasts only one mark, and that expressing

-admiration of the relief afforded from monotony of the heroic couplets

-by the introduction in the opening of the double rhyming verses:</p>

-

-<div class="poetry">

-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">“Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing&mdash;”<br /></span>

-</div></div>

-</div>

-

-<p>The friend to whom this mark is due never handled the volume, never even

-saw it; but once upon a time when he, another man, and I had got

-together, and were talking of the “gallipot poet,” the first friend said

-he always regarded this couplet as most happily placed where it appears.

-So when I reached home I marked my copy at the lines. Now, when I open

-the volume and find that mark, it is as good to me as, better than, a

-photograph of my friend; for I not only see his face and figure, but

-once more he places his index-finger on the table, as we three sit

-smoking, and whispers out the six opening lines, ending<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_108" id="page_108"></a>{108}</span> with the two I

-have quoted. Suppose I too should some day go 16,000 miles away from

-London, and carry this volume with me, shall I not be able to open it

-when I please, and recall what I then saw and heard, what I now see and

-hear, as distinctly as though no long interval of ocean or of months lay

-between to-night and that hour?</p>

-

-<p>Can I ever forget my burly tenor friend, who sang and composed songs,

-and dinted the line in <i>The Eve of St. Agnes</i>,</p>

-

-<div class="poetry">

-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">“The silver, snarling trumpets ’gan to chide,”<br /></span>

-</div></div>

-</div>

-

-<p class="nind">and declared a hundred times in my unwearied ears that no more happy

-epithet than snarling could be found for trumpets? He over and over

-again assured me, and over and over again I loved to listen to his fancy

-running riot on the line, how he heard and saw brazen and silver and

-golden griffins quarrelling in the roof and around his ears as the

-trumpets blared through the echoing halls and corridors. He, too, marked</p>

-

-<div class="poetry">

-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">“The music, yearning like a God in pain.”<br /></span>

-</div></div>

-</div>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_109" id="page_109"></a>{109}</span></p>

-

-<p class="nind">“Keats,” he would say, “seems to have got not only at the spirit of the

-music, but at the very flesh and blood of it. He has done one thing for

-me,” my friend continued. “Before I read these lines, and others of the

-same kind, in Keats, my favourite tunes always represented an emotion of

-my own mind. Now they stand for individual characters in scenes, like

-descriptions of people in a book. When I hear music now I am with the

-Falstaffs or the Romolas, with Quasimodo or Julius Cæsar.”</p>

-

-<p>I have been regarding the indentures in the volume chronologically. The

-next marks of importance in the order of the years occur, one in <i>The

-Eve of St. Agnes</i>, the other in the <i>Ode to a Nightingale</i>. These marks,

-more than any others, I regard with grateful memory. They are not the

-work of the hand of him for whom I value them. I have good reason to

-look on him as a valid friend. For months between him and me there had

-existed an acquaintance necessarily somewhat close, but wholly

-uninformed with friendship. We spoke to one another as Mr. So-and-so.

-Neither of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_110" id="page_110"></a>{110}</span> us suspected that the other had any toleration of poets or

-poetry. Our commerce had been in mere prose. One day, in mid-winter,

-when a chilling fog hung over London, I chanced to go into a room where

-he was writing alone. After a formal greeting, I complained of the cold.

-He dropped his pen and looked up. “Yes,” he said, “very cold and dark as

-night. Do you know the coldest night that ever was?” I answered that I

-did not. “It was St. Agnes’s Eve, when</p>

-

-<div class="poetry">

-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">“<span class="leftspc">‘</span>The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold.’<span class="leftspc">”</span><br /></span>

-</div></div>

-</div>

-

-<p class="nind">And so we fell to talking about Keats, and talked and talked for hours;

-and before the first hour of our talk had passed we had ceased

-“Mistering” one another for ever. The fire of his enthusiasm rose higher

-and higher as the minutes swept by. He knew one poet personally, for

-whose verse I had profound respect, and this poet, he told me,

-worshipped Keats. Often in our talks I laid plots for bringing him back

-to the simple sentence, “You should hear M. talk about Keats.” The<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_111" id="page_111"></a>{111}</span>

-notion that any one who knew M. could think M. would talk to me about

-Keats intoxicated me. “He would not let me listen to him?” I said half

-fearfully. “M. would talk to any one about Keats&mdash;to even a lawyer.” How

-I wished at that moment I was a Lord Chancellor who might stand in M.’s

-path. I have, in a way, been near to that poet since. I might almost

-have said to him,</p>

-

-<div class="poetry">

-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">“So near, too! You could hear my sigh,<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">Or see my case with half an eye;<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">But must not&mdash;there are reasons why.”<br /></span>

-</div></div>

-</div>

-

-<p>So this friend I speak of now and I came to be great friends indeed. We

-often met and held carnivals of verse, carnivals among the starry lamps

-of poetry. He had a subtle instinct that saw the jewel, however it might

-be set. He owned himself the faculty of the poet, which gave him ripe

-knowledge of all matters technical in the setting.</p>

-

-<div class="poetry">

-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">“Now more than ever seems it rich to die,<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">To cease upon the midnight with no pain.”<br /></span>

-</div></div>

-</div>

-

-<p class="nind">He would quote these two lines and cry, “Was<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_112" id="page_112"></a>{112}</span> ever death so pangless as

-that spoken of here? ‘To <i>cease</i> upon the midnight!’ Here is no

-struggle, no regret, no fear. This death is softer and lighter and

-smoother than the falling of the shadow of night upon a desert of

-noiseless sand.”</p>

-

-<p>For a long time the name of one man had been almost daily in my ears. I

-had been hearing much through the friend to whom I have last referred

-about his intuitive eye and critical acumen. That friend had informed me

-of the influence which his opinion carried; and of how this man held

-Keats high above poets to whom we have statues of brass, whose names we

-give to our streets. My curiosity was excited, and, while my desire to

-meet this man was largely mingled with timidity, I often felt a jealous

-pang at thinking that many of the people with whom I was acquainted knew

-him. At length I became distantly connected with an undertaking in which

-he was prominently concerned. Through the instrumentality of one

-friendly to us both, we met. It was a sacred night for me, and I sat and

-listened, enchanted. After some hours the talk wheeled<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_113" id="page_113"></a>{113}</span> round upon

-sonnets. “Sonnets!” he cried, starting up; “who can repeat the lines

-about Cortez in Keats? You all know it.” Some one began to read or

-repeat the sonnet. Until coming upon the words, “or like stout Cortez.”

-“That’s it, that’s it! Now go on.”</p>

-

-<div class="poetry">

-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">“Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">He stared at the Pacific&mdash;and all his men<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">Look’d at each other with a wild surmise&mdash;<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">Silent, upon a peak in Darien.”<br /></span>

-</div></div>

-</div>

-

-<p>“<span class="leftspc">‘</span>And all his men looked at each other with a <i>wild</i> surmise,’<span class="leftspc">”</span> he

-repeated, “<span class="leftspc">‘</span><i>silent</i> upon a peak in Darien.’ The most enduring group

-ever designed. They are standing there to this day. They will stand

-there for ever and for ever; they are immutable. When an artist carves

-them you may know that Buonarotti is risen from the dead and is once

-more abroad.”</p>

-

-<p>That portion of a book which is called a preface and put first, is

-always the last written. It may be human, but it is not logical, that

-when a man starts he does not know what he has to say first, until he

-finds out by an elaborate guess<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_114" id="page_114"></a>{114}</span> of several hundred pages what he wants

-to say last. It would be unbecoming of me in a collection of ignorant

-essays to affect to know less than a person of average intelligence; but

-I am quite sincere when I say I am not aware who the author is of the

-great aphorism that “After all, there is a great deal of human nature in

-man.” There is, I would venture to say, more human nature than logic in

-man. My copy of Keats is no exception to the general rule of books. The

-preface ought to precede immediately the colophon. Yet it is in the

-forefront of the volume, before even the very title page itself. It

-forms no integral part of the volume, and is unknown to the printer or

-publisher. It was given to me by a thoughtful and kind-hearted friend at

-whose side I worked for a considerable while. One time, years ago, he

-took a holiday and vanished, going from among us I knew not whither. On

-coming back he presented each of his associates with something out of

-his store of spoil. That which now forms the preface to my copy he gave

-me. It consists of twelve leaves; twelve myrtle leaves on a spray.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_115" id="page_115"></a>{115}</span> When

-he was in Rome he bore me in mind and plucked this sprig at the grave of

-the poet. It is consoling to remember Keats is buried so far away from

-where he was born, when we cannot forget that the abominable infamy of

-publishing his love-letters was committed in his own country&mdash;here in

-England. His spirit was lent to earth only for a little while, and he

-gave all of it to us. But we were not satisfied. We must have his

-heart’s blood and his heart too. The gentlemen who attacked his poetry

-when he was alive really knew no better, and tried, perhaps, to be as

-honest as would suit their private ends. But the publication of the dead

-man’s love-letters, fifty years after he had passed away, cannot be

-attributed even to ignorance. If any money was made out of the book it

-would be a graceful act to give it to some church where the burial

-ground is scant, and the parish is in need of a Potter’s Field.</p>

-

-<p>When I take down my copy of Keats, and look through it and beyond it, I

-feel that while it is left to me I cannot be wholly shorn of my friends.

-It is the only album of photographs I<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_116" id="page_116"></a>{116}</span> possess. The faces I see in it

-are not for any eye but mine. It is my private portrait gallery, in

-which hang the portraits of my dearest friends. The marks and blots are

-intelligible to no eye but mine; they are the cherished hieroglyphics of

-the heart. I close the book; I lock up the hieroglyphics; I feel certain

-the book will last my time. Should it survive me and pass into new

-hands&mdash;into the hands of some boy now unborn, who may pluck out of it

-posies of love-phrases for his fresh-cheeked sweetheart&mdash;he will know

-nothing of the import these marginal notes bore to one who has gone

-before him; unless, indeed, out of some cemetery of ephemeral literature

-he digs up this key&mdash;this Rosetta stone.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_117" id="page_117"></a>{117}</span></p>

-

-<h2><a name="DECAY_OF_THE_SUBLIME" id="DECAY_OF_THE_SUBLIME"></a>DECAY OF THE SUBLIME.</h2>

-

-<p><span class="smcap">The</span> sublime is dying. It has been pining a long time. At last

-dissolution has set in. Nothing can save it but another incursion of

-Goths and Huns; and as there are no Goths and Huns handy just now, the

-sublime must die out, and die out soon. You can know what a man is by

-the company he keeps. You can judge a people by the ideas they retain

-more than by the ideas they acquire. The philology of a tongue, from its

-cradle to its grave, is the social history of the people who spoke it.

-To-day you may mark the progress of civilisation by the decay bf the

-sublime. Glance at a few of the nations of earth as they stand. Italy

-and Spain still hold with the sublime in literature and art, although,

-being exhausted stocks, they cannot produce it any longer. France is<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_118" id="page_118"></a>{118}</span>

-cynical, smart, artistic, but never was and never can be sublime, so

-long as vanity rules her; and yet, by the irony of selection, sublime is

-one of her favourite words. Central Europe has had her sublime phases,

-but cannot be even thought of now in connection with the quality; and

-Russia and Turkey are barbarous still. If we come to the active pair of

-nationalities in the progress of current civilisation, the United States

-and England, we find the sublime in very poor case.</p>

-

-<p>Young England across the water is the most progressive nation of our

-age, because it is the most practical. If ever there was a man who put

-his foot on the neck of the sublime, that man is Uncle Sam. His

-contribution to the arts is almost nothing. His outrages against

-established artistic canons have been innumerable. He owns a new land

-without traditions. He laughs at all traditions. He has never raised a

-saint or a mummy or a religion (Mormonism he stole from the East), a

-crusader, a tyrant, a painter, a sculptor, a musician, a dramatist, an

-inquisition, a star chamber, a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_119" id="page_119"></a>{119}</span> council of ten. All his efforts have

-been in a strictly practical direction, and most of his efforts have

-been crowned with success. He has devoted his leisure time, the hours

-not spent in cutting down forests or drugging Indians with whisky, to

-laughing at the foolish old notions which the foolish old countries

-cherish. He had a wonderfully fertile estate of two thousand million

-acres, about only one fourth of which is even to this day under direct

-human management. In getting these five hundred million acres of land

-under him he had met all kinds of ground&mdash;valley, forest, mountain,

-plain. But in none of these did he find anything but axes and whisky of

-the least use. No mountain had been sanctified to him by first earthly

-contact with the two Tables of the Law. No plain had been rendered

-sacred as that upon which the miraculous manna fell to feed the chosen

-people. No inland sea had been the scene of a miraculous draught of

-fishes. All the land acquired and cultivated by Uncle Sam came to him by

-the right of whisky and the axe. The mountain was nothing more than so<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_120" id="page_120"></a>{120}</span>

-much land placed at a certain angle that made it of little use for

-tillage. The plains, the rivers, and inland seas had a simply commercial

-value in his eyes. He had no experience of a miracle of any kind, and he

-did not see why he should bow down and respect a mountain, that, to him,

-was no more than so many thousand acres on an incline unfavourable to

-cultivation. Such a condition of the ground was a bore, and he would

-have cut down the mountain as he had cut down the Indian and the forest,

-if he had known how to accomplish the feat. He saw nothing mystic in the

-waters or the moon. Were the rivers and lakes wholesome to drink and

-useful for carriage, and well stocked with fish? These were the

-questions he asked about the waters. Would there be moonlight enough for

-riding and working? was the only question he asked about that “orbèd

-maiden with white fire laden whom mortals call the moon.” His notions,

-his plains, his rivers, his lakes, were all “big,” but he never thought

-of calling them sublime. On his own farm he failed to find any present

-trace of the supernatural;<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_121" id="page_121"></a>{121}</span> and he discovered no trace of the

-supernatural in tradition, for there was no tradition once the red man

-had been washed into his grave with whisky. Hence Uncle Sam began

-treating the supernatural with familiarity, and matters built on the

-supernatural with levity. Now without the supernatural the sublime

-cannot exist any length of time, if at all.</p>

-

-<p>It may be urged it is unreasonable to hold that the Americans have done

-away with the sublime, since in the history of all nations the earlier

-centuries were, as in America, devoted to material affairs. There is one

-fact bearing on this which should not be left out of count, namely, that

-America did not start from barbarism, or was not raised on a site where

-barbarism had overrun a high state of civilisation. The barbarous hordes

-of the north effaced the civilisation of old Rome, and raised upon its

-ashes a new people, the Italians, who in time led the way in art, as the

-old Romans had before them. The Renaissance was a second crop raised off

-the same ground by new men. The arts Rome had borrowed from<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_122" id="page_122"></a>{122}</span> Greece had

-been trampled down by Goths, who, when they found themselves in the land

-of milk and honey, sat down to enjoy the milk and honey, until suddenly

-the germs of old art struck root, and once more all eyes turned to Italy

-for principles of beauty. But America started with the civilisation of a

-highly civilised age. She did not rear her own civilisation on her own

-soil. She did not borrow her arts from any one country. She simply

-peopled her virgin plains with the sons of all the earth, who brought

-with them the culture of their respective nationalities. She has not

-followed the ordinary course of nations, from conflict to power, from

-power to prosperity, from prosperity to the arts, luxury, and decay. She

-started with prosperity, and the first use she made of her prosperity

-was, not to cultivate the fine arts in her own people, but to laugh at

-them in others. In the individual man the sense of humour grows with

-years. In nations the sense of humour develops with centuries. The

-literature of nations begins with battle-songs and hymns, and ends with

-burlesques and blasphemies.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_123" id="page_123"></a>{123}</span></p>

-

-<p>Now although America has begun with burlesques and blasphemies, no one

-can for a moment imagine that America is not going to create a noble

-literature of her own. She is destined not only to found and build up a

-noble literature, but one which will be unique. When she has time, when

-she has let most of those idle one thousand five hundred million acres,

-she will begin writing her books. By that time she will have running in

-her veins choice blood from every race on earth, and it is a matter of

-certainty she will give the world many delights now undreamed of. No

-other nation on earth will have, or ever has had, such an opportunity of

-devoting attention to man in his purely domestic and social relations.

-The United States of to-day has, for practical purposes, no foreign

-policy. She has no foreign rivals, she is not likely to have foreign

-wars, while in her own country she has large bodies of men from every

-people on the world. She owns the largest assorted lot of mankind on the

-globe, and as years go by we may safely conclude she will add to the

-variety and number<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_124" id="page_124"></a>{124}</span> of her sons. In all this appears no hope for the

-sublime. There is no instance in literature of a nation going back from

-laughter to heroics. The two may exist side by side. But that is not the

-case in America. Up to this hour only one class of transatlantic writers

-has challenged the attention of Europe, and that class is humorous and

-profane. Emerson, Bryant, Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Lowell, Holmes, and

-Irving are merely Europeans born in America. But Ward, Harte, Twain, and

-Breitmann are original and American.</p>

-

-<p>America is undoubtedly the literary promise-land of the future. It has

-done nothing up to this. Its condition has forbidden it to achieve

-anything, but great triumphs may be anticipated from it. Crossing the

-Atlantic, what do we find in the other great branch of the

-English-speaking race? Religious publications head the list by a long

-way. They have nothing to do with this subject save in so far as they

-are in the line of the sublime. All forms of the Christian and Jewish

-creeds are sublime. Looking at the other walks of literature, we find

-the death sentence<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_125" id="page_125"></a>{125}</span> of the sublime written everywhere. With the

-exception of Mr. Browning, here or there we have no poet or dramatist

-who attempts it. We have elegant trifles and beautiful form in many

-volumes of second-rate contemporary verse. There never was a time when

-the science of poetry was understood until now. Our critics can tell you

-with mathematical certainty the number of poems as distinguished from

-pieces of verse every well-known man has written. But we are not

-producing any great poetry, and none of the sublime kind. This is the

-age of elegant poetic incentive, of exquisite culture, but it is too

-dainty. We do not rise much above a poem to a shoe, or an ode to a

-ringlet, perfumed with one of Mr. Rimmel’s best admired distillations.

-We have a few poets who are continually trying to find out who or what

-the deuce they are, and what they meant by being born, and so on; but

-then these men are for the eclectic, and not the herd of sensible

-people. We have two men who have done noble work, Browning and Tennyson;

-but, speaking broadly, we find the sublime nowhere.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_126" id="page_126"></a>{126}</span> It is true you

-cannot force genius as you force asparagus; and these remarks are not

-intended to indict the age with having no poetic faculty or aspiration.

-Abundance of poetry of a new and beautiful kind does exist, but it is

-not of the lofty kind born to the men of old.</p>

-

-<p>Turning eyes away from literature, take a few more of the arts. Before

-we go farther, let us admit that one art at least never reached sublimer

-recorded heights than to-day. The music of the generation just past is,

-I believe, in the front rank of the art. It is an art now in the throes

-of an enormous transformation. Not using the phrase in its slangy

-meaning, the music of the future is sure to touch splendours never

-dreamed of by that Raphael of the lyre, Mozart. The only art-Titans now

-wrestling are the musicians; not those paltry souls that pad the poor

-words of inane burlesques, but the great spirits that sit apart, and

-have audiences of the angels. These men, out of their own mouths, assure

-us that they catch the far-off murmurs of such imperial tones as never

-filled the ear of man yet. They cannot gather up the broken chords they

-hear.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_127" id="page_127"></a>{127}</span> They admit they have heard no more than a few bars of the great

-masters who are close upon us; but, they say, if they only reproduce the

-effect these preluding passages have upon them, “Such harmonious madness

-from their lips would flow, the world should listen then as they are

-listening now.”</p>

-

-<p>Go to the Royal Academy and look round you. How pretty! How nice! How

-pathetic! But would you like to lend your arm to Michael Angelo, and go

-round those walls with him? He would prefer the rack, the gridiron of

-St. Laurence. It is true there is no necessity for the sublime; but

-those men who have been in the awful presence of such dreams as <i>Night</i>

-and <i>Morning</i>, by that sculptor, must be pardoned if they prefer it to

-the art you find in Burlington House. One of our great English poets

-said, speaking of the trivial nature of conversation at the beginning of

-this century, that if Lord Bacon were alive now, and made a remark in an

-ordinary assembly, conversation would stop. If casts of <i>Night</i> and

-<i>Morning</i> were placed at the head of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_128" id="page_128"></a>{128}</span> staircase of Burlington House,

-no one with appreciation of art would enter the rooms; the strong would

-linger for ever round those stupendous groups, and the feeble would be

-frighted away. Of course, the vast crowd of art-patrons would pass the

-group with only a casual glance, and a protest against having plaster

-casts occupying ground which ought to be allotted to original work.</p>

-

-<p>Read any speech Burke or Grattan ever spoke, and then your <i>Times</i> and

-the debate last night. How plain it becomes that from no art has the

-sublime so completely vanished as the orator’s. Take those two speakers

-above, and run your eye over Cicero and Demosthenes, the four are of the

-one school, in the great style. Theirs is the large and universal

-eloquence. It is as fresh and beautiful, as pathetic, as sublime now as

-when uttered, although the occasions and circumstances are no longer of

-interest to man. The statistician and the poltroon and the verbatim

-reporter have killed the orator. If any man were to rise in the House

-and make a speech in the manner of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_129" id="page_129"></a>{129}</span> ancients, the honourable members

-would hurry in from all sides to laugh. A few sessions ago a member rose

-in his place, and delivered an oration on a subject not popular with the

-House, but in a manner which echoed the grand old style. At once every

-seat for which there was a member present at the time was occupied; and

-the next morning the daily papers had articles which, while disposing of

-the speaker’s cause in a few lines, devoted columns to the manner in

-which he had pleaded it.</p>

-

-<p>To discover what has led to the decay of the sublime is not difficult,

-and even in an ignorant essay like this, it may be briefly indicated.

-Roughly speaking, it is attributable to the accumulation of certainties.

-Any handbook that cribs from Longinus or Burke will tell you the vague

-is essential to the sublime. To attain it there must be something half

-understood&mdash;not fully known, only partly revealed. To attain it detail

-must be lost, and only a totality presented to the mind. For instance,

-if a great lover of Roman history were suddenly to find himself on the

-top of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_130" id="page_130"></a>{130}</span> Coliseum, the most sublime result to be obtained from the

-situation would be produced by repeating to himself the simple words,

-“This is Rome.” By these words the totality of the city’s grandeur,

-influence, power, and enterprises would be vaguely presented to a

-scholar’s mind dim in the glow of a multitude of half-revealing

-side-lights. If a companion whispered in the scholar’s ears, “This place

-would at one time seat a hundred thousand people,” then the particular

-is reached, and the sublime vanishes like sunshine against a cloud. Most

-of North America has been explored. Africa and Australia have been

-traversed. The source of the Nile has been found. We can read the

-hieroglyphics. We know the elements now flaming in the sun. Many of the

-phenomena in all branches of physiology which were mysteries to our

-fathers are familiar commonplaces of knowledge now. We have learned to

-foretell the weather. We travel a thousand miles for the hundred

-travelled by our fathers. We have daily newspapers to discuss all

-matters, clear away mysteries. We have opened the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_131" id="page_131"></a>{131}</span> grave for the sublime

-with the plough of progress. Though the words stick in my throat, I

-must, I daresay, cry, “God speed the plough!”<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_132" id="page_132"></a>{132}</span></p>

-

-<h2><a name="A_BORROWED_POET" id="A_BORROWED_POET"></a>A BORROWED POET.</h2>

-

-<p><span class="smcap">Twenty</span> years ago I borrowed, and read for the first time, the poems of

-James Clarence Mangan. I then lived in a city containing not one-third

-as many people as yearly swell the population of London. The friend of

-whom I borrowed the volume in 1866 is still living in his old home, in

-the house from which I carried away the book then. I saw him last winter

-and he is almost as little aged as the hills he has fronted all that

-time. I have had in those years as many homes as an Arab nomad. He still

-stays in the old place, and in the gray twilight of dark summer mornings

-wakes to hear as of yore the twitter of sparrows and the cawing of rooks

-from the other side of the river, and the hoarse hooting of the

-steamboat hard by.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_133" id="page_133"></a>{133}</span></p>

-

-<p>The volume of Mangan now by me I borrowed of another old friend, who

-passes most of his day within sight of that familiar river not quite a

-hundred yards from the house of the lender of twenty years back. In the

-meantime I have seen no other copy of Mangan.</p>

-

-<p>This latest fact is not much to be wondered at, for I am not

-enterprising in the matter of books&mdash;rarely buy and rarely borrow, and

-have never been in the reading room of the British Museum in my life.

-The book may be common to those who know much about books; but I have

-seen only the two copies I speak of, and these are of the same edition

-and of American origin. I believe a selection from the poems was issued

-a few years ago in Dublin, but a copy has not drifted my way. The

-title-page of the volume before me is missing, but in a list of

-publications at the back I find “<i>The Poems of James Clarence Mangan</i>.

-Containing German Anthology, Irish Anthology, Apocrypha, and

-Miscellaneous Poems. With a Biographical and Critical Introduction, by

-John Mitchel. 1 vol. 12mo. Printed on tinted and calendered paper.

-Nearly 500 pages. $1.”<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_134" id="page_134"></a>{134}</span> Beyond all doubt this is the book, and it was

-published by Mr. P. M. Haverty, of New York.</p>

-

-<p>As far as I know, this is the only edition of Mangan which pretends to

-be even comprehensive. It does not lay claim to completeness. At the

-time the late John Mitchel wrote his introduction he was aware of but

-one other edition of Mangan’s poems&mdash;the German Anthology, published in

-Dublin many years ago. I am nearly sure that since the appearance of

-Mitchel’s edition there have been no verses of Mangan’s published in

-book form on this side of the Atlantic, except the selections I have

-already mentioned, and I do not think any edition whatever has been

-published in this country.</p>

-

-<p>During the twenty years which have elapsed since first I made the

-acquaintance of the poems of James Clarence Mangan, I have read much

-verse and many criticisms of verse, and yet I don’t remember to have

-seen one line about Mangan in any publication issued in England. I

-believe two magazine articles have appeared, but I never saw them.

-Almost during these<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_135" id="page_135"></a>{135}</span> years, or within a period which does not extend

-back far beyond them, criticism of verse has ceased to be a matter of

-personal opinion, and has been elevated or degraded, as you will, into

-an exact science. The opinions of old reviewers&mdash;the Jeffreys and

-Broughams&mdash;are now looked on as curiosities of literature. There is as

-wide a gulf between the mode of treating poetry now and eighty years ago

-as there is between the mode of travelling, or the guess-work that makes

-up the physician’s art; and if in a gathering of literary experts any

-one were now to apply to a new bard the dogmas of criticism quoted for

-or against Byron, Shelley, Keats, and the Lakers in their time, a

-silence the reverse of respectful would certainly follow.</p>

-

-<p>This is not the age of great poetry, but it is the age of “poetical

-poetry,” to quote the phrase of one of the finest critics using the

-English language&mdash;one who has, unfortunately for the culture of that

-tongue and those who use it, written lamentably little. The great danger

-by which we stand menaced at present is, that our perceptions may become

-too exquisite and our poetry<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_136" id="page_136"></a>{136}</span> too intellectual. This, anyway, is true of

-poetry which may at all claim to be an expression of thought. There are

-in our time supreme formists in small things, carvers of cameos and

-walnut shells, and musical conjurors who make sweet melodies with richly

-vowelled syllables. But unfortunately the tendency of the poetic men of

-to-day is towards intellectuality, and this is a humiliating decay. In

-the times of Queen Elizabeth, when all the poets were Shakespeares, they

-cared nothing for their intellects. The intellectual side of a poet’s

-mind is an impertinence in his art.</p>

-

-<p>I do not presume to say what place exactly James Clarence Mangan ought

-to occupy on the greater roll of verse-writers, and I am not sure that

-he is, in the finest sense of the phrase, a “poetical poet;” but he is,

-at all events, the most poetical poet Ireland has produced, when we take

-into account the volume and quality of his song. I shall purposely avoid

-any reference to him as a translator, except in acting on John Mitchel’s

-opinion, and treating one of his “translations” from the Arabic as an

-original<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_137" id="page_137"></a>{137}</span> poem; for during his lifetime he confessed that he had passed

-off original poems of his own as translations; and Mitchel assures us

-that Mangan did not know Arabic. As this essay does not profess to be

-orderly or dignified, or anything more than rambling gossip, put into

-writing for no other reason than to introduce to the reader a few pieces

-of verse he may not have met before, I cannot do better than insert here

-the lines of which I am now speaking:</p>

-

-<h3>THE TIME OF THE BARMECIDES.</h3>

-

-<h4>I.</h4>

-

-<div class="poetry">

-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">“My eyes are filmed, my beard is grey,<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">I am bowed with the weight of years;<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">I would I were stretched in my bed of clay<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">With my long-lost youth’s compeers!<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">For back to the past, though the thought brings woe,<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">My memory ever glides&mdash;<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">To the old, old time, long, long ago,<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">The time of the Barmecides!<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">To the old, old time, long, long ago,<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">The time of the Barmecides.<br /></span>

-</div></div>

-</div>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_138" id="page_138"></a>{138}</span></p>

-

-<h4>II.</h4>

-

-<div class="poetry">

-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">“Then youth was mine, and a fierce wild will,<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">And an iron arm in war,<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">And a fleet foot high upon Ishkar’s hill,<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">When the watch-lights glimmered afar,<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">And a barb as fiery as any I know<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">That Khoord or Beddaween rides,<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">Ere my friends lay low&mdash;long, long ago,<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">In the time of the Barmecides;<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">Ere my friends lay low&mdash;long, long ago,<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">In the time of the Barmecides.<br /></span>

-</div></div>

-</div>

-

-<h4>III.</h4>

-

-<div class="poetry">

-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">“One golden goblet illumed my board,<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">One silver dish was there;<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">At hand my tried Karamanian sword<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">Lay always bright and bare;<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">For those were the days when the angry blow<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">Supplanted the word that chides&mdash;<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">When hearts could glow&mdash;long, long ago,<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">In the time of the Barmecides;<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">When hearts could glow&mdash;long, long ago,<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">In the time of the Barmecides.<br /></span>

-</div></div>

-</div>

-

-<h4>IV.</h4>

-

-<div class="poetry">

-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">“Through city and desert my mates and I<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">Were free to rove and roam,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_139" id="page_139"></a>{139}</span><br /></span>

-<span class="i1">Our diapered canopy the deep of the sky,<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">Or the roof of the palace dome.<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">Oh, ours was the vivid life to and fro,<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">Which only sloth derides:<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">Men spent Life so&mdash;long, long ago,<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">In the time of the Barmecides;<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">Men spent Life so&mdash;long, long ago,<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">In the time of the Barmecides.<br /></span>

-</div></div>

-</div>

-

-<h4>V.</h4>

-

-<div class="poetry">

-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">“I see rich Bagdad once again,<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">With its turrets of Moorish mould,<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">And the Kalif’s twice five hundred men<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">Whose binishes flamed with gold.<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">I call up many a gorgeous show<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">Which the Pall of Oblivion hides&mdash;<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">All passed like snow, long, long ago,<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">With the time of the Barmecides;<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">All passed like snow, long, long ago,<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">With the time of the Barmecides.<br /></span>

-</div></div>

-</div>

-

-<h4>VI.</h4>

-

-<div class="poetry">

-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">“But mine eye is dim, and my beard is grey,<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">And I bend with the weight of years&mdash;<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">May I soon go down to the House of Clay,<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">Where slumber my Youth’s compeers!<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_140" id="page_140"></a>{140}</span><br /></span>

-<span class="i1">For with them and the Past, though the thought wakes woe,<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">My memory ever abides,<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">And I mourn for the Times gone long ago,<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">For the Times of the Barmecides!<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">I mourn for the Times gone long ago,<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">For the Times of the Barmecides!”<br /></span>

-</div></div>

-</div>

-

-<p>This is the poem claimed by Mangan to be from the Arabic. I have no

-means of knowing whether it is or not. There is one translation from the

-Persian, one from the Ottoman, and according to Mitchel, one from the

-Coptic. But seeing that he turned into verse a great number of Irish

-poems from prose translations done by another, and that he did not know

-a word of that language, I think it may be safely assumed that <i>The Last

-of the Barmecides</i> is original. This poem is so old a favourite of mine

-that I cannot pretend to be an impartial judge of it. When I hear it (I

-can never see a poem I know well and love much) I listen as to the

-unchanged voice of an old friend; I wander in a maze of memories; “I see

-rich Bagdad once again;” I am once more owner of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_141" id="page_141"></a>{141}</span> the magic carpet, and

-am floating irresponsibly and at will on the intoxicating atmosphere of

-the poets over the enchanted groves, and streams, and hills, and seas of

-fairyland, or harkening to voices that years ago ceased to stir in my

-ears, gazing at the faces that have long since moulded the face cloth

-into blunted memories of the face for the grave.</p>

-

-<p>On the 20th of June, 1849, Mangan died in the Meath Hospital, Dublin.

-Having been born in 1803, he was, in 1849, eight years older than Poe,

-who died destitute and forlorn at Baltimore in the same year. Both poets

-had been in abject poverty, both had been unfortunate in love, both had

-been consummate artists, both had been piteously unlucky in a thousand

-ways, and both had died the same year, and in common hospitals. Two more

-miserable stories it is impossible to find anywhere. I would recommend

-those of sensitive natures to confine their reading to the work these

-men did, and not to the misfortunes they laboured under, and the follies

-they committed. I think, of the two, Mangan suffered more acutely; for<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_142" id="page_142"></a>{142}</span>

-he never rose up in anger against the world, or those around him, but

-glided like an uncomplaining ghost into the grave, where, long before

-his death, all his hopes lay buried. He had only a half-hearted pity for

-himself. Poe, in his <i>Raven</i>, is, all the time of his most pathetic and

-terrible complaining, conscious that he complains as becomes a fine

-artist. But the raven’s croak does not touch the heart. It appeals to

-the intellect; it affects the fancy, the imagination, the ear, the eye.

-When Mangan opens his bosom and shows you the ravens that prey upon him,

-he cannot repress something like a laugh at the thought that any one

-could be interested in him and his woes. See:</p>

-

-<h3>THE NAMELESS ONE.</h3>

-

-<p class="c">BALLAD.</p>

-

-<h4>I.</h4>

-

-<div class="poetry">

-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">“Roll forth, my song, like the rushing river,<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">That sweeps along to the mighty sea;<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">God will inspire me while I deliver<br /></span>

-<span class="i8">My soul of thee!<br /></span>

-</div></div>

-</div>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_143" id="page_143"></a>{143}</span></p>

-

-<h4>II.</h4>

-

-<div class="poetry">

-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">“Tell thou the world, when my bones lie whitening<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">Amid the last homes of youth and eld,<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">That there was once one whose veins ran lightning<br /></span>

-<span class="i8">No eye beheld.<br /></span>

-</div></div>

-</div>

-

-<h4>III.</h4>

-

-<div class="poetry">

-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">“Tell how his boyhood was one drear night-hour,<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">How shone for <i>him</i>, through his griefs and gloom,<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">No star of all heaven sends to light our<br /></span>

-<span class="i8">Path to the tomb.<br /></span>

-</div></div>

-</div>

-

-<h4>IV.</h4>

-

-<div class="poetry">

-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">“Roll on, my song, and to after ages<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">Tell how, disdaining all earth can give,<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">He would have taught men from wisdom’s pages<br /></span>

-<span class="i8">The way to live.<br /></span>

-</div></div>

-</div>

-

-<h4>V.</h4>

-

-<div class="poetry">

-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">“And tell how, trampled, derided, hated,<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">And worn by weakness, disease, and wrong,<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">He fled for shelter to God, who mated<br /></span>

-<span class="i8">His soul with song&mdash;<br /></span>

-</div></div>

-</div>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_144" id="page_144"></a>{144}</span></p>

-

-<h4>VI.</h4>

-

-<div class="poetry">

-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">“With song which alway, sublime or vapid,<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">Flowed like a rill in the morning beam,<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">Perchance not deep, but intense and rapid&mdash;<br /></span>

-<span class="i8">A mountain stream.<br /></span>

-</div></div>

-</div>

-

-<h4>VII.</h4>

-

-<div class="poetry">

-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">“Tell how the Nameless, condemned for years long<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">To herd with demons from hell beneath,<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">Saw things that made him, with groans and tears, long<br /></span>

-<span class="i8">For even death.<br /></span>

-</div></div>

-</div>

-

-<h4>VIII.</h4>

-

-<div class="poetry">

-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">“Go on to tell how, with genius wasted,<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">Betrayed in friendship, befooled in love,<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">With spirit shipwrecked and young hopes blasted,<br /></span>

-<span class="i8">He still, still strove.<br /></span>

-</div></div>

-</div>

-

-<h4>IX.</h4>

-

-<div class="poetry">

-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">“Till, spent with toil, dreeing death for others,<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">And some whose hands should have wrought for <i>him</i><br /></span>

-<span class="i1">(If children live not for sires and mothers),<br /></span>

-<span class="i8">His mind grew dim.<br /></span>

-</div></div>

-</div>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_145" id="page_145"></a>{145}</span></p>

-

-<h4>X.</h4>

-

-<div class="poetry">

-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">“And he fell far through the pit abysmal,<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">The gulf and grave of Maginn and Burns,<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">And pawned his soul for the devil’s dismal<br /></span>

-<span class="i8">Stock of returns.<br /></span>

-</div></div>

-</div>

-

-<h4>XI.</h4>

-

-<div class="poetry">

-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">“But yet redeemed it in days of darkness,<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">And shapes and signs of the final wrath,<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">Where death in hideous and ghastly starkness<br /></span>

-<span class="i8">Stood in his path.<br /></span>

-</div></div>

-</div>

-

-<h4>XII.</h4>

-

-<div class="poetry">

-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">“And tell how now, amid wreck and sorrow,<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">And want and sickness and houseless nights,<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">He bides in calmness the silent morrow<br /></span>

-<span class="i8">That no ray lights.<br /></span>

-</div></div>

-</div>

-

-<h4>XIII.</h4>

-

-<div class="poetry">

-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">“And lives he still, then? Yes! old and hoary<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">At thirty-nine, from despair and woe,<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">He lives enduring what future story<br /></span>

-<span class="i8">Will never know.<br /></span>

-</div></div>

-</div>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_146" id="page_146"></a>{146}</span></p>

-

-<h4>XIV.</h4>

-

-<div class="poetry">

-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">“Him grant a grave to, ye pitying noble,<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">Deep in your bosoms! There let him dwell!<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">He, too, had tears for all souls in trouble,<br /></span>

-<span class="i8">Here and in hell.”<br /></span>

-</div></div>

-</div>

-

-<p>The burden of all his song is sad, and in his translations he has chosen

-chiefly themes which echoed the harpings of his own soul. He began life

-as a copying clerk in an attorney’s office, and had for some time to

-support wholly, or in the main, a mother and sister. In Mitchel’s

-preface there are many passages almost as fine as the verse of the poet.

-Here is one, long as it is, that must find a place. Mitchel is speaking

-of the days when Mangan was in the attorney’s office:&mdash;</p>

-

-<div class="blockquot"><p>“At what age he devoted himself to this drudgery, at what age he

-left it, or was discharged from it, does not appear; for his whole

-biography documents are wanting, the man having never, for one

-moment, imagined that his poor life could interest any surviving

-human being, and having never, accordingly, collected his

-biographical assets, and appointed a literary executor to take care

-of his posthumous fame. Neither did he ever acquire the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_147" id="page_147"></a>{147}</span> habit,

-common enough among literary men, of dwelling upon his own early

-trials, struggles, and triumphs. But those who knew him in after

-years can remember with what a shuddering and loathing horror he

-spoke&mdash;when at rare intervals he could be induced to speak at

-all&mdash;of his labours with the scrivener and attorney. He was shy and

-sensitive, with exquisite sensibilities and fine impulses; eye,

-ear, and soul open to all the beauty, music, and glory of heaven

-and earth; humble, gentle, and unexacting; modestly craving nothing

-in the world but celestial, glorified life, seraphic love, and a

-throne among the immortal gods (that’s all); and he was eight or

-ten years scribbling deeds, pleadings, and bills in Chancery.”</p></div>

-

-<p>There is, I believe, but one portrait of him in existence, and a copy of

-it hangs on the wall of the room in which I am writing, a few feet in

-front of my eyes. It is not a face easy to describe. Beauty is the chief

-characteristic of it. But it is not the beauty that men admire or that

-inspires love in women. It is not the face of a poet or a visionary or a

-thinker. There is no passion in it; not even the passionate sadness of

-his own verse. It is not the face of a man who has suffered greatly, or

-rejoiced in ecstasy. It is the face of a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_148" id="page_148"></a>{148}</span> fleshless, worn man of forty,

-with hair pressed back from the forehead and ear. I have been looking at

-it for a long time, trying to find out something positive about it, and

-I have failed. It is not interesting. It is the face of a man who is

-done with the world and humanity. It is the face of a dead man whose

-spirit has passed away, while the body remains alive. The eyes are open,

-and have light in them; the face would be more complete if the light

-were out, and the lids drawn down and composed for the blind tomb.</p>

-

-<p>He gives a picture of his mental attitude at about the time this

-portrait was taken:&mdash;</p>

-

-<h3>TWENTY GOLDEN YEARS AGO.</h3>

-

-<h4>I.</h4>

-

-<div class="poetry">

-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">“Oh, the rain, the weary, dreary rain,<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">How it plashes on the window-sill!<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">Night, I guess too, must be on the wane,<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">Strass and Gass around are grown so still.<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">Here I sit with coffee in my cup&mdash;<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">Ah, ’twas rarely I beheld it flow<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">In the tavern where I loved to sup<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">Twenty golden years ago!<br /></span>

-</div></div>

-</div>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_149" id="page_149"></a>{149}</span></p>

-

-<h4>II.</h4>

-

-<div class="poetry">

-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">“Twenty years ago, alas!&mdash;but stay&mdash;<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">On my life, ’tis half-past twelve o’clock!<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">After all, the hours <i>do</i> slip away&mdash;<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">Come, here goes to burn another block!<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">For the night, or morn, is wet and cold;<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">And my fire is dwindling rather low:<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">I had fire enough, when young and bold<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">Twenty golden years ago.<br /></span>

-</div></div>

-</div>

-

-<h4>III.</h4>

-

-<div class="poetry">

-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">“Dear! I don’t feel well at all, somehow:<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">Few in Weimar dream how bad I am;<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">Floods of tears grow common with me now,<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">High-Dutch floods that Reason cannot dam.<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">Doctors think I’ll neither live nor thrive<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">If I mope at home so&mdash;I don’t know&mdash;<br /></span>

-<span class="i1"><i>Am</i> I living <i>now</i>? I <i>was</i> alive<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">Twenty golden years ago.<br /></span>

-</div></div>

-</div>

-

-<h4>IV.</h4>

-

-<div class="poetry">

-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">“Wifeless, friendless, flagonless, alone,<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">Not quite bookless, though, unless I choose;<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">Left with naught to do, except to groan,<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">Not a soul to woo, except the Muse.<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">Oh, this is hard for <i>me</i> to bear&mdash;<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">Me who whilom lived so much <i>en haut</i>&mdash;<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">Me who broke all hearts like china-ware,<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">Twenty golden years ago.<br /></span>

-</div></div>

-</div>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_150" id="page_150"></a>{150}</span></p>

-

-<h4>V.</h4>

-

-<div class="poetry">

-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">“Perhaps ’tis better;&mdash;time’s defacing waves<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">Long have quenched the radiance of my brow&mdash;<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">They who curse me nightly from their graves<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">Scarce could love me were they living now;<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">But my loneliness hath darker ills&mdash;<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">Such dun duns as Conscience, Thought, &amp; Co.,<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">Awful Gorgons! Worse than tailors’ bills<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">Twenty golden years ago.<br /></span>

-</div></div>

-</div>

-

-<h4>VI.</h4>

-

-<div class="poetry">

-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">“Did I paint a fifth of what I feel,<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">Oh, how plaintive you would ween I was!<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">But I won’t, albeit I have a deal<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">More to wail about than Kerner has!<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">Kerner’s tears are wept for withered flowers;<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">Mine for withered hopes; my scroll of woe<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">Dates, alas! from youth’s deserted bowers,<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">Twenty golden years ago.<br /></span>

-</div></div>

-</div>

-

-<h4>VII.</h4>

-

-<div class="poetry">

-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">“Yet, may Deutschland’s bardlings flourish long!<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">Me, I tweak no beak among them;&mdash;hawks<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">Must not pounce on hawks: besides, in song<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">I could once beat all of them by chalks.<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">Though you find me, as I near my goal,<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">Sentimentalising like Rousseau,<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">Oh, I had a great Byronian soul<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">Twenty golden years ago!<br /></span>

-</div></div>

-</div>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_151" id="page_151"></a>{151}</span></p>

-

-<h4>VIII.</h4>

-

-<div class="poetry">

-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">“Tick-tick, tick-tick!&mdash;not a sound save Time’s,<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">And the wind gust as it drives the rain&mdash;<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">Tortured torturer of reluctant rhymes,<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">Go to bed and rest thine aching brain!<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">Sleep!&mdash;no more the dupe of hopes or schemes;<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">Soon thou sleepest where the thistles blow;<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">Curious anti-climax to thy dreams<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">Twenty golden years ago!”<br /></span>

-</div></div>

-</div>

-

-<p>I find myself now in a great puzzle. I want, first of all, to say I

-think it most melancholy that Mangan, when of full age and judgment,

-should have thought Byron had “a great Byronian soul.” Observe, he does

-not mean that he had a soul greatly like Byron’s, but that he had a soul

-like the great soul of Byron. I do not believe Byron had a great soul at

-all. I believe he was simply a fine stage-manager of melodrama, the

-finest that ever lived, and that as a property-master he was unrivalled;

-but that to please no one, himself included, could he have written the

-play. I am not descending to so defiling a depth as to talk about

-plagiarism. What I wish to say is, that whether Byron stole<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_152" id="page_152"></a>{152}</span> or not made

-not the least difference in the world, for he never by the aid of his

-gifts or his thefts wrote a poem. I wanted further to say of Byron that

-there was nothing great about him except his vanity. Suddenly I

-remembered some words of the critic of whom I spoke a while back, in

-dealing with the question of poetical poetry and poems. I took down the

-printed page, where I found these lines:&mdash;</p>

-

-<div class="blockquot"><p>“Mr. Swinburne’s poetry is almost altogether poetical. Not all the

-poetry of even the Poets is so, and to one who loves this dear and

-intimate quality of which we speak, Coleridge, for instance, is a

-poet of some four poems, Wordsworth of some sixteen, Keats of five,

-Byron of none, though Byron is <i>great and eloquent</i>, but the thing

-we prize so much is far away from eloquence. Poetical poetry is the

-inner garden; there grows the ‘flower of the mind.’<span class="leftspc">”</span></p></div>

-

-<p>Now, my difficulty is plain. My critic, who is also a poet, says Byron

-is great, and I find fault with Mangan for saying Byron had a great

-Byronian soul. Here are two of my select authors against me. Plainly,

-the best thing I can do is say nothing at all about the matter!<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_153" id="page_153"></a>{153}</span></p>

-

-<p><i>Twenty Golden Years Ago</i> is by no means a poetical poem, but there is

-poetry in it. There is no poetical poem by Mangan. But he has written no

-serious verses in which there is not poetry.</p>

-

-<p>After giving Mangan’s own verse account of what he was like in his own

-regard at about forty years of age, I copy what Mitchel saw when the

-poet was first pointed out to him:&mdash;</p>

-

-<div class="blockquot"><p>“Being in the College Library [Trinity, Dublin], and having

-occasion for a book in that gloomy apartment of the institution

-called the ‘Fagal Library,’ which is the innermost recess of the

-stately building, an acquaintance pointed out to me a man perched

-on the top of a ladder, with the whispered information that the

-figure was Clarence Mangan. It was an unearthly and ghostly figure,

-in a brown garment; the same garment (to all appearance), which

-lasted till the day of his death. The blanched hair was totally

-unkempt; the corpse-like features still as marble; a large book was

-in his arms, and all his soul was in the book. I had never heard of

-Clarence Mangan before, and knew not for what he was celebrated,

-whether as a magician, a poet, or a murderer; yet took a volume and

-spread it on a table, not to read, but with the pretence of reading

-to gaze on the spectral creature on the ladder.”</p></div>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_154" id="page_154"></a>{154}</span></p>

-

-<p>I never met any one who had known Mangan. Mitchel did not know the name

-of the woman who lured him on with smiles that seemed to promise love.

-He always addressed her in his poems as Frances. Some time ago the name

-of the woman was divulged. It is ungallant of me to have forgotten it,

-but such is the case. The address at which Mangan visited her was in

-Mountpleasant Square, Dublin. At the time I saw the name of the lady I

-looked into a directory of 1848 which I happened to have by me, and

-found a different name at the address given in the Square. I know the

-love affair of the poet took place years before his death in 1849, but

-people in quiet and unpretentious houses in Dublin, or correctly

-Ranelagh, often live a whole generation in the same house.</p>

-

-<p>Here I find myself in a second puzzle. So long as I thought merely of

-writing this rambling account of “My Borrowed Poet,” I decided upon

-trying to say something about the stupidity of women and poets in

-general. But I don’t feel in case to do so when I glance up at the face

-of Mangan hanging on the wall, and bring<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_155" id="page_155"></a>{155}</span> myself to realise the fact

-that this face now looking so dead and unburied was young and bright and

-perhaps cheerful when he went wooing in Ranelagh.</p>

-

-<p>Instead of saying anything wise and stupid and commonplace about either

-poets or women, let me quote here stanzas which must have been written

-some day when he saw sunshine among the clouds:&mdash;</p>

-

-<h3>THE MARINER’S BRIDE.</h3>

-

-<div class="poetry">

-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">“Look, mother! the mariner’s rowing<br /></span>

-<span class="i3">His galley adown the tide;<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">I’ll go where the mariner’s going,<br /></span>

-<span class="i3">And be the mariner’s bride!<br /></span>

-</div><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">“I saw him one day through the wicket,<br /></span>

-<span class="i3">I opened the gate and we met&mdash;<br /></span>

-<span class="i3">As a bird in the fowler’s net,<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">Was I caught in my own green thicket.<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">O mother, my tears are flowing,<br /></span>

-<span class="i3">I’ve lost my maidenly pride&mdash;<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">I’ll go if the mariner’s going,<br /></span>

-<span class="i3">And be the mariner’s bride!<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_156" id="page_156"></a>{156}</span><br /></span>

-</div><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">“This Love the tyrant winces,<br /></span>

-<span class="i3">Alas! an omnipotent might,<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">He darkens the mind like night,<br /></span>

-<span class="i3">He treads on the necks of Princes!<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">O mother, my bosom is glowing,<br /></span>

-<span class="i3">I’ll go whatever betide,<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">I’ll go where the mariners going,<br /></span>

-<span class="i3">And be the mariner’s bride!<br /></span>

-</div><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">“Yes, mother! the spoiler has reft me<br /></span>

-<span class="i3">Of reason and self-control;<br /></span>

-<span class="i3">Gone, gone is my wretched soul,<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">And only my body is left me!<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">The winds, O mother, are blowing,<br /></span>

-<span class="i3">The ocean is bright and wide;<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">I’ll go where the mariner’s going,<br /></span>

-<span class="i3">And be the mariner’s bride.”<br /></span>

-</div></div>

-</div>

-

-<p>This appears among the Apocrypha, and is credited by Mangan to the

-“Spanish;” but it is safe to assume when he is so vague that the poem is

-original. It is one of the most bright and cheerful he has given us. The

-only touch of sorrow we feel is for the poor mother who is about to lose

-so impulsive and vivacious a daughter. The time of this delightful

-ballad is not clearly defined, but we may be absolutely<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_157" id="page_157"></a>{157}</span> certain that we

-of this moribund nineteenth century will never meet except at a function

-of a recondite spiritual medium even the great grandchild of the

-Mariner’s Bride. How much more is our devout gratitude due to a good and

-pious spiritualist than to any riotous and licentious poet! The former

-can give us intercourse with the illustrious defunct of history; the

-latter can give us no more than the image of a figment, the phantom of a

-shade, the echo of sounds that never vibrated in the ear of man. All

-persons who believe the evidence adduced by poets are the victims of

-subornation.</p>

-

-<p>A saw-mill does not seem a good subject for a “copy of verses.” Mangan

-died single and in poverty, and was buried by his friends. Listen:&mdash;</p>

-

-<h3>THE SAW-MILL.</h3>

-

-<div class="poetry">

-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">“My path lay towards the Mourne again,<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">But I stopped to rest by the hill-side<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">That glanced adown o’er the sunken glen<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">Which the Saw-and Water-mills hide,<br /></span>

-<span class="i5">Which now, as then,<br /></span>

-<span class="i0"><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_158" id="page_158"></a>{158}</span>   The Saw-and Water-mills hide.<br /></span>

-</div><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">“And there, as I lay reclined on the hill,<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">Like a man made by sudden <i>qualm</i> ill,<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">I heard the water in the Water-mill,<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">And I saw the saw in the Saw-mill!<br /></span>

-<span class="i5">As I thus lay still<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">I saw the saw in the Saw-mill!<br /></span>

-</div><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">“The saw, the breeze, and the humming bees,<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">Lulled me into a dreamy reverie,<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">Till the objects round me&mdash;hills, mills, trees,<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">Seemed grown alive all and every&mdash;<br /></span>

-<span class="i5">By slow degrees<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">Took life as it were, all and every!<br /></span>

-</div><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">“Anon the sound of the waters grew<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">To a Mourne-ful ditty,<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">And the song of the tree that the saw sawed through<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">Disturbed my spirit with pity,<br /></span>

-<span class="i5">Began to subdue<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">My spirit with tenderest pity!<br /></span>

-</div><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">“<span class="leftspc">‘</span>Oh, wanderer, the hour that brings thee back<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">Is of all meet hours the meetest.<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">Thou now, in sooth art on the Track,<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">And nigher to Home than thou weetest;<br /></span>

-<span class="i5">Thou hast thought Time slack,<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">But his flight has been of the fleetest!<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_159" id="page_159"></a>{159}</span><br /></span>

-</div><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">“<span class="leftspc">‘</span>For this it is that I dree such pain<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">As, when wounded, even a plank will;<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">My bosom is pierced, is rent in twain,<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">That thine may ever bide tranquil.<br /></span>

-<span class="i5">May ever remain<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">Henceforward untroubled and tranquil.<br /></span>

-</div><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">“<span class="leftspc">‘</span>In a few days more, most Lonely One!<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">Shall I, as a narrow ark, veil<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">Thine eyes from the glare of the world and sun<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">’Mong the urns of yonder dark vale&mdash;<br /></span>

-<span class="i5">In the cold and dun<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">Recesses of yonder dark vale!<br /></span>

-</div><div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">“<span class="leftspc">‘</span>For this grieve not! Thou knowest what thanks<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">The Weary-souled and Meek owe<br /></span>

-<span class="i1">To Death!’ I awoke, and heard four planks<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">Fall down with a saddening echo.<br /></span>

-<span class="i5"><i>I heard four planks</i><br /></span>

-<span class="i2"><i>Fall down with a hollow echo.</i>”<br /></span>

-</div></div>

-</div>

-

-<p>This was the epithalamium of James Clarence Mangan sung by himself.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_160" id="page_160"></a>{160}</span></p>

-

-<h2><a name="THE_ENGLISH_OPIUM-EATER" id="THE_ENGLISH_OPIUM-EATER"></a>THE ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER.</h2>

-

-<p><span class="smcap">I bought</span> my copy new for fourpence-halfpenny, in Holywell Street. It was

-published by George Routledge and Sons, of the Broadway, London. The

-little volume is made up of a “Preface,” by Thomas de Quincey;

-“Confessions of an English Opium-eater;” and “Notes from the Pocket-book

-of a late Opium-eater;” including “Walking Stewart,” “On the Knocking at

-the Gates in <i>Macbeth</i>,” and “On Suicide.” When it last left my hands it

-boasted a paper cover, on which appeared the head of the illustrious

-Laker. At my elbow now it lies, divested of its shield; and I sit face

-to face with the title-page, as though my author had taken off his hat

-and overcoat, and I were asking him which he preferred, clear or thick

-soup, while the servant stood behind filling his glass<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_161" id="page_161"></a>{161}</span> with

-Amontillado. How that cover came to be removed I do not know. The last

-borrower was of the less destructive sex, and I am at a great loss to

-account for the injury.</p>

-

-<p>I object to the presence of “Walking Stewart,” and “On Suicide,”

-otherwise I count my copy perfect. With the exception of <i>Robinson

-Crusoe</i> and Poe’s <i>Tales</i> I have read nothing so often as the

-<i>Opium-eater</i>. Only twice in my life up to five-and-twenty years of age

-did I sit up all night to read a book: once when about midnight I came

-into possession of <i>Enoch Arden</i>, and a second time when, at the same

-witching hour I drew a red cloth-bound edition of the <i>Opium-eater</i> out

-of my pocket, in my lonely, dreary bedroom, five hundred miles from

-where I am now writing. The household were all asleep, and I by no means

-strong of nerve. The room was large, the dwelling ghostly. I sat in an

-embrasure of one of the windows, with a little table supporting the

-candles on one side, and on the other a small movable bookcase. Thus I

-was in a kind of dock, only open on one side, that fronting the room. It

-was in<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_162" id="page_162"></a>{162}</span> the beginning of autumn, and a low, warm wind blew the

-complaining rain against the pane on a level with my ear. At that time I

-had not seen London, and I remember being overpowered and broken before

-the spectacle of that sensitive and imaginative boy in the text, hungry

-and forlorn, in the unsympathetic mass of innumerable houses, every door

-of which was shut against him.</p>

-

-<p>As I read on and the hour grew late, the succession of splendours and

-terrors wrought on my imagination, until I felt cold and exhausted, and

-had scarcely strength to sit upright in my chair. My hand trembled, and

-my mind became tremulously apprehensive of something vague and awful; I

-could not tell what. Sounds of the night which I had heard a thousand

-times before, which were as familiar to me as the bell of my parish

-church, now assumed dire, uncertain imports. The rattling of the sash

-was not the work of the wind, not the work of ghostly hands, but worse

-still, of human hands belonging to men in some more dire extremity than

-the approach of death. The beating<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_163" id="page_163"></a>{163}</span> of the rain against the glass was

-made to cover voices trying to tell me secrets I could not hear and

-live, and which yet I would have given my life to know.</p>

-

-<p>I cannot tell why I was so exhilarated by terror. The <i>Confessions</i>

-alone are not calculated to produce inexplicable disturbance of the

-mind. It may be I had eaten little or nothing that day; it may be I had

-steeped myself too deeply in nicotine. All I know for certain is that I

-was in such a state of abject panic I had not courage to cross the room

-to my bed. It was in the dreary, pitiless, raw hour before the dawn I

-finished the book. Then I found I durst not rise. I put down the book

-and looked at the candles. They would last till daylight.</p>

-

-<p>I would have given all the world to lie on that bed over there, with my

-back secure against it, warmed by it, comforted by it. But that open

-space was more terrible to me than if it were filled with flame. I

-should have been much more at my ease in the dark, yet I could not bring

-myself to blow out the lights;<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_164" id="page_164"></a>{164}</span> not because I dreaded the darkness, but

-because I shrank from encountering the possibilities of that awful

-moment of twilight between the full light of the candles and the blank

-gloom.</p>

-

-<p>When I thought of blowing out the lights and imagined the dread of

-catching a glimpse of some spectacle of supreme horror, I imprudently

-gave my imagination rein, and set myself to find out what would terrify

-me most. All at once, and before I had made more than the inquiry of my

-mind, I saw in fancy between me and the bed, a thing of unapproachable

-terror; I had not been recently reading <i>Christabel</i>, and yet it must

-have been remotely from that poem I conjured the spectre which so awed

-me. I placed out in the open of the room on the floor, between me and

-the door, and close to a straight line drawn between me and the bed, a

-figure shrouded in a black cloak, from hidden shoulder to invisible

-feet. Over the head of this figure was cast a cowl, which completely

-concealed the head and face. At any moment the cloak might open and

-disclose the body of that figure. I knew the body<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_165" id="page_165"></a>{165}</span> of that figure was a

-“thing to dream of, not to see.” I felt sure I should lose my reason if

-the cloak opened and discovered the loathsome body. I had no idea what I

-should see, but I knew I should go mad.</p>

-

-<p>In my dock by the window, and with the light behind my eyes I felt

-secure. But at that moment no earthly consideration, no consideration

-whatever, would have induced me to face that ghostly form in the flicker

-of expiring light. I was not under any delusion. I knew then as well as

-I know now that there was no object on which the normal human eye could

-exercise itself between me and the bed. I deliberately willed the figure

-to appear, and although once I had summoned it I could not dismiss it, I

-had complete and self-possessed knowledge that I saw nothing with my

-physical eye. Moreover, full of potentiality for terror as that figure

-was in its present shape and attitude, it had no dread for me. I was

-fascinated by considering possibilities which I knew could not arise so

-long as the present circumstances remained unchanged. In<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_166" id="page_166"></a>{166}</span> other words, I

-knew I could trust my reason to keep my imagination in subjection, so

-long as my senses were not confused or my attention scared. If I

-attempted to extinguish the candles that figure might waver! if I moved

-across the floor it might get behind my back, and as I caught sight of

-it over my shoulder, the cloak might fall aside! Then I should go mad.

-Thus I sat and waited until daylight came. Then I fell asleep in my

-chair.</p>

-

-<p>As I have said, the copy of the <i>Opium-eater</i> I then had was bound in

-red cloth. It was a much handsomer book than the humble one published by

-Routledge. Since that memorable night many years ago in my high, dreary,

-lonely bedroom, I cannot tell you all the copies of the <i>Opium-eater</i>

-which have been mine. I remember another, bound in dark blue cloth, with

-copious notes. There was a third, the outside seeming of which I forget,

-but which I think formed part of two volumes of selections from De

-Quincey. I love my little sixpenny volume for one reason chiefly. I can

-lend it without fear, and lose it without a pang.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_167" id="page_167"></a>{167}</span> Why, the beggarliest

-miser alive can’t think much of fourpence-halfpenny! I have already

-dispensed a few copies of the <i>Opium-eater</i>, price fourpence-halfpenny.

-As it lies on my table now, I take no more care of it than one does of

-yesterday’s morning paper. When I read it I double it back, to show to

-myself how little I value the gross material of the book. Any one coming

-in likely to appreciate the book, and who has not read it is welcome to

-carry it off as a gift. Yet if I am free with the volume, I am jealous

-of the author. I do not mention his name to people I believe unwilling

-or unable to worship him becomingly.</p>

-

-<p>But when I meet a true disciple what prodigal joy environs and suffuses

-me! What talks of him I have had, and speechless raptures in hearing of

-him! How thick with gold the air of evenings has been, spent with him

-and one who loved him! I recall one glorious summer’s day, when an old

-friend and I (we were then, alas! years and years younger than we are

-to-day), had toiled on through mountain heather for hours, until we were

-half-baked<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_168" id="page_168"></a>{168}</span> by the sun and famished with thirst. Suddenly we came upon

-the topmost peak of all the hills, and saw, many miles away, the

-unexpected sea. As we stood, shading our eyes with our hands, my

-companion chanted out, “Obliquely to the right lay the many-languaged

-town of Liverpool; obliquely to the left ‘the multitudinous sea.’<span class="leftspc">”</span>

-“Whose is that?” I asked eagerly, notwithstanding my drought. “What

-isn’t Shakespeare’s is De Quincey’s.” “Where did you find it?” “In the

-<i>Opium-eater</i>.” I remember cursing my memory because I had forgotten

-that passage. When I got home I looked through the copy I then had, and

-could not find the sentence. I wrote to my friend, saying I could not

-come upon his quotation. He answered that he now believed it did not

-occur in the body of the <i>Confessions</i>, but in a note in some edition,

-he could not remember which. What a sense of miserable desolation I had

-that this edition had never come my way!</p>

-

-<p>There are only three marks of any kind in my present copy of the

-<i>Confessions</i>, one dealing<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_169" id="page_169"></a>{169}</span> with the semi-voluntary power children have

-over the coming and going of phantoms painted on the darkness. This mark

-is very indistinct, and, as I remember nothing about it, I think it must

-have been made by accident. The part indicated by it is only

-introductory to an unmarked passage immediately following which has

-always fascinated my imagination. It is in the “Pains of Opium,” and

-runs:&mdash;</p>

-

-<div class="blockquot"><p>“In the middle of 1817, I think it was, that this faculty became

-positively distressing to me: at night, when I lay awake in bed,

-vast processions passed along in mournful pomp, friezes of

-never-ending stories, that to my feelings were as sad and solemn as

-if they were stories drawn from times before Œdipus and

-Priam&mdash;before Tyre&mdash;before Memphis. And at the same time a

-corresponding change took place in my dreams: a theatre seemed

-suddenly opened and lighted up within my brain, which presented

-nightly spectacles of more than earthly splendour.”</p></div>

-

-<p>How thankful we ought to be that it has never been our fate to sit in

-that awful theatre of prehistoric woes! There is surely nothing more

-appalling in the past than the interminably vain activities of that

-mysterious<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_170" id="page_170"></a>{170}</span> atomie, Egyptian man. Who could bear to look upon the three

-hundred thousand ant-like slaves swarming among the colossal monoliths

-piled up in thousands for the pyramid of Cheops! The bare thought makes

-one start back aghast and shudder.</p>

-

-<p>I find the next mark opposite another awful passage dealing with

-infinity, on this occasion infinity of numbers, not of time:&mdash;</p>

-

-<div class="blockquot"><p>“The waters now changed their character,&mdash;from translucent lakes,

-shining like mirrors, they now became seas and oceans. And now came

-a tremendous change, which, unfolding itself slowly like a scroll,

-through many months, promised an abiding torment; and, in fact, it

-never left me until the winding-up of my case. Hitherto the human

-face had mixed often in my dreams, but not despotically, not with

-any special power of tormenting. But now, that which I have called

-the tyranny of the human face began to unfold itself. Perhaps some

-part of my London life might be answerable for this. Be that as it

-may, now it was that upon the rocking waters of the ocean the human

-face began to appear: the sea appeared paved with innumerable

-faces, upturned to the heavens&mdash;faces imploring, wrathful,

-despairing, surged upwards by thousands, by myriads, by

-generations, by centuries.”</p></div>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_171" id="page_171"></a>{171}</span></p>

-

-<p>Upon closer looking, I see an attempt has been made to erase the mark

-opposite this passage. Joining the fact with the faintness of the line

-opposite the former quotation I am driven to the conclusion that there

-is only one “stetted” note of admiration in the book. It is a whole page

-of the little volume. It begins on page 91, and ends on page 92. To show

-you how little I care for my copy of the <i>Confessions</i>, I shall cut it

-out. Even a lawyer would pay me more than fourpence-halfpenny for

-copying a page of the book, and, as I have said before, the volume has

-no extrinsic value for me. Excepting the Bible, I am not familiar with

-any finer passage of so great length in prose in the English language:&mdash;</p>

-

-<div class="blockquot"><p>“The dream commenced with a music which now I often heard in

-dreams; a music of preparation and awakening suspense; a music like

-the opening of the Coronation Anthem, and which, like <i>that</i>, gave

-the feeling of a vast march&mdash;of infinite cavalcades filing off&mdash;and

-the tread of innumerable armies. The morning was come of a mighty

-day&mdash;a day of crisis and of final hope for human nature, then

-suffering some mysterious eclipse, and labouring in some dread

-extremity. Somewhere,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_172" id="page_172"></a>{172}</span> I knew not where&mdash;somehow, I knew not

-how&mdash;by some beings, I knew not whom&mdash;a battle, a strife, an agony

-was conducting, was evolving like a great drama, or piece of music;

-with which my sympathy was the more insupportable from my confusion

-as to its place, its cause, its nature, and its possible issue. I,

-as is usual in dreams (where, of necessity, we make ourselves

-central to every movement), had the power and yet had not the

-power, to decide it. I had the power, if I could raise myself, to

-will it; and yet again had not the power, for the weight of twenty

-Atlantics was upon me, or the oppression of inexpiable guilt.

-‘Deeper than ever plummet sounded,’ I lay inactive. Then, like a

-chorus, the passion deepened. Some greater interest was at stake;

-some mightier cause than ever yet the sword had pleaded or trumpet

-had proclaimed. Then came sudden alarms; hurryings to and fro;

-trepidations of innumerable fugitives, I knew not whether from the

-good cause or the bad; darkness and lights; tempest and human

-faces; and at last, with the sense that all was lost, female forms,

-and the features that were all the world to me, and but a moment

-allowed, and clasped hands, and heart-breaking partings, and

-then&mdash;everlasting farewells! and with a sigh such as the caves of

-hell sighed when the incestuous mother uttered the abhorred name of

-death, the sound was reverberated&mdash;everlasting farewells! and again

-and yet again reverberated&mdash;everlasting farewells! And I awoke in

-struggles, and cried aloud, ‘I will sleep no more!’<span class="leftspc">”</span></p></div>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_173" id="page_173"></a>{173}</span></p>

-

-<p>Upon reading this passage over I am glad I am not familiar with any

-finer one in English prose&mdash;it would be impossible to endure it. In

-these sentences it is not the consummate style alone that overwhelms

-one, the matter is nearly as fine as the manner. How tremendously the

-numbers and sentences are marshalled! How inevitable, overbearing,

-breathless is the onward movement! What awful expectations are aroused,

-and shadowy fears vaguely realized! As the spectral pageant moves on

-other cohorts of trembling shades join the ghostly legion on the blind

-march! All is vaporous, spectral, spiritual, until when we are wound up

-to the highest pitch of physical awe and apprehension, we stop suddenly,

-arrested by failure of the ground, insufficiency of the road, and are

-recalled to life and light and truth and fellowship with the kindly race

-of man by the despairing human shriek of incommunicable, inarticulable

-agony in the words, “I will sleep no more!” In that despairing cry the

-tortured soul abjectly confesses that it has been vanquished and driven

-wild by the spirit-world.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_174" id="page_174"></a>{174}</span> It is when you contrast the finest passages

-in Macaulay with such a passage as this, that you recognise the

-difference between a clever writer and a great stylist.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_175" id="page_175"></a>{175}</span></p>

-

-<h2><a name="A_GUIDE_TO_IGNORANCE" id="A_GUIDE_TO_IGNORANCE"></a>A GUIDE TO IGNORANCE.</h2>

-

-<p><span class="smcap">For</span> a long time I have had it in my mind to write a guide to ignorance.

-I have been withheld partly by a feeling of diffidence and partly by a

-want of encouragement from those to whom I mentioned the scheme. I have

-submitted a plan of my book to a couple of publishers, but each of these

-assured me that such a work would not be popular. In their

-straightforward commercial way they told me they could see “no money in

-the idea.” I differ from them; I think the book would be greeted with

-acclaim and bought with avidity.</p>

-

-<p>Novelties are, I know, always dangerous speculations except in the form

-of clothes, when they are certain of instant and immense adoption. The

-mind of man cannot conceive the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_176" id="page_176"></a>{176}</span> pattern for trousers’ cloth or the

-design for a bonnet that will not be worn. There is nothing too high or

-too low to set the fashion to men and women in dress. Conquerors were

-crowned with mural wreaths, of which the chimney-pot hat is the lineal

-descendant; pigs started the notion of wearing rings in their noses, and

-man in the southern seas followed the example; kangaroos were the

-earliest pouch-makers and ladies took to carrying reticules.</p>

-

-<p>But an innovation in the domain of education or thought is a widely

-different thing from a frolic in gear. It is easy to set going any craze

-which depends merely or mostly on the way of wearing the hair or the

-height of the cincture. Hence æstheticism gained many followers in a

-little time. But remember it took ages and ages to reconcile people to

-wearing any clothes at all. Once you break the ice the immersion in a

-new custom may become as rapid as the descent of a round shot into the

-sea. The great step was, so to speak, from woad to wampum, with just an

-Atlantic<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_177" id="page_177"></a>{177}</span> of time between the two. If you went to Poole any day this

-week and asked him to make you a suit of wampum he would plead no

-insuperable difficulty. If you asked him to make you a suit of woad he

-would certainly detain you while he inquired as to your sanity and sent

-for your friends. Yet it is only one step, one film, from woad to

-wampum.</p>

-

-<p>Up to this time in the history of man there has, with few exceptions,

-been an infatuated pursuit of this will-o’-the-wisp, knowledge. Why

-should not man now turn his glance to ignorance, if it were only for a

-little while and for the sake of fair play? The idea is of course

-revolutionary, so also is every other new idea revolutionary, and (I am

-not now referring to politics) it is only from revolutionary ideas we

-derive what we regard as advantages. The earth and heavens themselves

-are revolutionary. Why then should we not fairly examine the chance of a

-revolution in the aim of man?</p>

-

-<p>The disinclination to face new attitudes of thought comes from the

-inherent laziness of man, and hence at the outset of my career<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_178" id="page_178"></a>{178}</span> towards

-that guide I should find nearly the whole race against me. Humboldt, who

-met people of all climes and races and colours, declares laziness to be

-the most common vice of human nature. Hence the initial obstacle is

-almost insuperable. But it is only almost, not quite insuperable. Men

-can be stirred from indolence only by a prospect of profit in some form.

-Even in the Civil Service they are incited to make the effort to

-continue living by the hope of greater leisure later in life, for with

-years comes promotion and promotion means less labour.</p>

-

-<p>By a little industry in the pursuit of ignorance greater repose would be

-attained in the immediate future. It would be very difficult to prove

-that up to this hour progress has been of the slightest use or pleasure

-to man. Higher pleasures, higher pains. Complexities of consciousness

-are merely a source of distraction from centralisation. The jelly fish

-may, after all, be the highest ideal of living things, and we may, if

-the phrase be admitted, have been developing backward from him. Of all

-the creatures on earth man is the most stuck<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_179" id="page_179"></a>{179}</span> up. He arrogates

-everything to himself and because he can split a flint or make a bow or

-gun-barrel he thinks he centres the universe, and insists that the

-illimitable deeps of space are focused upon him. Astronomers, a highly

-respectable class of people, assert there are now visible to us one

-hundred million fixed stars, one hundred million suns like our own. Each

-may have its system of planets, such as earth, and each planet again its

-attendant satellites. With that splendid magnanimity characteristic of

-our race, man would rather pitch the hundred million suns into chaos

-than for a moment entertain the idea that he is a humbug and of no use

-whatever. And yet after all the jelly-fish may be a worthier fellow than

-the best of us.</p>

-

-<p>I do not of course insist on reversion to the jelly-fish. In this

-climate his habits of life are too suggestive of ague and rheumatism. In

-fact I do not know that I am urging reversion to anything, even to the

-flocks of pastoral man. But I am saying that as myriads of facilities

-are given for acquiring<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_180" id="page_180"></a>{180}</span> knowledge, one humble means ought to be devised

-for acquiring ignorance. If I had anywhere met with the encouragement

-which I think I merited, I should have undertaken to write the book

-myself.</p>

-

-<p>I should open by saying it was not until I had concluded a long and

-painful investigation that I considered myself in any way qualified to

-undertake so grave and important a task as writing a guide to ignorance:

-that I had not only inquired curiously into my own fitness, but had also

-looked about carefully among my friends in the hope of finding some one

-better qualified to carry out this important undertaking. But upon

-gauging the depth of my own knowledge and considering conscientiously

-the capacity of my acquaintances, I came to the conclusion that no man I

-knew personally had so close a personal intimacy with ignorance as

-myself. There are few branches, I may say no branch, of knowledge except

-that of ignorance in which any one of my friends was not more learned

-than myself. I was born in such profound ignorance<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_181" id="page_181"></a>{181}</span> that I had no

-personal knowledge of the fact at the time. I had existed for a long

-time before I could distinguish between myself and things which were

-not.</p>

-

-<p>As a boy I was averse from study; and since I have grown to manhood I

-have acquired so little substantive information that I could write down

-in a bold hand on one page of this book every single fact, outside facts

-of personal experience, of which I am possessed.</p>

-

-<p>I know that the Norman invasion occurred in 1066, and the Great Fire in

-1666. I know that gunpowder is composed of saltpetre, sulphur, and

-charcoal, and sausages of minced meat and bread under the name of Tommy.

-I am aware Milton and Shakespeare were poets, and that needle-grinders

-are short lived. I know that the primest brands of three-shilling

-champagnes are made in London. I can give the Latin for seven words, and

-the French for four. I can repeat the multiplication table (with the

-pence) up to six times. I know the mere names of a number of people and

-things; but, as far as clear and definite information goes, I don’t

-believe I could<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_182" id="page_182"></a>{182}</span> double the above brief list. I am, I think, therefore,

-warranted in concluding that few men can have a more close or exhaustive

-personal acquaintance with ignorance. If you want learning at secondhand

-you must go to the learned: if you want ignorance at first hand you

-cannot possibly do better than come to me.</p>

-

-<p>In the first place let us consider the “Injury of Knowledge.” How much

-better off the king would be if he had no knowledge! Suppose his mental

-ken had never been directed to any period before the dawn of his own

-memory, he would have no disquieting thoughts of the trouble into which

-Charles I. or Richard II. drifted. He would be filled with no envy of

-the good old King John, who, from four or five ounces of iron in the

-form of thumb-screws, and a few hundredweight of rich Jew, filled up the

-royal pockets as often as they showed any signs of growing empty. And,

-above all, he would be spared the misery of committing dates to memory.

-How it must limit the happiness of a constitutional sovereign to know

-anything about the constitution! Why should he be<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_183" id="page_183"></a>{183}</span> burdened with the

-consciousness of rights and prerogatives? Would he not be much happier

-if he might smoke his cigar in his garden without the fear of the

-Speaker or the Lord Chancellor before his eyes? The Commons want their

-Speaker, the Lords want their Lord Chancellor&mdash;let them have them. The

-king wants neither. Why should he be troubled with any knowledge of

-either? Although he is a king is he not a man and a brother also? Why

-should he be worried out of his life with reasons for all he does? The

-king feels he can do no wrong. That ought to be enough for him. Most men

-believe the same thing of themselves, but few others share the faith.

-The king can do no wrong, then in mercy’s name let the man alone.

-Suppose it is a part of my duty to look out of the oriel window at dawn,

-noon, and sunset, why should I be bored with cause, reason, and

-precedent for this? Let me look out of window if it is my duty to do so;

-but, before and after looking out of the window, let me enjoy my life.</p>

-

-<p>Take the statesman. How knowledge must<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_184" id="page_184"></a>{184}</span> hamper him! He is absolutely

-precluded from acting with decision by the consciousness of the

-difficulties which lay in the path of his predecessors. He has to make

-up his subject, to get facts and figures from his subordinates and

-others. He has to arrange the party manœuvres before he launches his

-scheme, by which time all the energy is gone out of him, and he has not

-half as much faith in his bill as if he had never looked at the <i>pros</i>

-and <i>cons</i>. “Never mind manœuvring, but go at them,” said Nelson. The

-moment you begin to manœuvre you confess your doubtfulness of

-success, unless you can take your adversary at a disadvantage; but if

-you fly headlong at his throat, you terrify him by the display of your

-confidence and valour.</p>

-

-<p>The words of Nelson apply still more closely to the general. His

-knowledge that fifty years ago the British army was worsted on this

-field, unnerves, paralyses him. If he did not know that shells are

-explosive and bullets deadly, he would make his dispositions with twice

-the confidence, and his temerity would fill the foe<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_185" id="page_185"></a>{185}</span> with panic. His

-simple duty is to defeat the enemy, and knowing anything beyond this

-only tends to distract his mind and weaken his arm. In the middle of one

-of his Indian battles, and when he thought the conflict had been decided

-in favour of British arms, a messenger rode hastily up to the general in

-command, who was wiping his reeking forehead on his coat-sleeve: “A

-large fresh force of the enemy has appeared in such a place; what is to

-be done?” Gough rubbed his forehead with the other sleeve, and shouted

-out, “Beat ’em!” Obviously no better command could have been given. What

-the English nation wanted the English army to do with the enemy was to

-“beat ’em.” In the pictures of the Victoria Cross there is one of a

-young dandy officer with an eyeglass in his eye and a sword in his hand,

-among the thick of the foe. He knows he is in that place to kill some

-one. He is quite ignorant of the fact that the enemy is there to kill

-him, and he is taking his time and looking through his eyeglass to try

-to find some enticing man through whom to run his sword. One of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_186" id="page_186"></a>{186}</span>

-Wellington’s most fervent prayers was, “Oh, spare me my dandy officers!”

-Now dandies are never very full of knowledge, and yet the greatest Duke

-thought more of them than of your learning-begrimed sappers or your

-science-bespattered gunners.</p>

-

-<p>If an advocate at the bar knew one quarter of the law of the land, he

-could never get on. In the first place, he would know more than the

-judges, and this would prejudice the bench against him. With regard to a

-barrister, the best position for him to assume, if he is addressing a

-jury, is, “Gentlemen, the indisputable facts of the case, as stated to

-you by the witnesses, are so-and-so. In presence of so distinguished a

-lawyer as occupies the bench in this court, I do not feel myself

-qualified to tell you what the law is; that will be the easy duty of his

-lordship.” Even in Chancery cases, the barrister would best insure

-success by merely citing the precedent cases, in an off-hand way, “Does

-not your lordship think the case of Burke <i>v.</i> Hare meets the exact

-conditions of the one under consideration?” The indices<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_187" id="page_187"></a>{187}</span> are all the

-pleader need look at. The judge will surely strain a point for one who

-does not bore him with extracts and arguments, but leaves all to

-himself, and lets the work of the court run smoothly and just as the

-president wishes.</p>

-

-<p>Knowledge is an absolute hindrance to the doctor of medicine. Supposing

-he is a man of average intelligence (some doctors are), he is able to

-diagnose, let me say, fever. You or I could diagnose fever pretty

-well&mdash;quick pulse, dry skin, thirst, and so on. But as the doctor leans

-over the patient, he is paralysed by the complication of his knowledge.

-Such a theory is against feeding up, such a theory against slops, such a

-theory against bleeding, such a theory in favour of phlebotomy; there

-are the wet and the dry, the hot and the cold methods; and while the

-doctor is deliberating, vacillating, or speculating, the patient has

-ample opportunity of dying, or nature of stepping in and curing the man,

-and thus foiling the doctor. Is there not much more sense and candour in

-the method adopted by the Irish hunting<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_188" id="page_188"></a>{188}</span> dispensary doctor, who, before

-starting with the hounds, locked up all drugs, except the Glauber’s

-salts, a stone or two of which he left in charge of his servant, with

-instructions it was to be meted out impartially to all comers, each

-patient receiving an honest fistful as a dose? It is a remarkable fact

-that within this century homœopathy has gained a firm hold on an

-important section of the community, and yet, notwithstanding the growth

-of what the allopathists or regular profession regard as ignorant

-quackery, the span of human life has had six years added to it in eighty

-years. Still homœopathy is a practical confession of ignorance; for

-it says, in effect, “We don’t know exactly what Nature is trying to do,

-but let us give her a little help, and trust in luck.” Whereas allopathy

-pretended to know everything and to fight Nature. Here, in the result of

-years added to man’s life by the development of the ignorant system, we

-see once more the superiority of ignorance over knowledge.</p>

-

-<p>How full of danger to the unwedded men is knowledge owned by the widow!

-She has<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_189" id="page_189"></a>{189}</span> knowledge of the married state, in which she was far removed

-from all the troubles and responsibilities of life. She had her

-pin-money, her bills paid, stalls taken for her at the opera, agreeable

-company around her board, no occasion to face money difficulties. Now

-all that is changed. There is no elasticity in her revenue, no margin

-for the gratification of her whims; she has to pay her own bills, secure

-her own stalls; she cannot very well entertain company often, and all

-the unpleasantnesses of business matters press her sorely. Her knowledge

-tells her that, if she could secure a second husband, all would be

-pleasant again. It may be said that here knowledge is in favour of the

-widow. Yes; but it is against the “Community.” Remember, the “Community”

-is always a male.</p>

-

-<p>There is hardly any class or member of the community that does not

-suffer drawback or injury from knowledge. As I am giving only a crude

-outline of a design, I leave a great deal to the imagination of the

-reader. He will easily perceive how much happier and more free would be

-the man of business, the girl, the boy,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_190" id="page_190"></a>{190}</span> the scientist, the

-controversialist, and, above all, the literary man, if each knew little

-or nothing, instead of having pressed upon the attention from youth

-accumulated experiences, traditions, discoveries, and reasonings of many

-centuries.</p>

-

-<p>To the “Delights of Ignorance,” I should devote the consideration of man

-devoid of knowledge under various circumstances and in various

-positions.</p>

-

-<p>By the sea who does not love to lie “propt on beds of amaranth and moly,

-how sweet (while warm airs lull, blowing lowly), with half-dropt eyelids

-still, beneath a heaven dark and holy, to watch the long bright river

-drawing slowly his waters from the purple hill&mdash;to hear the dewy echoes

-calling from cave to cave through the thick-twined vine&mdash;to watch the

-emerald-coloured waters falling through many a woven acanthus wreath

-divine! Only to see and hear the far-off sparkling brine, only to hear

-were sweet, stretched out beneath the pine.” Just so! Is not that much

-better than bothering about gravitation and that wretched old clinker

-the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_191" id="page_191"></a>{191}</span> moon, and the tides, and how sea-water is made up of oxygen and

-hydrogen and chloride of sodium and bromide of something else, and fifty

-other things, not one of which has a tolerable smell when you meet it in

-a laboratory? Isn’t it better than thinking of the number of lighthouses

-built on the coast of Albion, and the tonnage which yearly is reported

-and cleared at the custom-houses of London, Liverpool, and that

-prosperous seaport of Bohemia! Isn’t it much better than improving the

-occasion by reading a hand-book on hydraulics or hydrostatics? Who on

-the seashore wants to know anything? There will always, down to the last

-syllable of recorded time, be finer things unknown about the sea than

-can be said about all other matters in the world. Trying to know

-anything about the sea is like shooting into the air an arrow attached

-to a pennyworth of string with a view to sounding space. If we threw all

-the knowledge we have into the ocean the Admiralty standards of

-high-water mark would not have to be altered one-millionth part of a

-line.</p>

-

-<p>What a blessing ignorance would be in<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_192" id="page_192"></a>{192}</span> an inn! Who would not dispense

-with a knowledge of all the miseries that follow in the wake of the vat

-when one is thirsty, and has before him amber sunset-coloured ale, and

-in his hand a capacious, long, cool-meaning churchwarden? Who would at

-such a moment cumber his mind with the unit of specific gravity used by

-excisemen in testing beer? Who would at such a moment care to calculate

-the toll exacted by the Chancellor of the Exchequer before each cool

-gulp may thrill with amazing joy the parched gullet?</p>

-

-<p>Who, when upon a journey, would care to know the precise pressure

-required to blow the boiler of the engine to pieces, or the number of

-people killed in collisions during the corresponding quarter of last

-year? Should we not be better in sickness for not knowing the exact

-percentage of deaths in cases of our class? In adversity should we not

-be infinitely happier were we in ignorance of the chance we ran of

-gaining a good position or of cutting our throats? Should we not enjoy

-our prosperity all the more if we were not, morning<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_193" id="page_193"></a>{193}</span> and evening,

-exercised by the fluctuations of the share-list, fluctuations in all

-likelihood destined never to increase or diminish our fortunes one

-penny? And oh, for ignorance in sleep! For sleep without dream, or

-nightmare, or memory! For sleep such as falls upon the body when the

-soul is done with it and away!</p>

-

-<p>But all this is only rambling talk and likely to come to nothing. I fear

-I shall never find a publisher for my great work. Upon reading over what

-I have written I am impressed by the faintness of the outline it

-displays of the book. In fact there is hardly any outline at all. It is

-no more clear than the figures thrown by a magic-lantern upon a fog. I

-have done nothing more than wave the sacred lamp of ignorance before

-your eyes. I daresay my friend the jelly-fish would shake his fat sides

-with laughter if he became aware of this futile effort to show how far

-we are removed from his state of blissful calm. I feel infinitely

-depressed and discouraged. I feel that not only will I not be hailed as

-a prophet in my own<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_194" id="page_194"></a>{194}</span> country, but that the age will have nothing to do

-with my scheme. It may be thought by many that there is something like

-treason in thus enrolling oneself under the banner of the jelly-fish.

-Egypt, Assyria, Greece, Carthage, and Rome have gone back from

-knowledge, and even the jelly-fish does not flourish on their sites. But

-is the condition of their sites the worse for lacking the jelly-fish?

-Perhaps the “silence, and desolation, and dim night” are better in those

-places than the blare of trumpets and the tramp of man. So far as we

-know man is the only being capable of doing evil or offending heaven.

-His absence may by nature be considered very good company. Whatever part

-of earth he can handle and move he has turned topsy-turvy. One day earth

-will turn on him and wipe him out altogether.</p>

-

-<p>For me and my great scheme for the book there is no hope. Man has always

-been accounted a poor creature when judged by a fellow man whom he does

-not appreciate. How can I be expected to go on taking an interest in<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_195" id="page_195"></a>{195}</span>

-man when not the most credulous or the most crafty publisher in London

-will as much as look at my <i>Guide to Ignorance</i>? I feel that my life is

-wasted and that my functions have been usurped by the School Board. I

-cool the air with sighs for the days when a philosopher might teach his

-disciples in the porch or the grove. I feel as if I could anticipate

-earth and turn on man. But some of the genial good nature of the

-jelly-fish still lingers in my veins. I will not finally desert man

-until man has finally deserted me. I had by me a few scattered essays in

-the style of the book I projected in vain. If in them the reader has not

-found ample proof of my fitness to inculcate the philosophy of Ignorance

-I shall abandon Man to his fate. I have relieved my mind of some of its

-teeming store of vacuity. I can scarcely hope I have added to the

-reader’s hoard. But it would be consoling to fancy that upon laying down

-this book the reader’s mind will if possible be still more empty than

-when he took it up.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_196" id="page_196"></a>{196}</span></p>

-

-<p class="c"><small>

-<span class="smcap">Richard Clay and Sons</span>,<br />

-LONDON AND BUNGAY.</small>

-</p>

-

-<p><a name="transcrib" id="transcrib"></a></p>

-

-<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary=""

-style="padding:2%;border:3px dotted gray;">

-<tr><th align="center">Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:</th></tr>

-<tr><td align="left">the face of a charletan=> the face of a charlatan {pg 13}</td></tr>

-<tr><td align="left">acccording to Mitchel=> acccording to Mitchel {pg 140}</td></tr>

-<tr><td align="left">are focussed upon him.=> are focused upon him. {pg 179}</td></tr>

-</table>

-

-<hr class="full" />

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-<pre>

-

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+  </head>
+<body>
+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 53169 ***</div>
+
+<hr class="full" />
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/cover.jpg" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="c">IGNORANT ESSAYS.</p>
+
+<h1>IGNORANT<br /><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;">ESSAYS.</span></h1>
+
+<p class="cb"><img src="images/colophon.jpg"
+width="200"
+alt="text decoration unavailable." /><br />
+<br /><br />
+LONDON:<br />
+<br />
+WARD AND DOWNEY,<br />
+<br />
+12, YORK STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C.<br />
+<br />
+1887.<br />
+<br />
+[<i>All Rights Reserved.</i>]<br />
+<br /><br />
+<small><span class="smcap">Richard Clay and Sons</span>,<br />
+
+LONDON AND BUNGAY.</small></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS"></a>CONTENTS.</h2>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td><td class="rt"><small>PAGE</small></td></tr>
+<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#THE_ONLY_REAL_GHOST_IN_FICTION">THE ONLY REAL GHOST IN FICTION</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_1">1</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#THE_BEST_TWO_BOOKS">THE BEST TWO BOOKS</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_30">30</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#LIES_OF_FABLE_AND_ALLEGORY">LIES OF FABLE AND ALLEGORY</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_55">55</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#MY_COPY_OF_KEATS">MY COPY OF KEATS</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_83">83</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#DECAY_OF_THE_SUBLIME">DECAY OF THE SUBLIME</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_117">117</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#A_BORROWED_POET">A BORROWED POET</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_132">132</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#THE_ENGLISH_OPIUM-EATER">THE ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_160">160</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#A_GUIDE_TO_IGNORANCE">A GUIDE TO IGNORANCE</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_175">175</a></td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_1" id="page_1"></a>{1}</span>&nbsp; </p>
+
+<p class="cb"><big><big>IGNORANT ESSAYS.</big></big></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_ONLY_REAL_GHOST_IN_FICTION" id="THE_ONLY_REAL_GHOST_IN_FICTION"></a>THE ONLY REAL GHOST IN FICTION.</h2>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">My</span> most ingenious friend met me one day, and asked me whether I
+considered I should be richer if I had the ghost of sixpence or if I had
+not the ghost of sixpence.</p>
+
+<p>“What side do you take?” I inquired, for I knew his disputatious turn.</p>
+
+<p>“I am ready to take either,” he answered; “but I give preference to the
+ghost.”</p>
+
+<p>“What!” I said. “Give preference to the ghost!”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes. You see, if I haven’t the ghost of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_2" id="page_2"></a>{2}</span> sixpence I have nothing at
+all; but if I have the ghost of a sixpence&mdash;&mdash;”</p>
+
+<p>“Well?”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, I am the richer by having the ghost of a sixpence.”</p>
+
+<p>“And do you think when you add one more delusion to those under which
+you already labour”&mdash;he and I could never agree about the difference
+between infinity and zero&mdash;“that you will be the better off?”</p>
+
+<p>“I have not admitted a ghost is a delusion; and even if I had I am not
+prepared to grant that a delusion may not be a source of wealth. Look at
+the South Sea Bubble.”</p>
+
+<p>I was willing, so there and then we fell to and were at the question&mdash;or
+rather, the questions to which it led&mdash;for hours, until we finally
+emerged upon the crystallization of cast-iron, the possibility of a
+Napoleonic restoration, or some other kindred matter. How we wandered
+about and writhed in that talk I can no more remember than I can recall
+the first articulate words that fell into my life. I know we handled
+ghosts (it was broad day and in a public street)<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_3" id="page_3"></a>{3}</span> with a freedom and
+familiarity that must have been painful to spirits of refinement and
+reserve. I know we said much about dreams, and compared the phantoms of
+the open lids with the phantoms of the closed eyes, and pitted them one
+against another like cocks in a main, and I remember that the case of
+the dreamer in Boswell’s Johnson came up between us. The case in Boswell
+submitted to Johnson as an argument in favour of a man’s reason being
+more acute in sleep than in waking, showed the phantom antagonistic able
+to floor the dreamer in his proper person. Johnson laughed at such a
+delusion, for, he pointed out, only the dreamer was besotted with sleep
+he would have perceived that he himself had furnished the confounding
+arguments to the shadowy disputant. That is very good, and seems quite
+conclusive as far as it goes; but is there nothing beyond what Johnson
+saw? Was there no ghostly prompter in the scene? No <i>suggeritore</i>
+invisible and inaudible to the dreamer, who put words and notes into the
+mouth of the opponent? No thinner shade than the spectral being visible
+in the dream? If in our waking<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_4" id="page_4"></a>{4}</span> hours we are subject to phantoms which
+sometimes can be seen and sometimes cannot, why not in our sleeping
+hours also? Are all ghosts of like grossness, or do some exist so fine
+as to be beyond our carnal apprehension, and within the ken only of the
+people of our sleep? If we ponderable mortals are haunted, who can say
+that our insubstantial midnight visitors may not know wraiths finer and
+subtler than we, may not be haunted as we are? In physical life
+parasites have parasites. Why in phantom life should not ghosts have
+ghosts?</p>
+
+<p>The firm, familiar earth&mdash;our earth of this time, the earth upon which
+we each of us stand at this moment&mdash;is thickly peopled with living
+tangible folk who can eat, and drink, and talk, and sing, and walk, and
+draw cheques, and perform a number of other useful, and hateful, and
+amusing actions. In the course of a day a man meets, let us say, forty
+people, with whom he exchanges speech. If a man is a busy dreamer, with
+how many people in the course of one night does he exchange speech? Ten,
+a hundred, a thousand? In the dreaming of one<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_5" id="page_5"></a>{5}</span> minute by the clock a man
+may converse with half the children of Adam since the Fall! The command
+of the greatest general alive would not furnish sentries and vedettes
+for the army of spirits that might visit one man in the interval between
+one beat of the pendulum of Big Ben and another!</p>
+
+<p>Shortly after that talk with my friend about the ghost of the sixpence,
+I was walking alone through one of the narrow lanes in the tangle of
+ways between Holborn and Fleet Street, when my eye was caught by the
+staring white word “Dreams” on a black ground. The word is, so to speak,
+printed in white on the black cover of a paper-bound book, and under the
+word “Dreams” are three faces, also printed in white on a black ground.
+Two of the faces are those of women: one of a young woman, purporting to
+be beautiful, with a star close to her forehead, and the other of a
+witch with the long hair and disordered eyes becoming to a person of her
+occupation. I dare say these two women are capable not only of
+justification, but of the simplest explanation. For all I know<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_6" id="page_6"></a>{6}</span> to the
+contrary, the composition may be taken wholly, or in part, from a
+well-known picture, or perhaps some canon of ghostly lore would be
+violated if any other design appeared on the cover. About such matters I
+know absolutely nothing. The word “Dreams” and the two female faces are
+now much less prominent than when I saw the book first, for, Goth that I
+am, long ago I dipped a brush in ink and ran a thin wash over the
+letters and the two faces; as they were, to use artist’s phrases, in
+front of the third face, and killing it.</p>
+
+<p>The third face is that of a man, a young man clean shaven and handsome,
+with no ghastliness or look of austerity. His arms are resting on a
+ledge, and extend from one side of the picture to the other. The left
+arm lies partly under the right, and the left hand is clenched softly
+and retired in half shadow. The right arm rises slightly as it crosses
+the picture, and the right wrist and hand ride on the left. The fore and
+middle fingers are apart, and point forward and a little downward,
+following the sleeve of the other arm. The third finger droops<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_7" id="page_7"></a>{7}</span> still
+more downward, and the little finger, with a ring on it, lies directly
+perpendicular along the cuff of the sleeve beneath. The hand is not well
+drawn, and yet there is some weird suggestiveness in the purposeless
+dispersion of the fingers.</p>
+
+<p>Fortunately upon my coming across the book, the original cost of which
+was one shilling, I had more than the ghost of a sixpence, and for
+two-thirds of that sum the book became mine. It is the only art purchase
+I ever made on the spur of the moment; I knew nothing of the book then,
+and know little of it now. It says it is the cut-down edition of a much
+larger work, and what I have read of it is foolish. The worst of the
+book is that it does not afford subject for a laugh. Thomas Carlyle is
+reported to have said in conversation respecting one of George Eliot’s
+latest stories that “it was not amusing, and it was not instructive; it
+was only dull&mdash;dull.” This book of dreams is only dull. However, there
+are some points in it that may be referred to, as this is an idle time.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_8" id="page_8"></a>{8}</span></p>
+
+<p>“To dream you see an angel or angels is very good, and to dream that you
+yourself are one is much better.” The noteworthy thing in connection
+with this passage being that nothing is said of the complexion of the
+angel or angels! Black or white it is all the same. You have only to
+dream of them and be happy. “To dream that you play upon bagpipes,
+signifies trouble, contention, and being overthrown at law.” Doubtless
+from the certainty, in civilised parts, of being prosecuted by your
+neighbours as a public nuisance. I would give a trifle to know a man who
+did dream that he played upon the bagpipes. Of course, it is quite
+possible he might be an amiable man in other ways.</p>
+
+<p>“To dream you have a beard long, thick, and unhandsome is of a good
+signification to an orator, or an ambassador, lawyer, philosopher or any
+who desires to speak well or to learn arts and sciences.” That
+“ambassador” gleams like a jewel among the other homely folk. I remember
+once seeing a newspaper contents-bill after a dreadful accident with the
+words<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_9" id="page_9"></a>{9}</span> “Death of fifty-seven people and a peer.” “To dream that you have
+a brow of brass, copper, marble, or iron signifies irreconcilable hatred
+against your enemies.” The man capable of such a dream I should like to
+see&mdash;but through bars of metal made from his own sleep-zoned forehead.
+“If any one dreams that he hath encountered a cat or killed one, he will
+commit a thief to prison and prosecute him to the death; for the cat
+signifies a common thief.” Mercy on us! Does the magistrate who commits
+usually prosecute, and is thieving a hanging matter now? This is
+necromancy or nothing; prophecy, inspiration, or something out of the
+common indeed.</p>
+
+<p>“To dream one plays or sees another play on a clavicord, shows the death
+of relations, or funeral obsequies.” I now say with feelings of the most
+profound gratitude that I never to my knowledge even saw a clavicord. I
+do not know what the beastly, ill-omened contrivance is like. The most
+recondite musical instrument I ever remember to have performed on is the
+Jew’s harp; and although there seems to be something<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_10" id="page_10"></a>{10}</span> weak, uncandid and
+treacherous in the spelling of “clavicord,” I presume the two are not
+identical. In any case I am safe, for I have never dreamed of playing
+even on the Jew’s harp. Here however is a cheerful promise from a
+painful experience&mdash;one wants something encouraging after that
+terrifying “clavicord.” “For a man to dream that his flesh is full of
+corns, shows that a man will grow rich proportionately to his corns.” I
+can breathe freely once more, having got away from outlandish musical
+instruments and within the influence of the familiar horn.</p>
+
+<p>As might be expected, it is not useful to dream about the devil. Let
+sleeping dogs lie. “To dream of eating human flesh” is also a bad way of
+spending the hours of darkness. It is lucky to dream you are a fool. You
+see, even in sleep, the virtue of candour brings reward. “To dream that
+you lose your keys signifies anger.” And very naturally too. “To dream
+you kill your father is a bad sign.” I had made up my mind not to go
+beyond the parricide, but I am lured on to quote this, “To dream of
+eating<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_11" id="page_11"></a>{11}</span> mallows, signifies exemption from trouble and dispatch of
+business, because this herb renders the body soluble.” I will not say
+that Nebuchadnezzar may not at one time have eaten mallows among other
+unusual herbs, but I never did. That however is not where the wonder
+creeps in. It is at the reason. If you eat mallows you will have no
+trouble <i>because</i> this herb renders the body <i>soluble</i>. Why is it good
+to render the body soluble, and what is the body soluble in? One more
+and I am done. “To dream one plays, or sees another play, upon the
+virginals, signifies the death of relations, or funeral obsequies.” From
+bagpipes, clavicords, and virginals, we hope we may be protected. And
+yet if these are the only instruments banned, a person having an
+extensive acquaintance with wind and string instruments of the orchestra
+may be musical in slumber without harm to himself or threat to his
+friends.</p>
+
+<p>In the interpretation of dreams Artemidorus was the most learned man
+that ever lived. He gave the best part of his life to collecting matter
+about dreams, and this he afterwards<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_12" id="page_12"></a>{12}</span> put together in five books. He
+might better have spent his time in bottling shadows of the moon.</p>
+
+<p>It was however for the face of the man on the cover that I bought and
+have kept the book. The face is that of a man between thirty and
+thirty-five years of age. It is regular and handsome. The forehead leans
+slightly forward, and the lower part of the face is therefore a little
+foreshortened. It is looking straight out of the picture; the shadows
+fall on the left of the face, on the right as it fronts you. The nose is
+as long and broad-backed as the nose of the Antinous. The mouth is large
+and firm and well-shaping with lips neither thick nor thin. The interval
+between the nostrils and verge of the upper lip is short. The chin is
+gently pointed and prominent. The outline of the jaws square. The
+modelling of the left cheek is defectively emphasised at the line from
+above the hollow of the nostrils downward and backward. The brows are
+straight, the left one being slightly more arched than the right. The
+forehead is low, broad, compact, hard, with<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_13" id="page_13"></a>{13}</span> clear lines. The lower line
+of the temples projects beyond the perpendicular. The hair is thick and
+wavy and divided at the left side, depressed rather than divided, for
+the parting is visible no further up the head than a splay letter V.</p>
+
+<p>The eyes are wide open, and notwithstanding the obtuse angle made by the
+facial line in the forward pose of the head, they are looking out level
+with their own height upon the horizon. There is no curiosity or
+speculation in the eyes. There is no wonder or doubt; no fear or joy.
+The gaze is heavy. There is a faint smile, the faintest smile the human
+face is capable of displaying, about the mouth. There is no light in the
+eyes. The expression of the whole face is infinitely removed from
+sinister. In it there is kindliness with a touch of wisdom and pity. It
+asks no question; desires to say no word. It is the face of one who
+beyond all doubt knows things we do not know, things which can scarcely
+be shaped into words, things we are in ignorance of. It is not the face
+of a charlatan, a seer, or a prophet.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_14" id="page_14"></a>{14}</span></p>
+
+<p>It is the face of a man once ardent and hopeful, to whom everything that
+is to be known has lately been revealed, and who has come away from the
+revelation with feelings of unassuageable regret and sorrow for Man. It
+says with terrible calmness, “I have seen all, and there is nothing in
+it. For your own sakes let me be mute. Live you your lives. <i>Miserere
+nobis!</i>”</p>
+
+<p>My belief is that the extraordinary expression of that face is an
+accident, a happy chance, a result that the artist never foresaw. Who
+drew the cover I cannot tell. No initials appear on it and I have never
+made inquiries. Remember that in pictures and poems (I know nothing of
+music), what is a miracle to you, has in most cases been a miracle to
+the painter or poet also. Any poet can explain how he makes a poem, but
+no poet can explain how he makes poetry. He is simply writing a poem and
+the poetry glides or rushes in. When it comes he is as much astonished
+by it as you are. The poem may cost him infinite trouble, the poetry he
+gets as a free gift. He begins a poem to prepare himself<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_15" id="page_15"></a>{15}</span> for the
+reception of poetry or to induce its flow. His poem is only a
+lightning-rod to attract a fluid over which he has no control before it
+comes to him. There may be a poetic art, such as verse-making, but to
+talk about the art of poetry is to talk nonsense. It is men of genteel
+intellects who speak of the art of poetry. The man who wrote the <i>Art of
+Poetry</i> knew better than to credit the possible existence of any such
+art. He himself says the poet is born, not made.</p>
+
+<p>I am very bad at dates, but I think Le Fanu wrote <i>Green Tea</i> before a
+whole community of Canadian nuns were thrown into the most horrible
+state of nervous misery by excessive indulgence in that drug. Of all the
+horrible tales that are not revolting, <i>Green Tea</i> is I think the most
+horrible. The bare statement that an estimable and pious man is haunted
+by the ghost of a monkey is at the first blush funny. But if you have
+not read the story read it, and see how little of fun is in it. The
+horror of the tale lies in the fact that this apparition of a monkey is
+the only <i>probable</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_16" id="page_16"></a>{16}</span> ghost in fiction. I have not the book by me as I
+write, and I cannot recall the victim’s name, but he is a clergyman,
+and, as far as we know to the contrary, a saint. There is no reason <i>on
+earth</i> why he should be pursued by this malignant spectre. He has
+committed no crime, no sin even. He labours with all the sincerity of a
+holy man to regain his health and exorcise his foe. He is as crimeless
+as you or I and infinitely more faultless. He has not deserved his fate,
+yet he is driven in the end to cut his throat, and you excuse <i>that</i>
+crime by saying he is mad.</p>
+
+<p>I do not think any additional force is gained in the course of this
+unique story by the importation of malignant irreverence to Christianity
+in the latter manifestations of the ape. I think the apparition is at
+its best and most terrible when it is simply an indifferent pagan,
+before it assumes the <i>rôle</i> of antichrist. This ape is at his best as a
+mind-destroyer when the clergyman, going down the avenue in the
+twilight, raised his eyes and finds the awful presence preceding him
+along the top of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_17" id="page_17"></a>{17}</span> wall. There the clergyman reaches the acme of
+piteous, unsupportable horror. In the pulpit with the brute, the priest
+is fighting against the devil. In the avenue he has not the
+strengthening or consoling reflection that he is defending a cause,
+struggling against hell. The instant motive enters into the story the
+situation ceases to be dramatic and becomes merely theatrical. Every
+“converted” tinker will tell you stirring stories of his wrestling with
+Satan, forgetting that it takes two to fight, and what a loathsome
+creature he himself is. But the conflict between a good man and the
+unnecessary apparition of this ape is pathetic, horribly pathetic, and
+full of the dramatic despair of the finest tragedy.</p>
+
+<p>It is desirable at this point to focus some scattered words that have
+been set down above. The reason this apparition of the ape appears
+probable is <i>because</i> it is unnecessary. Any one can understand why
+Macbeth should see that awful vision at the banquet. The apparition of
+the murdered dead is little more than was to be expected, and can be
+explained<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_18" id="page_18"></a>{18}</span> in an easy fashion. You or I never committed murder,
+therefore we are not liable to be troubled by the ghost of Banquo. In
+your life or mine Nemesis is not likely to take heroic dimensions. The
+spectres of books, as a rule, only excite our imaginative fears, not our
+personal terrors. The spectres of books have and can have nothing to do
+with us any more than the sufferings of the Israelites in the desert.
+When a person of our acquaintance dies, we inquire the particulars of
+his disease, and then discover the predisposing causes, so that we may
+prove to ourselves we are not in the same category with him. We do not
+deny our liability to contract the disease, we deny our likelihood to
+supply the predisposing causes. He died of aneurysm of the aorta: Ah, we
+say, induced by the violent exercise he took&mdash;we never take violent
+exercise. If not of aneurysm of the aorta, but fatty degeneration of the
+heart: Ah, induced by the sedentary habits of his latter years&mdash;we take
+care to secure plenty of exercise. If a man has been careful of his
+health and dies, we allege that he took all the robustness out of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_19" id="page_19"></a>{19}</span> his
+constitution by over-heedfulness; if he has been careless, we say he
+took no precautions at all; and from either of these extremes we are
+exempt, and therefore we shall live for ever.</p>
+
+<p>Now here in this story of <i>Green Tea</i> is a ghost which is possible,
+probable, almost familiar. It is a ghost without genesis or
+justification. The gods have nothing to do with it. Something, an
+accident due partly to excessive tea-drinking, has happened to the
+clergyman’s nerves, and the ghost of this ape glides into his life and
+sits down and abides with him. There is no reason why the ghost should
+be an ape. When the victim sees the apparition first he does not know it
+to be an ape. He is coming home in an omnibus one night and descries two
+gleaming spots of fire in the dark, and from that moment the life of the
+poor gentleman becomes a ruin. It is a thing that may happen to you or
+me any day, any hour. That is why Le Fanu’s ghost is so horrible. You
+and I might drink green tea to the end of our days and suffer from
+nothing more than ordinary impaired digestion. But you or I may get a
+fall, or a sunstroke, and ever afterwards<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_20" id="page_20"></a>{20}</span> have some hideous familiar.
+To say there can be no such things as ghosts is a paltry blasphemy. It
+is a theory of the smug, comfortable kind. A ghost need not wear a white
+sheet and have intelligible designs on personal property. A ghost need
+not be the spirit of a dead person. A ghost need have no moral mission
+whatever.</p>
+
+<p>I once met a haunted man, a man who had seen a real ghost; a ghost that
+had, as the ape, no ascertainable moral mission but to drive his victim
+mad. In this case too the victim was a clergyman. He is, I believe,
+alive and well now. He has shaken off the incubus and walks a free man.
+I was travelling at the time, and accidentally got into chat with him on
+the deck of a steamboat by night. We were quite alone in the darkness
+and far from land when he told me his extraordinary story. I do not of
+course intend retailing it here. I look on it as a private
+communication. I asked him what brought him to the mental plight in
+which he had found himself, and he answered briefly, “Overwork.” He was
+then convalescent, and had been assured by his physicians that with
+care<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_21" id="page_21"></a>{21}</span> the ghost which had been laid would appear no more. The spectre he
+saw threatened physical harm, and while he was haunted by it he went in
+constant dread of death by violence. It had nothing good or bad to do
+with his ordinary life or his sacred calling. It had no foundation on
+fact, no basis on justice. He had been for months pursued by the figure
+of a man threatening to take away his life. He did not believe this man
+had any corporeal existence. He did not know whether the creature had
+the power to kill him or not. The figure was there in the attitude of
+menace and would not be banished. He knew that no one but himself could
+see the murderous being. That ghost was there for him, and there for him
+alone.</p>
+
+<p>Respecting the Canadian nuns whose convent was beleaguered and infested
+by ghostly enemies that came not by ones or twos but in battalions, I
+had a fancy at the time. I do not intend using the terminologies or
+theories of the dissecting room, or the language of physiology found in
+books. I am not sure the fancy is wholly my own, but some of it is
+original.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_22" id="page_22"></a>{22}</span> I shall suppose that the nerves are not only capable of
+various conditions of health and disease, but of large structural
+alteration in life; structural alteration not yet recorded or observed
+in fact; structural alteration which, if you will, exists in life but
+disappears instantly at death. In fine, I mean rather to illustrate my
+fancy than to describe anything that exists or could exist. Before
+letting go the last strand of sense, let me say that talking of nerves
+being highly strung is sheer nonsense, and not good nonsense either. The
+muscles it is that are highly strung. The poor nerves are merely
+insulated wires from the battery in the head. Their tension is no more
+affected by the messages that go over them, than an Atlantic cable is
+tightened or loosened by the signals indicating fluctuations in the
+Stock Exchanges of London and New York.</p>
+
+<p>The nerves, let us suppose, in their normal condition of health have
+three skins over the absolute sentient tissue. In the ideal man in
+perfect health, let us say Hodge, the man whose privilege it is to “draw
+nutrition, propagate, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_23" id="page_23"></a>{23}</span> rot,” the three skins are always at their
+thickest and toughest. Now genius is a disease, and it falls, as ladies
+of Mrs. Gamp’s degree say, “on the nerves.” That is, the first of these
+skins having been worn away or never supplied by nature, the patient
+“sees visions and dreams dreams.” The man of genius is not exactly under
+delusions. He does not think he is in China because he is writing of
+Canton in London, but his optic nerve, wanting the outer coating, can
+build up images out of statistics until the images are as full of line
+and colour and as incapable of change at will as the image of a barrel
+of cider which occupies Hodge’s retina when it is imminent to his
+desires, present to his touch. The sensibility of the nerves of genius
+is greater than the sensibility of the nerves of Hodge. Not all the
+eloquence of an unabridged dictionary could create an image in Hodge’s
+mind of a thing he had never seen. From a brief description a painter of
+genius could make a picture&mdash;not a likeness of course&mdash;of Canton,
+although he had never been outside the four corners of these kingdoms.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_24" id="page_24"></a>{24}</span>
+The painting would not, in all likelihood, be in the least like Canton,
+but it would be very like the image formed in the painter’s mind of that
+city. In the painter such an image comes and goes at will. He can either
+see it or not see it as he pleases. It is the result of the brain
+reacting on the nerve. It relies on data and combination. It is his
+slave, not his master. Before it can be formed there must be great
+increase of sensibility. Hodge is crude silver, the painter is the
+polished mirror. The painter can see things which are not, things which
+he himself makes in his mind. His invention is at least as vivid as his
+memory.</p>
+
+<p>I suppose then that the man of genius, the painter or poet, is one who,
+having lost the first skin, or portion of the first skin of his nerves,
+can create and see in his mind’s eye things never seen by the eye of any
+other man, and see them as vividly as men of no genius can see objects
+of memory.</p>
+
+<p>Now peel off the second skin. The more exquisitely sensitive or the
+innermost skin of the nerve is exposed. Things which the eye of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_25" id="page_25"></a>{25}</span> genius
+could not invent or even dream of are revealed. A drop of putrid water
+under the microscope becomes a lake full of terrifying monsters large
+enough to destroy man. Heard through the microphone the sap ascending a
+tree becomes loud as a torrent. Seen through a telescope nebulous spots
+in the sky become clusters of constellations. Divested of its second
+skin the nerve becomes sensitive to influences too rare and fine for the
+perception of the optic nerve in a more protected state. Beings that
+bear no relation whatever to weight or the law of impenetrability, float
+about and flash hither and thither swifter than lightning. The air and
+other ponderable matter are nothing to them. They are no more than the
+shadows or reflections of action, the imperishable progeny of thought.
+Here lies disclosed to the partly emancipated nerve the Canton of the
+painter’s vision. Here the city he made to himself is as firm and sturdy
+and solid and full of life as the Canton of this day on the southern
+coast of China. Here throng the unrecorded visions of all the poets.
+Here are the counterfeits of all<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_26" id="page_26"></a>{26}</span> the dead in all their phases. Here
+float the dreams of men, the unbroken scrolls of life and action and
+thought complete of all beings, man and beast, that have lived since
+time began. In the world of matter nothing is lost; in the world of
+spirit nothing is lost either.</p>
+
+<p>If instead of taking the whole of this imaginary skin off the optic
+nerve, we simply injure it ever so slightly, the nerve may become alive
+to some of these spirits; and this premature perception of what is
+around all of us, but perceived by few, we call seeing ghosts. It may be
+objected that all space is not vast enough to afford room for such a
+stupendous panorama. When we begin to talk of limits of space to
+anything beyond our knowledge and the touch of our inch-tape, we talk
+like fools. There is no good in allotting space with a two-foot rule. It
+is all the same whether we divide zero into infinity or infinity into
+zero. The answer is the same; “I don’t know how many times it goes.”
+Take a cubic inch of air outside your window and see the things packed
+into it. Here interblent we find all together resistance and light and
+sound and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_27" id="page_27"></a>{27}</span> odour and flavour. We must stop there, for we have got to the
+end, not of what <i>is</i> packed into that cubic inch of air, but to the end
+of the things in it revealed to our senses. If we had five more senses
+we should find five more qualities; if we had five thousand senses, five
+thousand qualities. But even if we had only our own senses in higher
+form we should see ghosts.</p>
+
+<p>If the third skin were removed from the optic nerve all things we now
+call opaque would become transparent, owing to the naked nerve being
+sensitive to the latent light in every body. The whole round world would
+become a crystal ball, the different degrees of what we now call opacity
+being indicated merely by a faint chromatic modification. What we now
+regard as brilliant sunlight would then be dense shadow. Apocalyptic
+ranges of colour would be disclosed, beginning with what is in our
+present condition the least faint trace of tint and ascending through a
+thousand grades to white, white brighter far than the sun our present
+eyes blink upon. Burnished<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_28" id="page_28"></a>{28}</span> brass flaming in our present sun would then
+be the beginning of the chromatic scale descending in the shadow of
+yellow, burnished copper of red, burnished tin of black, burnished steel
+of blue. So intense then would the sensibility of the optic nerve become
+that the satellites attendant on the planets in the system of the suns,
+called fixed stars, would blaze brighter than our own moon reflected in
+the sea. To the eye matter would cease to be matter in its present,
+gross obstructive sense. It would be no more than a delicate transparent
+pigment in the wash of a water-colour artist. The gross rotundity of the
+earth would be, in the field of the human eye, a variegated transparent
+globe of reduced luminousness and enormous scales and chords of colour.
+The Milky Way would then be a concave measureless ocean of prismatic
+light with pendulous opaline spheres.</p>
+
+<p>The figures of dreams and ghosts may be as real as we are pleased to
+consider ourselves. What arrogance of us to say they are our own
+creation! They may look upon themselves as superior to us, as we look
+upon ourselves as<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_29" id="page_29"></a>{29}</span> superior to the jelly-fish. No doubt we are to ghosts
+the baser order, the spirits stained with the woad of earth, low
+creatures who give much heed to heat and cold, and food and motion. They
+are the sky-children, the chosen people. They are nothing but
+circumscribed will wedded to incorporeal reasons of the nobler kind, and
+with scopes the contemplation of which would split our tenement of clay.
+They are the arch-angelic hierarchs of man, the ultimate condition of
+the race, the spirit of this planet distilled by the sun.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_30" id="page_30"></a>{30}</span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_BEST_TWO_BOOKS" id="THE_BEST_TWO_BOOKS"></a>THE BEST TWO BOOKS.</h2>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">In</span> no list I met of the best hundred books, when that craze took the
+place of spelling-bees and the fifteen puzzle, do I recollect seeing
+mention made of my two favourite works. These two books stand completely
+apart in my esteem, and if I were asked to name the volume that comes
+third, I should have to make a speech of explanation. The first of them
+is not in prose or verse, it is not a work of theology or philosophy or
+science or art or history or fiction or general literature. It is at
+once the most comprehensive and impartial book I know. This paragraph is
+assuming the aspect of a riddle. Being in a mild and passionless way a
+lover of my species, I am a loather of riddles. So I will go<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_31" id="page_31"></a>{31}</span> no further
+on the downward way, but declare the name, title, and style of my book
+to be Nuttall’s <i>Standard Dictionary</i>.</p>
+
+<p>I am well aware there is a great deal to be said against Nuttall’s
+<i>Dictionary</i> as a dictionary, but I am not speaking of it in that sense.
+I am treating it as a dear companion, a true friend, a <i>vade mecum</i>. Let
+those who have a liking for discovering spots in the sun glare at the
+orb until they have a taste for nothing else but spots in the sun. I
+find Nuttall so close to my affections that I can perceive no defects in
+him. I cannot bear to hold him at arm’s length, for critical
+examination. I hug him close to me, and feel that while I have him I am
+almost independent of all other books printed in the English language.</p>
+
+<p>Cast your eyes along your own bookshelves of English authors; every
+word, liberally speaking, that is in each and every volume on your
+shelves is in my Nuttall! Here is the juice of the language, from
+Shakespeare to Huxley, in a concentrated solution. Here is a book that
+starts by telling you that A is a vowel, and does not<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_32" id="page_32"></a>{32}</span> desert you until
+it informs you that zythum is a beverage, a liquor made from malt and
+wheat; a fact, I will wager, you never dreamed of before! And between A
+and zythum, what a boundless store of learning is disclosed! This is the
+only single-volume book I know of which no man living is or ever can be
+the master. Charles Lamb would not allow that dictionaries are books at
+all. In his days they were white-livered charlatans compared with the
+full-blooded enthusiast, Nuttall.</p>
+
+<p>If such an unkind thing were desirable as to diminish the conceit of a
+man of average reading and intelligence, there is no book could be used
+with such paralysing effect upon him as this one. It is almost
+impossible for any student to realise the infinite capacity for
+ignorance with which man is gifted until he is brought face to face with
+such a book as Nuttall. The list of words whose meanings are given
+occupies 771 very closely printed pages of small type in double column.
+The letter A takes up from 1 to 52. How many words unfamiliar to the
+ordinary man are to be found in this fifteenth part of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_33" id="page_33"></a>{33}</span> the dictionary!
+On the top of every folio there occur four words, one at the head of
+each column. Barring the right of the candidates in ignorance to guess
+from the roots how many well-informed people know or would use any of
+the following words&mdash;absciss, acidimeter, acroteleutic, adminicular,
+adminiculator, adustion, aerie, agrestic, allignment, allision,
+ambreine, ampulla, ampullaceous, android, antiphonary, antiphony,
+apanthropy, aponeurosis, appellor, aramaic, aretology, armilla,
+armillary, asiarch, assentation, asymptote, asymptotical, aurate,
+averruncator, aversant, axotomous, or axunge? And yet all these are at
+the heads of columns under A alone! Take, now, one column haphazard
+perpendicularly, and with the same reservation as before, who would use
+antimaniac, antimask, antimasonic, antimeter, antimonite, antinephritic,
+antinomian, antinomy, antipathous, antipedobaptist, antiperistaltic,
+antiperistasis, or antiphlogistic? The letter A taken along the top of
+the pages or down one column is not a good letter for the confusion of
+the conceited; because viewed across the top of the page it is pitifully
+the prey of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_34" id="page_34"></a>{34}</span> prefixes which lead to large families of words, and viewed
+down the column (honestly selected at haphazard), it is the bondslave of
+one prefix. When, however, one starts a theory, it is not fair to pick
+and choose. I have, of course, eschewed derivatives in coming down the
+column; across the column I did not do so, as the chance of a prime word
+being at the bottom of one column and its derivate at the top of the
+next ought to count two in my favour. I am aware this claim may be
+disputed; I have disputed it with myself at much too great length to
+record here, and I have decided in my own favour.</p>
+
+<p>Of course the mere reading of the dictionary in a mechanical way would
+produce no more effect than the repetition of numerals abstracted from
+things. There is no greater suggestiveness in saying a million than in
+saying one. But what an enlargement of the human capacity takes place
+when a person passes from the idea of one man to the idea of a million
+men. Take the first word quoted from the head of the column. I had
+wholly forgotten the meaning of absciss. I cannot even now remember<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_35" id="page_35"></a>{35}</span>
+that I ever knew the meaning of it, though of course I must, for I was
+supposed to have learned conic sections once. Why any one should be
+expected to learn conic sections I cannot guess. As far as I can now
+recall, they are the study of certain possible systems and schemes of
+lines in a wholly unnecessary figure. I believe the cone was invented by
+some one who had conic sections up his sleeve, and devised the miserable
+spinning of the triangle merely to gratify his lust of cruelty to the
+young. The only one use to which cones are put, as far as I am aware, is
+for a weather signal on the sea coast. The only section of a cone put to
+any pleasant use is a frustum when it appears in the bark of the cork
+tree; and even this conic section is not of much use to pleasure until
+it is removed from the bottle. Conic sections are reprehensible in
+another way. They are, in the matter of difficulty, nothing better than
+impostors. They are really “childlike and bland,” and will, when you
+have conquered your schoolboy terror of them, be found agreeable
+after-dinner reading.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_36" id="page_36"></a>{36}</span></p>
+
+<p>But I must return to Nuttall. The systematic study of the book is to be
+deplored. It is, like the Essays of Elia, not to be read through at a
+sitting, but to be dipped into curiously when one is in the vein. The
+charm of Lamb is in the flavour; and one cannot reach the more remote
+and finer joys of taste if one eats quickly. There is no cohesion, and
+but little thought in Nuttall. It is as a spur, an incentive, to thought
+I worship the book, and as a storehouse for elemental lore. You have
+known a thing all your life, let us say, and have called it by a
+makeshift name. You feel in your heart and soul there must be a more
+close-fitting appellation than you employ for it, and you endure a sense
+of feebleness and dispersion of mind. One day you are idly glancing
+through your Nuttall, and suddenly the clouds, the nebulous mists of a
+generalized term, roll away, and out shines, clear and sharply defined,
+the particular definition of the thing. From childhood I have, for
+example, known a pile-driver, and called it a pile-driver for years and
+years. All along something told me pile-driver<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_37" id="page_37"></a>{37}</span> was no better than a
+loose and off-hand way of describing the machine. It partook of the
+barbarous nature of a hieroglyphic. You drew, as it were, the figure of
+a post, and of a weight descending upon it. The device was much too
+pictorial and crude. Moreover, it was, so described, a thing without a
+history. To call a pile-driver a pile-driver is no more than to describe
+a barn-door cock onomatopoetically as cock-a-doodle-doo&mdash;a thing
+repellent to a pensive mind. But in looking over Nuttall I accidentally
+alighted on this: “Fistuca, fis’&mdash;tu-ka, <i>s.</i> A machine which is raised
+to a given height by pulleys, and then allowed suddenly to fall on the
+head of a pile; a monkey (L. a rammer).” Henceforth there is, in my
+mind, no need of a picture for the machine. So to speak, the abstract
+has become concrete. I would not, of course, dream of using the word
+fistuca, but it is a great source of internal consolation to me.
+Besides, I attain with it to other eminences of curiosity, which show me
+fields of inquiry I never dreamed of before.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_38" id="page_38"></a>{38}</span></p>
+
+<p>I have not met the word monkey in this sense until now. I look out
+monkey in my book, and find one of the meanings “a pile-driver,” and
+that the word is derived from the Italian “<i>monna</i>, contraction for
+<i>madonna</i>.” Up to this moment I did not know from what monkey was
+derived, although I had heard that from monkey man was derived. All this
+sets one off into a delicious doze of thought and keeps one carefully
+apart from his work. For “who would fardels bear to groan and sweat
+under a weary” load of even pens, when he might lie back and close his
+eyes, and drift off to the Rome of Augustus or the Venice of to-day?
+Philology as mere philology is colourless, but if one uses the records
+of verbal changes as glasses to the past and present, what panchromatic
+hues sweep into the pale field of the dictionary! What myriads of dead
+men stand up out of their graves, and move once more through scenes of
+their former activities! What reimpositions of old times on old earth
+take place! What bravery of arms and beauty of women are renewed; what
+glowing argosies, long mouldered,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_39" id="page_39"></a>{39}</span> sparkle once more in the sun! What
+brazen trumpets blare of conquest, and dust of battle roll along the
+plain! What plenitude of life, of movement, of man is revealed! A
+dictionary is to me the key-note in the orchestra where mankind sit
+tuning their reeds for the overture to the final cataclysm of the world.</p>
+
+<p>My second book would be Whitaker’s <i>Almanack</i>. Owing to miserable
+ill-luck I have not been able to get a copy of the almanac for this
+year. I offered fair round coin of the realm for it before the Jubilee
+plague of ugliness fell upon the broad pieces of her most gracious
+Majesty. But, alas! no copy was to be had. I was too late in the race.
+All the issue had been sold. The last edition of which I have a copy is
+that for 1886. I have one for each year of the ten preceding, and I
+cannot tell how crippled and humiliated I feel in being without one for
+1887.</p>
+
+<p>This is another of the books that Charles Lamb classes among the
+no-books. As in the case of Nuttall, there was no Whitaker in his<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_40" id="page_40"></a>{40}</span> day,
+and certainly no almanac at all as good. At first glance this book may
+seem dry and sapless as the elm ready sawn for conversion into parish
+coffins. But how can anything be considered dry or dead when two hundred
+thousand of its own brothers are at this moment dwelling in useful amity
+among our fellowmen? It in one way contrasts unfavourably with almanacs
+which can claim a longer life, there are no vaticinations in it. But if
+the gift of prophecy were possessed by other almanacs, why did they not
+foretell that they would be in the end known as humbugs, and cut their
+conceited throats? I freely own I am a bigot in this matter; I have
+never given any other almanac a fair chance, and, what is worse, I have
+firmly made up my mind not to give any other one any chance at all. What
+is the good of being loyal to one’s friends if one’s loyalty is at the
+beck of every upstart acquaintance, no matter how great his merits or
+how long his purse? I place my faith in Whitaker, and am ready to go to
+the stake (provided it is understood that nothing unpleasant takes place
+there)<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_41" id="page_41"></a>{41}</span> chaunting my belief and glorying in my doom.</p>
+
+<p>If you took away Whitaker’s <i>Almanack</i> from me I do not know how I
+should get on. It is a book for diurnal use and permanent reference. One
+edition of it ought to be printed on bank note paper for the pocket, and
+another on bronze for friezes for the temple of history. It is worth all
+the Livys and Tacituses that ever breathed and lied. It is more truthful
+than the sun, for that luminary is always eight minutes in advance of
+where it seems to be. It is as impartial and veracious as fossilising
+mud. It contains infinitely more figures than Madame Tussaud’s, and
+teaches of everything above and under the sun, from stellar influences
+to sewage.</p>
+
+<p>How is the daily paper to be understood lacking the aid of Whitaker? Who
+is the honourable member for Berborough, of whom the Chanceller of the
+Exchequer spoke in such sarcastic terms last night? For what place sits
+Mr. Snivel, who made that most edifying speech yesterday? How old is
+the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_42" id="page_42"></a>{42}</span> Earl of Champagne, who has been appointed Governor of Labuan? Where
+is Labuan? What is the value in English money of £T97,000, and 2,784,000
+roubles? What are the chances of a man of forty (yourself) living to be
+a hundred? and what is the chance of a woman of sixty-four (your
+mother-in-law) dying next year? How much may one deduct from one’s
+income with a view to income tax before one needs begin to lie? What
+annuity ought a man of your age be able to get for the five thousand
+pounds you expect on the death of your mother-in-law? How much will you
+have to pay to the state if you article your son to a solicitor or give
+him a little capital and start him in an honest business as a
+pawnbroker? How old is the judge that charged dead against the prisoner
+whom the jury acquitted without leaving the box? What railway company
+spends the most money in coal? legal charges? palm oil? Is there
+anything now worth a gentleman’s while to smuggle on his return from the
+Continent? What is the tonnage of the ironclad rammed yesterday morning
+by another ironclad<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_43" id="page_43"></a>{43}</span> of the Channel squadron? When may one begin to eat
+oysters? What was the most remarkable event last year? How much longer
+is it likely to pay to breed farmers in England?</p>
+
+<p>These are only a few, very few, of the queries Whitaker will answer
+cheerfully for you. Indeed, you can scarcely frame any questions to
+which it will not make a reply of some kind or other. It contains,
+moreover, either direct or indirect reference to every man in the United
+Kingdoms of Great Britain and Ireland. If you occupy a prominent
+official position in any walk in life, you will find yourself herein
+mentioned by name. If you are a simple and prudent trader, you will have
+your name and your goods described elaborately among the advertisements.
+If you come under neither of these heads you are sure to be included,
+not distinguished perhaps personally, under the statistics of the Insane
+or Criminal classes.</p>
+
+<p>All the information on the points indicated may be said to lie within
+the parochial domain of the book. But it has a larger, a universal
+scope, and takes into view all the civilized and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_44" id="page_44"></a>{44}</span> half civilized nations
+of all the earth. It contains multitudinous facts and figures about
+Abyssinia, Afghanistan, Annam, Argentine Republic, Austro-Hungary,
+Baluchistan, Belgium, Bokhara, Bolivia, Borneo, Brazil, Bulgaria,
+Eastern Roumelia, Burmah, Corea, Central America, Chili, China, Cochin
+China, Colombia, Congo State, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador,
+Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Hawaiian Islands, Hayti, Italy, Japan,
+Liberia, Madagascar, Mexico, Montenegro, Morocco, Nepal, Netherlands,
+Oman, Orange Free State, Paraguay, Persia, Peru, Portugal, Roumania,
+Russia, Sarawak, Servia, Siam, Sokoto, Spain, Sweden and Norway,
+Switzerland, Tibet, Transvaal, Tripoli, Tunis, Turkey, United States,
+Uruguay, Venezuela, and Zanzibar!</p>
+
+<p>The list takes away one’s breath. The mere recital of it leaves one
+faint and exhausted. Passing the most elementary knowledge of these
+nations and countries through the mind is like looking at a varying
+rainbow while the ears are solicited by a thousand tunes. The names, the
+mere names, of Mexico and Brazil stop my heart<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_45" id="page_45"></a>{45}</span> with amazement. The
+Aztecs and the Amazon call up such visions of man in decay and nature in
+naked strength that I pause like one in a gorgeous wood held in fear by
+its unfamiliarity. What has the Amazon done in the ages of its
+unlettered history? What did the Aztecs know before they began to revert
+to birds? Then Morocco and Tripoli, what memories and mysteries of man!
+And Sokoto&mdash;of which little is known but the name; and that man was here
+before England was dissevered from the mainland of Europe. Turkey, as it
+even now lies crippled and shorn, embraces within its stupendous arms
+the tombs of the greatest empire of antiquity. Only to think of China is
+to grow old beyond the reach of chroniclers. Compared with China,
+Turkey, India, and Russia, even Greece and Rome are mushroom states, and
+Germany and France virgin soil.</p>
+
+<p>But when I am in no humour for contemplation and alarms of eld I take up
+my Whitaker for 1886, and open it at page 285. There begins the most
+incredible romance<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_46" id="page_46"></a>{46}</span> ever written by man, and what increases its
+incredibility is that it happens to be all true.</p>
+
+<p>At page 285 opens an account of the British Empire. The first article is
+on India, and as one reads, taking in history and statistics with
+alternate breaths, the heart grows afraid to beat in the breast lest its
+motion and sound might dispel the enchantment and bring this “miracle of
+rare device” down about one’s head. The opening statement forbids
+further progress for a time. When one hears that “the British Empire in
+India extends over a territory as large as the continent of Europe
+without Russia,” it is necessary to pause and let the capacity of the
+mind enlarge in order to take in this stupendous fact with its
+stupendous significances.</p>
+
+<p>Here are 254 millions of people living under the flag of Britain! Here
+is a vast country of the East whose history goes back for a thousand
+years from this era, which knew Alexander the Great and was the scene of
+Tamerlane’s exploits, subject to the little island on the western verge
+of modern Europe. Here,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_47" id="page_47"></a>{47}</span> paraded in the directest and most prosaic
+fashion, are facts and figures that swell out the fancy almost
+intolerably. Here is one feudatory state, one dependent province, almost
+as populous as the whole empire over which Don Pedro II. reigns in South
+America. Here is a public revenue of eighty millions sterling a year,
+and Calcutta, including suburbs, with a population close upon a million.
+Here are no fewer than fifty-three towns and cities of more than fifty
+thousand people each. Here is a gross number of seven hundred and
+fourteen thousand towns and villages! Is not this one item incredible?
+Just three quarters of a million, not of people or even houses, but of
+“towns and villages!” The population of Madras alone is five-sixths of
+that of the United Kingdom, that of the North-West Provinces and Oudh
+considerably more, and that of Bengal nearly twice as much as England,
+Ireland, Scotland, and Wales together. The Native States have many more
+inhabitants than any country in Europe, except Russia. Bombay equals
+Spain. The Punjaub exceeds Turkey in Asia. Assam exceeds Turkey in<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_48" id="page_48"></a>{48}</span>
+Europe. The Central Provinces about equal Belgium and Holland together;
+British Burmah, Switzerland. Berar exceeds Denmark, and all taken
+together contain more than the combined populations of the United States
+of America, Austria, Germany, France, Turkey, Italy, Spain, Portugal,
+Holland, and Belgium! All ours absolutely, or in the feudatory leash;
+with more Mohammedans than are to be found in the Sultan’s dominions,
+and a larger revenue than is enjoyed by any country on earth except
+England, France, United States of America, Austria, and Russia!</p>
+
+<p>These are facts and figures enough to set one dreaming for a month. This
+is not an age for epic poetry. It is exceedingly unlikely any poet in
+the present age will seek the framework for his great work in the past.
+The past was all very well in its own day until it was found out.
+Certitudes in bygone centuries have been shaken. The present time is
+wildly volcanic. Now the hidden, throbbing, mad, fierce, upheaving fires
+bulge out the crust of earth under fabrics whilom regarded as
+indestructible, and split their<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_49" id="page_49"></a>{49}</span> walls, and warp their pillars, and
+choke their domes. It was a good thing for Milton and Dante they lived
+and wrote long ago, for the iconoclasts of to-day are trying to build a
+great wall across heaven and tear up the sacred pavement of hell. They
+tell us the Greek armies were a mob of disorderly and timid cits, and
+that speculations as to the reported dealings of Dr. Faustus with any
+folk but respectable druggists are too childish for the nursery or
+Kaffirs. The golden age is no longer the time that will never come
+again. The past is a fire that has burnt out, a flame that has vanished.
+To kneel before what has been is to worship impotent shadows. Up to this
+man has been wandering in the desert, and until now there have not been
+even trustworthy rumours of the land of promise. But to us has come a
+voice prophesying good things. The Canaan of the ages is in the future
+of time. Taking this age at its own estimate I have long thought the
+subject for the finest epic lying within possibility in our era is the
+building of the railway to India. Into a history of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_50" id="page_50"></a>{50}</span> that undertaking
+would flow all the affluents of the ancient world. The stories of
+Baalbec and Nineveh that are finished, and of Aleppo and Damascus that
+survive, would fall into this prodigious tale of peaceful conquest. The
+line would have for marge Assyria on one hand, Egypt on the other; it
+would reach from the land of the Buddhist through the land of the
+Mohammedan to the land of the Christian. It would be a work undertaken
+in honour of the modern god, Progress, through the graves of the oldest
+peoples, to link the three great forms of faith. All the action of the
+epic would take place on earth, and all the actors would be men. There
+would be no need for evolving the god from the machine, for the machine
+itself would be the god. It would be the history of man from his birth
+till this hour. It would be most fitly written in English, for English
+is the most capacious and virile language yet invented by man.</p>
+
+<p>But a mere mortal, such as I, cannot stay in India always, or even abide
+for ever by the way. Although I have <i>Whitaker’s Almanack</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_51" id="page_51"></a>{51}</span> before me
+all the time, I have strayed a little from it. In thinking of the lands
+through which that heroic line of railway would pass, I have almost
+forgotten the modest volume at my elbow. Yet fragile as it looks, one
+volume similar to it will last as long as the Pyramids, will come in
+time to be as old as the oldest memory is now; that is, if the ruins of
+England endure as long as those of Egypt, for a copy of it lies built up
+under Cleopatra’s Needle.</p>
+
+<p>I turn over the last page of “British India” in my <i>Almanack</i>. We are
+not yet done with orient lands and seas. The article over-leaf is headed
+“Other British Possessions in the East.” Here, if one wants incitement
+towards prose or verse, dreaming or doing, commerce or pillage, is
+matter to his hand. The places one may read of are&mdash;Aden, Socotra,
+Ceylon, Hong-Kong, Labuan, British North Borneo, and Cyprus. Then in my
+book comes “The Dominion of Canada,” with its territory “about as large
+as Europe”! and a revenue equal to Portugal, which discovered<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_52" id="page_52"></a>{52}</span> and once
+held India. After Canada come “Other American Possessions,” including
+British Guiana, which, except for the sugar of Demerara, is little heard
+of; it occupies a space of earth as large as all Great Britain. So
+little do people of inferior education know of this dependency, that
+once, when a speaker in the House of Commons spoke of the “island of
+Demerara,” there was not a single member present who knew that Demerara
+was not an island, but part of the mainland of South America. Last in
+the list comes British Honduras, about as big as Wales.</p>
+
+<p>After America, we have our enormous outlying farm in the southern
+hemisphere, “British Possessions in Australasia.” There the land owned
+by England is again about the size of Europe! Then follow “British
+Possessions in the West Indies,” small in mileage, great in fertility
+and richness of produce, and with a population twice that of Eastern
+Roumelia. The “British Possessions in Africa” are considerably larger
+than France, with about half as many inhabitants as Denmark. The
+territories owned in<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_53" id="page_53"></a>{53}</span> the Southern Atlantic are Ascension, the Falkland
+Islands, South Georgia, and St. Helena. This prodigious list ends with
+the European Possessions, namely, Malta, Gibraltar, Heligoland, the
+Channel Islands, and Isle of Man.</p>
+
+<p>By this time the hand is tired writing down the mere names of the riches
+belonging to Great Britain. Towards the close of my list from Whitaker
+my energy drooped, and a feeling of enervating satiety came upon me. I
+am surfeited with splendours, and, like a tiger filled with flesh, I
+must sleep. But in that sleep what dreams may come! How the imagination
+expands and aspires under the stimulus of a page of tabulated figures!
+How the fancy is excited, provoked, by the spectacle of an endless sea
+in which every quarter of the globe affords a bower for Britannia when
+it pleases her aquatic highness to adventure abroad upon the deep, into
+the farthest realms of the morning, into the regions of the dropping
+sun. Here, in my best two books, are the words of the most copious
+language that man ever spoke, and the facts and figures of the greatest
+realm over<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_54" id="page_54"></a>{54}</span> which man ever ruled. <i>Civis Romanus sum!</i> I will sleep. I
+will dream that I am alone with my two books. I will speak in this
+imperial, this dominant dialect, as I move by sea and land among the
+peoples who live under the flag flying above me now. Who would encumber
+himself with finite poetry or romance when he may take with him the
+uncombined vocabulary, with its infinite possibilities of affinities,
+and the history of the countries and the peoples that lie beneath this
+flag, and bear in his heart the astounding and exalting
+consciousness&mdash;<i>Civis Romanus sum!</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_55" id="page_55"></a>{55}</span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="LIES_OF_FABLE_AND_ALLEGORY" id="LIES_OF_FABLE_AND_ALLEGORY"></a>LIES OF FABLE AND ALLEGORY.</h2>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Some</span> little while ago the battered and shattered remains of an old
+bookcase with the sedimentary deposit of my own books, reached me after
+a journey of many hundred miles from its former resting place. The front
+of the bookcase is twisted wirework, which, when I remember it first,
+was lined with pink silk. Not a vestige, not a shred of the silk remains
+and the half dozen shelves now depend for preservation in position on a
+frame as crazy as Her Majesty’s ship <i>Victory</i>, and certainly older. The
+bookcase had belonged to my grandfather before Trafalgar, and some of
+the books I found in it among the sediment were printed before the Great
+Fire of London. In all there were about a couple or three hundred books,
+none<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_56" id="page_56"></a>{56}</span> of which would be highly valued by a bibliophile. Owing to my
+being in a very modest way a wanderer on the face of the realm, these
+books had been out of my possession for nearly twenty years, and dusty
+and dilapidated as they were when they reached me I took them in my arms
+as long-lost friends. I had finished the last sentence with the word
+children, but that would not do for two reasons. These books were not
+mine as this one I am now writing is, and long-lost children change more
+than they have changed, or more than friends change. Children grow and
+outpace us and leave us behind and are not so full of companionable
+memories as friends. There is hardly time to make friends of our adult
+children before we are beckoned away. The friends we make and keep when
+we are young have always twenty years’ start of our children in
+friendship. A man may be friendly with his son of five but a father and
+son cannot be full friends until the son is twenty years older.</p>
+
+<p>Again, as to the impropriety of speaking of the books as long-lost
+children I have<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_57" id="page_57"></a>{57}</span> another scruple. I am in great doubt as to whether the
+recovery of a long-lost child is at all desirable. A long-lost child
+means a young girl or boy of our own who is lost when under ten years of
+age and recovered years afterwards. I do not know that the recovery of
+the missing one is a cause of gratitude. Remember it is not at all the
+child we lost. It is a child alleged or alleging itself to be the child
+we lost. It is more correctly not a child at all, but a lad or lass whom
+we knew when young, and whose acquaintance we have to make over again.
+Our personality has become dim to it, and we have to occupy ourselves
+seriously in trying to identify the unwieldy bulk of the stranger with
+our memory of the wanderer. When the boy went from us we mourned for him
+as dead, and now he comes back to us from the tomb altered all out of
+memory. He is not wholly our child. There is an interregnum in our reign
+over him and we do not know what manner of king has held sway in our
+stead, or, if knowing the usurper, we cannot measure the extent or force
+of his<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_58" id="page_58"></a>{58}</span> influence. How much of this young person is really our very own?
+how much the development of untoward fate? Is the memory of our lost one
+dearer than the presence of this lad who is half stranger? What we lost
+and mourned was ours surely; how much of what we have regained belongs
+to us?</p>
+
+<p>With books no such question arises. They are our very own. They have
+suffered no increment, but rather loss. What we remember of them and
+find again in them fills us with joy; what we have forgotten and recall
+excites a surprise which makes us feel rich. We reproach ourselves with
+not having loved them sufficiently well, and swear upon them to endow
+them with warmer affection henceforth. In turning over the books in the
+old case I lighted upon one which I believe to be the volume that came
+earliest into my possession. It is Cobbett’s <i>Spelling-Book</i>, and by the
+writing on the title page I see it was given to me by my father on the
+second of February, 1854. It is in a very battered and tattered
+condition. I find a youthful autograph of my own on the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_59" id="page_59"></a>{59}</span> fly-leaf, the
+Christian name occupying one line, the surname the second; on a third
+line is the name of the town, and on a fourth the number of the street
+and part of the name of the street, the last being, I blush to say,
+ill-spelt. Surely there never was a book hated as I hated this one! At
+that time I had declared my unalterable determination of never learning
+to read. I possessed, until recently, a copy of Valpy’s Latin Grammar of
+about the same date, and I remember I worshipped the Latin Grammar
+compared with the Spelling-Book. I knew <i>rosa</i> before I could read words
+of two syllables, and at this moment I do not know much more Latin than
+I did then. The Spelling-Book was published by Anne Cobbett, at 137,
+Strand, in 1849. It is almost incredible that so short a time ago the
+atrocious woodcuts could be got in England for love or money. There is
+no attempt whatever at overlaying in the printing; the cut pages are all
+what are called “flat pulls.” Here and there through the pages of
+chilling columns of words of one, two, three or more syllables are
+pencil marks<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_60" id="page_60"></a>{60}</span> indicating the limits of a day’s lesson. What a ruthless
+way they had with us children in those days! When I look at those
+appalling columns of arid words I applaud my childish determination of
+never learning to read if the art were to be acquired only by traversing
+those fearful deserts of unintelligible verbiage. Fancy a child of
+tender years confronted with antitrinitarian, consubstantiality,
+discontinuation, excommunication, extraordinarily, immateriality,
+impenetrability, indivisibility, naturalization, plenipotentiary,
+recapitulation, supererogation, transubstantiation, valetudinarian, and
+volatilization, not one of which is as difficult to spell as one quarter
+the words of one syllable, and not one of which could be understood by a
+child or would be used by a single man out of a thousand in all his
+life. The country had penal settlements then, why in the name of mercy
+did they not send children to the settlements and give them a chance to
+keep their reason and become useful citizens when their time of
+punishment had expired? I am happy to say I find no pencil marks among<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_61" id="page_61"></a>{61}</span>
+those leviathan words above. I suppose I never got into the deep waters
+where they “wallowing unwieldy in their gait tempest the ocean.”</p>
+
+<p>I wonder was the foundation of a lifelong dislike to Cobbett’s writings
+laid in me at that early time of my existence? Anyway I do not remember
+the day when I did not dislike everything I read of Cobbett’s, and I
+dislike everything of his I read now. I wonder, also, was it at that
+early date the seed of my hatred of fable or allegory was sown? To me
+the fables in the back of that Spelling-Book were always odious, now
+they are loathsome. With the cold-blooded “morals” attendant upon them
+they are the worst form of literary torture I know. I am aware that the
+bulk of them are not original, but Cobbett inserted them in his book,
+and I give him full credit for evil intention. Yet in later years it was
+not his taste for fable that repelled me but his intense combativeness.
+He is never comfortable unless he is mangling some one. It was a pity he
+ever left the army. He would have been a credit to his corps at close
+quarters with a clubbed musket. Even in<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_62" id="page_62"></a>{62}</span> the Spelling-Book, intended for
+young children, his “Stepping-Stone to Cobbett’s English Grammar” takes
+the form of a dialogue, in which he, the “Teacher,” smashes the
+unfortunate Scholar and Mr. William. Cobbett sprang from the people and
+was a Saxon pure and simple, and the Saxon is the element in the English
+people which has been most undistinguished when unmingled with other
+blood. The Saxon of fifteen hundred years ago is the yokel of to-day,
+and he never was more than a yokel intellectually. The enormous
+intellectual fertility of England is owing to successive invasions, and
+chiefly to the Norman Conquest. All the great and noble and sweet faces
+in English history are Norman, or largely Norman. The awful faces of the
+Gibbon type make periods of English history like a night spectral with
+evil dreams.</p>
+
+<p>Does any one past the condition of childhood really like fables? Mind, I
+do not say past the years of childhood. But does any one of fully mature
+intellect like fables or pleasantly endure allegories? I think not. In
+the vigour of all lives there must be <i>lacunæ</i> of intense indolence,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_63" id="page_63"></a>{63}</span>
+backwaters of the mind, where one is willing to float effortless and
+take the things that come as though they were good things rather than
+work at the oars in pursuit of novelties. At such times it is easier to
+persuade ourselves we are amused by books that we admired when we lacked
+experience and discernment than to break new ground and encounter fresh
+obstacles. I am leaving out of account the dull worthy people who say
+they like a book because other people say they like it. These good
+people live in a continual state of self-justification. They are much
+more serenely secure in what they imagine to be their opinions than
+those travailing souls that really have opinions of their own. Their
+life is easy, and in lazy moments one sighs for the repose they enjoy.
+But do not the people with active minds often adhere to childish likings
+merely from indolence? A certain question they settled in their own
+minds when they were ten; it is too much trouble to treat it as an open
+matter at thirty. Consistency in a politician is invariably a sign of
+stupidity, because no man (outside fundamental questions<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_64" id="page_64"></a>{64}</span> of morals) can
+with credit to his sense remain stationary in opinion for thirty years
+where all is change. The very data on which he based an opinion in the
+year one are vapourized in the year thirty. The foundation of all
+political theories is first principles of some kind, and the only
+support a philosophic mind rejects with disdain is a first principle of
+any kind. Now, the fables we tolerate, nay, admire as children, are in
+imaginative literature what first principles are in that branch of
+imaginary philanthropy called politics. It is much easier to say every
+man has a right to eight shillings a day than to find out what each
+particular man has a right to, or if man has a right to anything at all.
+It is much easier to say one does like Fontaine than at thirty years of
+age to acquire a disgust of him and his fables.</p>
+
+<p>The lying insincerity of fables and their morals always shocks me, and
+the gross blindness of the fabulist to any view of transactions but that
+adopted by him to point his precept, fills me with contempt for him as
+an artist.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_65" id="page_65"></a>{65}</span> In the Spelling-Book I do not feel myself at liberty to
+select the fables as I choose. I will take only one, the first that
+comes. It is about the swallow and the sparrow. It is a very bad
+specimen for my contention, but as I am the challenger I have not the
+choice of weapons, and I accept the first presented by Cobbett.</p>
+
+<p>A swallow coming back to her old nest in the spring finds it occupied by
+a sparrow and his brood of young ones. The swallow demands possession on
+the grounds of having built the nest and brought up three broods in it.
+The sparrow will not budge. The swallow summons a number of swallows,
+and they wall up the sparrow and he and his brood die of hunger.</p>
+
+<p>The first notice of bias the reader gets is that the swallow is called
+she, and the sparrow he. Why? For the dishonest purpose of enlisting
+sympathy with the swallow. There is no evidence or statement the sparrow
+was aware when taking possession of the nest that it would be reclaimed
+by the swallow. How was the sparrow to know that the swallow was not
+dead and buried by the mole? The nest was<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_66" id="page_66"></a>{66}</span> derelict. Again, when the
+swallow returned the sparrow had young ones, which it would be dangerous
+to remove from the nest. How was the sparrow to know the swallow was
+telling the truth, and that the nest was hers? Then, even supposing the
+sparrow to be all in the wrong, the punishment was out of all proportion
+to the offence. The sparrow had done no harm beyond intruding. He had
+not injured the furniture, or burned any of the swallow’s gas, or broken
+into the wine-cellar. Justice would have been vindicated by the
+expulsion of the intruder and his brood. But what takes place instead?
+The door is built up, and the sparrow with his innocent young is
+murdered! Surely if this is a fruitful fable, the moral is immoral. This
+is the old Mosaic theory of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,
+and a little, or rather a great deal more. It is hideously un-Christian.
+I believe Cobbett professed Christianity. Why did he put this odious
+vengeful story in the forefront of his exemplars of righteous doing?<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_67" id="page_67"></a>{67}</span></p>
+
+<p>But the worst part of the story is in the Moral. “Thus it always is with
+the unjust,” says the Chorus of the fabulist. He means that the unjust
+are always nailed up in their houses with their blameless children and
+starved to death. Now neither Cobbett nor any other sane preacher
+believes anything of the kind. This is a lie, pure and simple; a lie no
+doubt told with a good object, but a lie all the same. Cobbett had too
+much common-sense not to know that it is not always “thus” with the
+“unjust.” As a rule, the unjust go scot free when they stop short of
+crime. The people who say otherwise are yielding to a feminine,
+sentimental weakness. Poetic justice no doubt does exist&mdash;in poetry.
+Most men are as unjust as they dare be, and most men get on comfortably
+from their cradles to their graves. It is only the fools, the men of
+ungovernable passions and impulses and the blunderers who suffer. Man is
+at heart a rapacious brute. All his centuries of civilization have not
+quelled the predatory spirit in him. Any man will become a thief if he
+only be sufficiently tempted when he is sufficiently<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_68" id="page_68"></a>{68}</span> desperate. The
+crime of the sparrow in appropriating the swallow’s nest is
+intelligible, the crime of the swallow in murdering the sparrow and his
+brood is intelligible, the crime of lying committed by the moralist is
+abominable. When the child to whom Cobbett lied grows up, he will know
+the lie, despise the liar, and have nothing left of the precious fable
+but a shaken faith in the words of all men, whether they be liars like
+Cobbett and the other moralists, or truth-tellers like the ordinary
+everyday folk, who do not pose as teachers and latter-day prophets. It
+is very improving to reflect on the freedom these teachers give
+themselves in act when enforcing their theories in writing. In order
+that Cobbett might exemplify his principles against the credit system,
+he signed his name across the face of acceptances for seventy thousand
+pounds!</p>
+
+<p>Cobbett’s Grammar was written for sailors and soldiers and such men. I
+gave the only copy of it I ever had to a sailor who had abandoned living
+on the sea to live by the sea, who had<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_69" id="page_69"></a>{69}</span> eschewed the paint-pot and the
+stage aboard the merchant service for the palette and stool of the
+studio. It is years since I have seen the book, but I remember the
+contemptuous way in which the ex-soldier disposes of prosody. He says to
+his pupil in effect: You need pay no attention to this branch of
+grammar, as it deals only with the <i>noise</i> made by words. Cobbett’s
+treatment of prosody does not occupy more than one line or one line and
+a half of print. It is briefer than Dr. Johnson’s Syntax:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>“The established practice of grammarians requires that I should
+here treat of the Syntax; but our language has so little inflexion,
+or variety of terminations, that its construction neither requires
+nor admits many rules. Wallis, therefore, has totally neglected it;
+and Jonson, whose desire of following the writers upon the learned
+languages made him think a syntax indispensably necessary, has
+published such petty observations as were better omitted.</p>
+
+<p>“The verb, as in other languages, agrees with the nominative in
+number and person; as <i>Thou fliest from good; He runs to death</i>.</p>
+
+<p>“Our adjectives are invariable.</p>
+
+<p>“Of two substantives the noun possessive is the genitive; as <i>His
+father’s glory; the sun’s heat</i>.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_70" id="page_70"></a>{70}</span></p>
+
+<p>“Verbs transitive require an oblique case; as <i>He loves me; You
+fear him</i>.</p>
+
+<p>“All prepositions require an oblique case: <i>He gave this to me; He
+took this from me; He says this of me; He came with me</i>.”</p></div>
+
+<p>That is all the merciful Dr. Samuel Johnson has to say about syntax. Oh,
+Lindley Murray! Oh, memories of youth! Does it seem possible that
+Johnson could have enjoyed the luxury of speaking in this light and airy
+and debonair way of English grammar in his day, and that Lindley Murray
+could have matured his awful Grammar in so few years afterwards?
+Recollect there were not forty years between the lexicographer and the
+grammarian. Could not Lindley Murray have left the unfortunate English
+language alone? Johnson says no one need bother about syntax, and
+Cobbett says no one need bother about prosody. Thus we have only
+orthography and etymology to look after, when in comes Murray and spoils
+all! It is doubtful if the language will ever recover the interference
+of that Yankee merchant who invented syntax and made the life of dull
+school boys and girls a path of thorns and agony.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_71" id="page_71"></a>{71}</span></p>
+
+<p>An allegory is a fable for fools of larger growth. I am writing in an
+off-hand way, and I will not pause to examine the question nicely; but
+is there any such thing as a successful allegory? I have no experience
+of one. I seem to hear a loud shout of “<i>The Pilgrim’s Progress</i>.” Well,
+I never could read the book through, and I have tried at least twenty
+times. I have put the reading of that book before myself in the most
+solemn manner. I have told myself over and over again that I ought to
+read it as an educational exercise. In vain. How any man with
+imagination can bear the book I do not know. Bunyan had inexhaustible
+invention, but no imagination. He saw a reason for things, not the
+things themselves. No creation of the imagination can lack consequence
+or verisimilitude. On almost every page of the <i>Progress</i> there is
+violation of sequence, outrage against verisimilitude. Christian has a
+great burden on his back and is in rags. He cannot remove the burden.
+(Why?) He is put to bed (with the burden on his back), then he is
+troubled in his mind (the burden is forgotten, and the vision altered
+completely and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_72" id="page_72"></a>{72}</span> fatally); again we are reminded that he has the burden
+on his back when he tells Evangelist of it. Why can he not loose the
+burden on his back? How is it secured so that he cannot remove it? He
+cannot see a wicket gate across a very wide field, but he sees a shining
+light (where?), and then he begins to run (burden and all) away from his
+wife and children (which is immoral and abhorrent to the laws of God and
+man). For the mere selfish ease of his body he deserts his wife and
+children, who must be left miserably poor, for is he not in rags? The
+neighbours come out and mock at him for running across a field. Why? How
+do they know why he runs, and what neighbours are there to come out and
+mock at one when one is running across a large field? The Slough of
+Despond is in this field (for he has not passed through the wicket
+gate), and he does not seem to know of the Slough, or think of avoiding
+it. Fancy any man not knowing of such a filthy hole within a field of
+his home! How is it that Pliable and Obstinate have no burdens on their
+backs? It is not the will of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_73" id="page_73"></a>{73}</span> the King that the Slough should be
+dangerous to wayfarers: this surely is blasphemy. The whole thing is
+grotesquely absurd and impossible to imagine. There is no sobriety in
+it, no sobriety of keeping in it; and no matter how wild the effort or
+vision of imagination may be there must always be sobriety of keeping in
+it or it is delirium not imagination, disease not inspiration. As far as
+I can see there is no trace of imagination, or even fancy, in the
+<i>Pilgrim’s Progress</i>. The story never happened at all. It is a horrible
+attempt to tinkerise the Bible.</p>
+
+<p>One of the things I cannot understand about Macaulay is that he stands
+by Bunyan’s silly book. Macaulay was a man of vast reading and
+acquirements and of common-sense tastes. He was not a poet, but he was
+very nearly one, and ought to have responded in sympathy with poets. In
+politics he belonged to that most melancholy of all sects, the Whigs,
+and it may be that the spirit of political compromise to which he had
+familiarised himself in public life had slipped unknown to him into his
+literary<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_74" id="page_74"></a>{74}</span> briefs. Anyway, he himself says that the <i>Pilgrim’s Progress</i>
+is the only book which was promoted from the kitchen to the
+drawing-room. There is no difficulty in accounting for the fact that the
+book was popular among scullions and cooks, but how it ever gained
+currency among people of moderate education and taste cannot be
+explained. It is the most dull and tedious and monstrous book of any
+note in the English language, and how any man with a gleam of
+imagination can like it is more than I can understand. If one has been
+familiar with it when young, one may tolerate it on the score of
+tenderness&mdash;tenderness for memories and laziness in new enterprises; but
+I never yet knew any one with even fancy who, meeting it for the first
+time after the dawn of adolescence, could even endure it.</p>
+
+<p>It is like celebrating one’s own apotheosis to drop Bunyan and take up
+Spenser. Here we share the air with an immortal god and not a bilious
+enthusiast. When I have laid aside the <i>Spelling-Book</i> and the
+<i>Pilgrim’s Progress</i>, and opened the <i>Faerie Queen</i>, I feel as though
+the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_75" id="page_75"></a>{75}</span> leaden clouds of the north had rolled away, disclosing the blue of
+Ægean skies; as though for squalid porridge and buttermilk had been
+substituted ambrosia and nectar; as though for fallow and stubble had
+drifted under my feet soft meadow-grass dense with flowers; as though
+the moist and clayey crags had changed into purple hills, the
+green-mantled pools to azure lakes, the narrow waters of a stagnant mere
+to the free imperial waves and tides of the ocean. It is better than
+escaping out of an East-end slum into the green lanes and roads of
+Warwickshire.</p>
+
+<p>And yet, melancholy truth! the <i>Faerie Queen</i> is most unpopular and most
+unreadable. It has with justice, I think, been said that of ten thousand
+people who begin the <i>Faerie Queen</i>, not ten read half way through it,
+and only one arrives at the end. I find by a mark in my copy that I have
+got a good deal more than half through it, but that I have not reached
+the last line of this most colossal fragment of a poem. What a mercy the
+rest of it was drowned in the Irish sea! My <i>Faerie Queen</i> occupies<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_76" id="page_76"></a>{76}</span> 792
+pages of five stanzas to the page; that is, between thirty-five and
+thirty-six thousand verses, two hundred and sixty to seventy thousand
+words, or equal in length to a couple of ordinary three-volume novels!
+And still it is <i>unperfite</i>! I find that although I have owned the book
+for twenty years, I have got no further than page 472, so that I have
+read only three-fifths of the fragment of this stupendous poem.</p>
+
+<p>It is not the length alone that defeats the reader. In all the field of
+English verse there is no poem of great length that comes upon the mind
+with more full and easy flow. The stanza after a long while becomes, no
+doubt, monotonous, but it is the monotony of a vast and freightful river
+that moves majestically, bearing interminable argosies of infinite
+beauty and variety and significance. After one hundred pages one might
+put down the book, wearied by the melodious monotony of the imperial
+chords. I have never been able to read anything like a hundred, anything
+like fifty pages at a time. I think I have rarely exceeded as many
+stanzas. Spenser is the poets’ poet, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_77" id="page_77"></a>{77}</span> the <i>Faerie Queen</i> the poets’
+poem, and yet even the poets cannot read it freely and fully, as one
+reads Milton or Shakespeare or Shelley or Keats or the readable parts of
+Coleridge, all of whom are poets’ poets also.</p>
+
+<p>The allegory bars the way. One reads on smoothly and joyously about a
+wood or a nymph, or a knight or a lady, or a castle or a dragon, and is
+half drunk on the wealthy poet’s mead (is not Spenser the wealthiest of
+English poets?), when suddenly Dan Allegory comes along and assures you
+that it is not a wood or a nymph, or a knight or lady, or a castle or
+dragon, but a virtue or a vice posing in property clothes; that in fact
+things are not what they seem, but visions are about. Cobbett intended
+his fables for little children, and Bunyan his allegory for the company
+of the stewpans, but Spenser’s story is for the ears of ladies and of
+knights; why then does he try to spoon-feed them with virtuous
+sentiment? There is not, as far as I know, a trace of dyspepsia in all
+the <i>Faerie Queen</i>, and yet he has sicklied it over “with the pale cast
+of thought.” In this Vale of Tears<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_78" id="page_78"></a>{78}</span> there are quite as many virtuous
+persons as any reasonable man can desire. Why should our poets&mdash;those
+rare and exquisite manifestations of our possibilities&mdash;turn themselves
+into moralists, who are, bless you, as common as grocers, as plentiful
+as mediocrity. In fact, nine-tenths of the civilised race of man are
+moralists. But poets ought not to be theorists. They are not sent to us
+for the purpose of converting us, but for the purpose of delighting us.
+They ought to be catholic and pagan. They are among the settled property
+of joy to which all mankind are heirs. They come in among the flowers
+and colours of the sky and earth, and the vocal rapture of the birds,
+and the perfumes of the breeze, and the love of woman and children and
+friends and kind. They are sent to us for our mere delight. They never
+grow less or fade away or change. They have nothing to do with dynasties
+or creeds or codes of manners. They are apart from all bias and strife.
+The will of Heaven itself is against poets preaching, for no poet has
+ever written hymns that were not a burden upon his reputation as a
+singer,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_79" id="page_79"></a>{79}</span> and did not weigh him to the ground, compared with his flight
+when free and catholic and pagan.</p>
+
+<p>After entertaining the nightmares of dulness born of Cobbett and Bunyan,
+how one’s shoulders swing back, one’s chest opens, and one’s breath
+comes with large and ample coolness and joy as one reads&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“The ioyous day gan early to appeare;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And fayre Aurora from the deawy bed<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Of aged Tithone gan herselfe to reare<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">With rosy cheekes, for shame as blushing red:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Her golden locks, for hast, were loosely shed<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">About her eares, when Una her did marke<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Clymbe to her charet, all with flowers spred,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">From heven high to chace the chearelesse darke;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">With mery note her lowd salutes the mountain larke.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">Or again here&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Then forth he called that his daughter fayre,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The fairest Un’, his onely daughter deare,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">His onely daughter and his onely hayre;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Who forth proceeding with sad sober cheare,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">As bright as doth the morning starre appeare<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Out of the east with flaming lockes bedight,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To tell that dawning day is drawing neare<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And to the world does bring long wished light:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">So fair and fresh that lady shewd herselfe in sight.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_80" id="page_80"></a>{80}</span></p>
+
+<p>Is it not a miserable destiny to be obliged to read stanza after stanza
+redolent of such rich perfumed words about the lady, and then to find
+that Una is not a mortal or a spirit even&mdash;but Truth! An abstraction! A
+whim of degrading reason! A figment of a moralist’s heated and
+disordered brain. Any Lie of a poet is better than any Truth of a
+moralist. Why did Spenser stoop to run on the same intellectual plain as
+the accidental teacher? The teacher would have done admirably for Truth,
+but all the worthy essayists of England in the “spacious days of Queen
+Elizabeth,” put together, could not have written the stanzas about Una
+as Spenser saw her. This poaching of poets on the preserves of moralists
+is one of the most shameful things in the history of art.</p>
+
+<p>There are few poets it is harder to select quotations from than Spenser.
+The fact is, all the <i>Faerie Queen</i> ought to be quoted except the
+blinding allegory. I find that in years of my movement from the opening
+of the poem to page 472, the limit I have reached, I have marked a
+hundred passages at least, some<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_81" id="page_81"></a>{81}</span> of them running through pages. In no
+other poem&mdash;except Shelley’s <i>Alastor</i>&mdash;do I notice such grievous,
+continuous pencil scores. What is one to do? Whither is one to turn? As
+I handle the book I am lost in a deeper forest of delight than ever
+knight of Gloriana’s trod. Here I find a passage of several stanzas
+marked. I am much too lazy to copy them, and the spelling is troublesome
+often. But who can resist this?&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">“&mdash;&mdash; And, when she spake,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sweete wordes, like dropping honny, she did shed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And twixt the perles and rubins softly brake<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A silver sound, that heavenly musicke seemed to make.<br /></span>
+<span style="margin-left: 4em;">. . . . . . . . . .</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Upon her eyelids many graces sate<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Under the shadow of her even browes.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>I have quoted the three lines and a half of the earlier stanza merely
+that they may act as an overture to the last two lines. Surely there are
+no two lovelier lines in the language! In the last line the words seem
+to melt together of their own propinquity.</p>
+
+<p>Here is an alexandrine that haunts me night and day&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Sweete is the love that comes alone with willingnesse.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_82" id="page_82"></a>{82}</span></p>
+
+<p>As a rule, I hate writing with the books I am speaking of near me; they
+fetter one cruelly when they are at hand. There is a tendency to verify
+one’s memory, and read up the context of favourite lines. This is
+checking to the speed and chilling to the spirits. When I was saying
+something about the <i>Spelling-Book</i> and the <i>Pilgrim’s Progress</i>, I had
+the copies within arm’s length, for I did not know either well enough to
+trust to memory. Since I got done with them I have placed them in
+distant safety. But one likes to handle Spenser&mdash;to have it nigh. My
+copy is lying at my left elbow in the blazing sun as I write now. It
+seems to me I shall never again look into the <i>Spelling-Book</i> or the
+<i>Pilgrim’s Progress</i>. Fables and allegories are only foolishnesses fit
+for people of weak intellect and children. Well, when I put down this
+pen, and before this ink is dry, I shall have resumed my interrupted
+reading of the <i>Faerie Queen</i> at page 473. My intellect is too weak and
+my heart too childish to resist the seduction of Spenser’s verse. So
+much for my own theory of allegory and my respect for my own theory.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_83" id="page_83"></a>{83}</span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="MY_COPY_OF_KEATS" id="MY_COPY_OF_KEATS"></a>MY COPY OF KEATS.</h2>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> only copy of Keats I ever owned is a modest volume published by
+Edward Moxon and Co. in the year 1861. By writing on its yellow fly-leaf
+I find it was given to me four years later, in September 1865. At that
+time it was clean and bright, opened with strict impartiality when set
+upon its back, and had not learned to respond with alacrity to hasty
+searches for favourite passages.</p>
+
+<p>The binding is now racked and feeble from use; and if, as in army
+regulations, service under warm suns is to be taken for longer service
+in cooler climes, it may be said that to the exhaustion following
+overwork have been added the prejudices of premature age.</p>
+
+<p>It is not bound as books were bound once upon a time, when they
+outlasted the tables and chairs,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_84" id="page_84"></a>{84}</span> even the walls; ay, the very races and
+names of their owners. The cover is simple plain blue cloth; on the back
+is a little patch of printing in gold, with the words Keats’s <i>Poetical
+Works</i> in the centre of a twined gilt ribbon and twisted gilt flowers.
+The welt at the back is bleached and frayed; the corners of the cover
+are battered and turned in. There is a chink between the cover and the
+arched back; and the once proud Norman line of that arc is flattened and
+degraded, retaining no more of its pristine look of sturdy strength than
+a wheaten straw after the threshing.</p>
+
+<p>In a list of new books preceding the biography of the poet I find the
+volume I speak of under the head “<span class="smcap">Poetry</span>&mdash;<i>Pocket Editions</i>;” described
+as “Keats’s <i>Poetical Works</i>. With a Memoir by R. M. Milnes. Price 3<i>s.</i>
+6<i>d.</i> cloth.” It was from no desire to look my gift-horse in the mouth I
+alighted upon the penultimate fact disclosed in the description. When I
+become owner of any volume my first delight in it is to read the
+catalogue of new books annexed, if there be any, before breaking my fast
+upon the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_85" id="page_85"></a>{85}</span> subject-matter of the writer in my hand&mdash;as a poor gentleman
+in a spacious restaurant, who, having ordered luncheon, consisting of
+bread and cheese, butter, and a half-pint of bitter ale, takes up the
+bill of fare and the list of wines, and designs for his imagination a
+feast his purse denies to his lips.</p>
+
+<p>If any owner of a cart of old books in Farringdon Street asked you a
+shilling for such a copy of Keats as mine, you would smile at him. You
+would think he had acquired the books merely to satisfy his own taste,
+and now displayed them to gratify a vanity that was intelligible; you
+would feel assured no motive towards commerce could underlie ever so
+deeply such a preposterous demand.</p>
+
+<p>My copy will, I think, last my time. Already it has been in my hands
+more than half the years of a generation; and I feel that its severest
+trials are over. In days gone by it made journeys with me by sea and
+land, and paid long visits to some friends, both when I went myself, and
+when I did not go. Change of air and scene have had no beneficial effect
+upon it. Journey after<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_86" id="page_86"></a>{86}</span> journey, and visit after visit, the full cobalt
+of the cloth grew darker and dingier, the boards of the cover became
+limper and limper, and the stitching at the back more apparent between
+the sheets, like the bones and sinews growing outward through the flesh
+of a hand waxing old.</p>
+
+<p>Once, when the book had been on a prolonged excursion away from me, it
+returned sadly out of sorts. Had it been a dear friend come back from
+India on sick-leave, after an absence from temperate skies of twenty
+years, I could not have observed a more disquieting change. The cover
+was darkened so that the original hue had almost wholly disappeared,
+save at the edges, that, like the Indian veteran’s forehead, were of
+startling and unwholesome pallor. Its presence in such guise aroused a
+gnawing solicitude which undermined all peace. I could not endure the
+symptoms of its speedy decline, the prospect of its dissolution; and to
+shield its case from harm and my sensibilities from continual assault, I
+wrapped it with sighs and travail of heart in a gritty cover of
+substantial brown paper.</p>
+
+<p>For a while, the consciousness that my book<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_87" id="page_87"></a>{87}</span> was safe compensated for
+the unfamiliarity of its appearance and my constitutional antipathy to
+contact with brown paper, even a lively image of which makes me cringe.</p>
+
+<p>But as days went on the brown paper entered into my soul and rankled.
+What! was my Keats to be clad in that wretched union garb, that livery
+of poverty acknowledged, that corduroy of the bookshelf? Intolerable!
+Should I, who had, like other men, only my time to live, be denied all
+friendly sight of the natural seeming of my prime friend? My Keats would
+last my time; and why should I hide my friend in an unparticularised
+garb, the uniform of the mean or the needy, merely that those who came
+after me might enjoy a privilege of which senseless timidity sought to
+rob me? No; that should not be. I would cast away the badge of beggary,
+and, like a man, face the daily decay of my old companion. I tore the
+paper off, threw it upon the fire, and set my disenthralled Keats in its
+own proper vesture on the shelf among its comrades and its peers.</p>
+
+<p>There is no man, how poor soever, who has<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_88" id="page_88"></a>{88}</span> not some taste which, for his
+circumstances, must be regarded as expensive; and in that “sweet
+unreasonableness” of human nature, not at all limited to “the Celt,” men
+take a kind of foolish pride in their particular extravagances. You know
+a man that declares he would sooner go without his dinner than a clean
+shirt; another who would prefer one good cigar to a pound of cavendish;
+one who would rather travel to the City of winter mornings by train
+without an overcoat than by vulgar tramcar in fur and pilot cloth; a
+fourth who would more gladly give his right hand than forget his Greek;
+a fifth who pays the hire of a piano and does without the beer which as
+a Briton is his birthright; a sixth who starves himself and stints his
+family for the love of a garden. For my own part, I felt the using of my
+Keats without protection of any kind to be beyond my means, but I
+gloried in this extravagance. It seemed rich to be thus hand and glove
+with the book: to touch it when and where I would, and as much as ever I
+liked: to feel assured that even with free using and free lending it
+would outlast my short stay here, as the blossoms<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_89" id="page_89"></a>{89}</span> of the roses in a
+friend’s hedge outlast your summer visit. Was it not fine, did it not
+strike a chord of kingly generosity, to be able to say to a friend,
+“Here is my copy of Keats. Take it, use it, read it. There is plenty of
+it for you and me”? I would rather have the lending of my Keats than the
+bidding to a banquet.</p>
+
+<p>So it fell out that my favourite went more among my friends than ever,
+and accumulated at a usurious rate all manner of marks and stains, and
+defacements, and dog-ears, and other unworded comments, as well as
+verbal comments expressed in pencil and ink. It is true that a rolling
+stone gathers no moss, but a rolling snowball gathers more snow, and
+moss and snow are of about equal value. Oliver Wendell Holmes says, if I
+may trust my memory, that only three things improve with years: violins,
+wine, and meerschaum pipes. He loves books, and knows books as well as
+any man now living&mdash;almost as well as Charles Lamb did when he was with
+us; and yet Dr. Holmes does not think books worthy of being included in
+the list of things that time ripens. Is this ingratitude<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_90" id="page_90"></a>{90}</span> or
+carelessness, or does it mean that books dwell apart, and are no more to
+be classed with mere tangible things than angels, or mathematical
+points, or the winds of last winter? Is a book to him an ethereal record
+of a divine trance? an insubstantial painting of a splendid dream? the
+music of a yesterday fruitful in heavenly melody? the echo of a syren’s
+song haunting a sea shell?</p>
+
+<p>Does not De Quincey tell us that, having lent some books to Coleridge,
+the poet not only wrote the lender’s name in them, but enriched the
+margins with observations and comments on the texts? Who would not give
+a tithe of the books he has for one volume so gloriously illuminated? I
+remember when I was a lad, among lads, a friend of ours picked up
+secondhand Cary’s Dante, in which was written the name of a poet still
+living, but who is almost unknown. We loved the living poet for his
+work, and when the buyer told us that the Dante bore not only the poet’s
+name, but numerous marginal notes and hints in his handwriting, we all
+looked upon the happy possessor with eyes of envious<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_91" id="page_91"></a>{91}</span> respect. The
+precious volume was shown to us, not in groups, for in gatherings there
+is peril of a profaning laugh, or an unsympathetic sneer. One by one we
+were handed the book, on still country roads, upon the tranquil heights
+of hills, where we were alone with the brown heather and the plover, or
+on some barren cliff above the summer sea. The familiar printed text
+sank into insignificance beside the blurred pencil lines. Any one might
+buy a fair uncut copy for a crown piece. The text was common
+property&mdash;“<span class="leftspc">’</span>twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands.” But
+here before us lay revealed the private workings of a poetic
+imagination, fired by contact with a master of the craft. To us this
+volume disclosed one of our heroes, clad in the homely garb of prose,
+speaking in his own everyday speech, and lifting up his voice in
+admiration, wonder, awe, to the colossal demi-god, in whose presence we
+had stood humiliated and afeard.</p>
+
+<p>My Keats has suffered from many pipes, many thumbs, many pencils, many
+quills, many pockets. Not one stain, one gape, one<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_92" id="page_92"></a>{92}</span> blot of these would
+I forego for a spick and span copy in all the gorgeous pomp of the
+bookbinder’s millinery. These blemishes are aureolæ to me. They are
+nimbi around the brows of the gods and demi-gods, who walk in the
+triumph of their paternal despot on the clouds metropolitan that
+embattle the heights of Parnassus.</p>
+
+<p>What a harvest of happy memories is garnered in its leaves! How well I
+remember the day it got that faint yellow stain on the page where begins
+the <i>Ode on a Grecian Urn</i>. It was a clear, bright, warm, sunshiny
+afternoon late in the month of May. Three of us took a boat and rowed
+down a broad blue river, ran the nose of the boat ashore on the gravel
+beach of a sequestered island and landed. Pulling was warm work, and we
+all climbed a slope, reached the summit, and cast ourselves down on the
+long lush cool grass, in the shade of whispering sycamores, and in a
+stream of air that came fresh with the cheering spices of the hawthorn
+blossom.</p>
+
+<p>One of our company was the best chamber reader I have ever heard. His
+voice was<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_93" id="page_93"></a>{93}</span> neither very melodious nor very full. Perhaps he was all the
+better for this because he made no effort at display. As he read, the
+book vanished from his sight, and he leaned over the poet’s shoulder,
+saw what the poet saw, and in a voice timid with the sense of
+responsibility, and yet elated with a kind of fearing joy, told of what
+he saw in words that never hurried, and that, when uttered, always
+seemed to hang substantially in the air like banners.</p>
+
+<p>He discovered and related the poet’s vision rather than simulated
+passion to suit the scene. I remember well his reading of the passage:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Though winning near the goal&mdash;yet, do not grieve;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">She cannot fade though thou hast not thy bliss,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">For ever wilt thou love and she be fair!”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>He rehearsed the whole of the ode over and over again as we lay on the
+grass watching the vast chestnuts and oaks bending over the river, as
+though they had grown aweary of the sun, and longed to glide into the
+broad full stream.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_94" id="page_94"></a>{94}</span></p>
+
+<p>As he read the lines just quoted, he gave us time to hear the murmur,
+and to breathe the fragrance of those immortal trees. “Nor ever can
+those trees be bare,” in the text has only a semicolon after it. Yet
+here he paused, while three wavelets broke upon the beach, as if he
+could not tear himself away from contemplating the deathless verdure,
+and realising the prodigious edict pronounced upon it. “Bold lover,
+never, never canst thou kiss, though winning near the goal.” At the
+terrible decree he raised his eyes and gazed with heavy-lidded, hopeless
+commiseration at this being, who, still more unhappy than Tithonus, had
+to immortality added perpetual youth, with passion for ever strong, and
+denial for ever final.</p>
+
+<p>“Yet do not grieve.” This he uttered as one who pleads forgiveness of a
+corpse&mdash;merely to try to soothe a conscience sensible of an obligation
+that can never now be discharged. “She cannot fade, though thou hast not
+thy bliss, for ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!” Here the reader,
+with eyes fixed and rayless, seemed by voice and pose to be sunk,
+beyond<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_95" id="page_95"></a>{95}</span> all power of hope, in an abyss of despair. The barren
+immutability of the spectacle appeared to weigh upon him more
+intolerably than the wreck of a people. He spoke the words in a long
+drawn-out whisper, and, after a pause, dropped his head, and did not
+resume.</p>
+
+<p>I recollect that when the illusion he wrought up so fully in my mind had
+passed away in that long pause, and when I remembered that the fancy of
+the poet was expending itself, not on beings whom he conceived
+originally as human, but on the figures of a mere vase, I was seized
+with a fierce desire to get up and seek that vase through all the world
+until I found it, and then smash it into ten thousand atoms.</p>
+
+<p>When I had written the last sentence, I took up the volume to decide
+where I should recommence, and I “turned the page, and turned the page.”
+I lived over again the days not forgotten, but laid aside in memory to
+be borne forth in periods of high festival. I could not bring myself
+back from the comrades of old, and the marvels of the great magician, to
+this poor street, this solitude, and this squalid company of my<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_96" id="page_96"></a>{96}</span> own
+thoughts&mdash;thoughts so trivial and so mean compared with the imperial
+visions into which I had been gazing, that I was glad for the weariness
+which came upon me, and grateful to gray dawn that glimmered against the
+blind and absolved me from further obligation for that sitting.</p>
+
+<p>On turning over the leaves without reading, I find <i>Hyperion</i> opens most
+readily of all, and seems to have fared worst from deliberate and
+unintentional comment. Much of the wear and tear and pencil marks are to
+be set down against myself; for when I take the book with no definite
+purpose I turn to <i>Hyperion</i>, as a blind man to the warmth of the sun.
+Some qualities of the poem I can feel and appreciate; but always in its
+presence I am weighed down by the consciousness that my deficiency in
+some attribute of perception debars me from undreamed-of privileges.</p>
+
+<p>I recall one evening in a pine glen, with one man and <i>Hyperion</i>. It
+would be difficult to match this man or me as readers. I don’t think
+there can be ten worse employing the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_97" id="page_97"></a>{97}</span> English language to-day. I not
+only do not by any inflection of voice expound what I utter, but I am
+often incapable of speaking the words before me. I take in a line at a
+glance, see its import with my own imagination apart from the verbiage,
+which leaves not a shadow of an impression on my mind. When I come to
+the next line I grow suddenly alive to the fact that I have to speak off
+the former one. I am in a hurry to see what line two has to show; so,
+instead of giving the poet’s words for line one, I give my own
+description of the vision it has conjured up in my mind. This is bad
+enough in all conscience; but the friend of whom I speak now, behaves
+even worse. His plan of reading is to stop his voice in the middle of
+line one, and proceed to discuss the merits of line two, which he had
+read with his eye, but not with his lips, and of which the listener is
+ignorant, unless he happen to know the poem by rote.</p>
+
+<p>On that evening in the glen I pulled out Keats, and turned, at my
+friend’s request, to <i>Hyperion</i>, and began to read aloud. He was more
+patient than mercy’s self; but occasionally,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_98" id="page_98"></a>{98}</span> when I did a most
+exceptionally bad murder on the text, he would writhe and cry out, and I
+would go back and correct myself, and start afresh.</p>
+
+<p>He had a big burly frame, and a deep full voice that shouted easily, and
+some of the comments shouted as I read are indicated by pencil marks in
+the margin. The writing was not done then, but much later, when he and I
+had shaken hands, and he had gone sixteen thousand miles away. As he was
+about to set out on that long journey, he said, “In seven years more
+I’ll drop in and have a pipe with you.” It had been seven years since I
+saw him before. The notes on the margin are only keys to what was said;
+for I fear the comment made was more bulky than the text, and the text
+and comment together would far exceed the limits of such an essay as
+this. I therefore curtail greatly, and omit much.</p>
+
+<p>I read down the first page without meeting any interruption; but when I
+came in page two on</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10">“She would have ta’en<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Achilles by the hair and bent his neck,”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_99" id="page_99"></a>{99}</span></p>
+
+<p class="nind">he cried out, “Stop! Don’t read the line following. It is bathos
+compared with that line and a half. It is paltry and weak beside what
+you have read. ‘Ta’en Achilles by the hair and bent his neck.’ By Jove!
+can you not see the white muscles start out in his throat, and the look
+of rage, defeat and agony on the face of the Greek bruiser? But how flat
+falls the next line: ‘Or with a finger stay’d Ixion’s wheel.’ What’s the
+good of stopping Ixion’s wheel? Besides, a crowbar would be much better
+than a finger. It is a line for children, not for grown men. It exhausts
+the subject. It is too literal. There is no question left to ask. But
+the vague ‘Ta’en Achilles by the hair and <i>bent</i> his neck’ is perfect.
+You can see her knee in the hollow of his back, and her fingers twisted
+in his hair. But the image of the goddess dabbling in that river of hell
+after Ixion’s wheel is contemptible.”</p>
+
+<p>He next stopped me at</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Until at length old Saturn lifted up<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">His faded eyes, and saw his kingdom gone.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>“What an immeasurable vision Keats must<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_100" id="page_100"></a>{100}</span> have had of the old bankrupt
+Titan, when he wrote the second line! Taken in the context it is simply
+overwhelming. Keats must have sprung up out of his chair as he saw the
+gigantic head upraised, and the prodigious grief of the grey-haired god.
+But Keats was not happy in the matter of full stops. Here again what
+comes after weakens. We get no additional strength out of</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“<span class="leftspc">‘</span>And all the gloom and sorrow of the place<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And that fair kneeling Goddess.’<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">The ‘gloom and sorrow’ and the ‘goddess’ are abominably
+anticlimacteric.”</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Yes, there must be a golden victory;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">There must be gods thrown down and trumpets blown<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Of triumph calm, and hymns of festival<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Upon the gold clouds metropolitan,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Voices of soft proclaim, and silver stir<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Of strings in hollow shells; and there shall be<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Beautiful things made new, for the surprise<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Of the sky-children; I will give command:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Thea! Thea! Thea! where is Saturn?”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_101" id="page_101"></a>{101}</span></p>
+
+<p>“Read that again!” cried my friend, clinging to the grass and breathing
+hard. “Again!” he cried, when I had finished the second time. And then,
+before I could proceed, he sprang to his feet, carrying out the action
+in the text immediately following:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">“This passion lifted him upon his feet,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And made his hands to struggle in the air.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>“Come on, John Milton,” cried my friend, excitedly sparring at the
+winds,&mdash;“come on, and beat that, and we’ll let you put all your
+adjectives behind your nouns, and your verb last, and your nominative
+nowhere! Why man,”&mdash;this being addressed to the Puritan poet&mdash;“it
+carried Keats himself off his legs; that’s more than anything you ever
+wrote when you were old did for you. There’s the smell of midnight oil
+off your later spontaneous efforts, John Milton.</p>
+
+<p>“When Milton went loafing about and didn’t mind much what he was writing
+he could give any of them points”&mdash;(I deplore the language) “any of
+them, ay, Shakespeare himself<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_102" id="page_102"></a>{102}</span> points in a poem. In a poem, sir” (this
+to me), “Milton could give Shakespeare a hundred and one out of a
+hundred and lick the Bard easily. How the man who was such a fool as to
+write Shakespeare’s poems had the good sense to write Shakespeare’s
+plays I can never understand. The most un-Shakesperian poems in the
+language are Shakespeare’s. I never read Cowley, but it seems to me
+Cowley ought to have written Shakespeare’s poems, and then his obscurity
+would have been complete. If Milton only didn’t take the trouble to be
+great he would have been greater. As far as I know there are no English
+poets who improved when they ceased to be amateurs and became
+professional poets, except Wordsworth and Tennyson. Shelley and Keats
+were never regular race-horses. They were colts that bolted in their
+first race and ran until they dropped. It was a good job Shakespeare
+gave up writing rhymes and posing as a poet. It was not until he
+despaired of becoming one and took to the drama that he began to feel
+his feet and show his pace. If he had suspected he was a great poet he
+would have adopted the airs of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_103" id="page_103"></a>{103}</span> the profession and been ruined. In his
+time no one thought of calling a play a poem&mdash;that was what saved the
+greatest of all our poets to us. The only two things Shakespeare didn’t
+know is that a play may be a poem and that his plays are the finest
+poems finite man as he is now constructed can endure. It is all nonsense
+to say man shall never look on the like of Shakespeare again. It is not
+the poet superior to Shakespeare man now lacks, but the man to apprehend
+him.”</p>
+
+<p>I looked around uneasily, and found, to my great satisfaction, that
+there was no stranger in view. My friend occupied a position of
+responsibility and trust, and it would be most injurious if a rumour got
+abroad that not only did he read and admire verse, but that he held
+converse with the shades of departed poets as well. In old days men who
+spoke to the vacant air were convicted of necromancy and burned; in our
+times men offending in this manner are suspected of poetry and
+ostracized.</p>
+
+<p>As soon as my friend was somewhat calmed, and had cast himself down
+again and lit a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_104" id="page_104"></a>{104}</span> pipe, I resumed my reading. He allowed me to proceed
+without interruption until I came to:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10">“His palace bright,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Bastion’d with pyramids of glowing gold,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And touch’d with shade of bronzed obelisks,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Glared a blood-red through all its thousand courts,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Arches, and domes, and fiery galleries;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And all its curtains of Aurorian clouds<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Flushed angerly: while sometimes eagles’ wings,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Unseen before by Gods or wondering men,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Darken’d the place; and neighing steeds were heard,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Not heard before by Gods or wondering men.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>“Prodigious!” he shouted. “Go over that again. Keep the syllables wide
+apart. It is a good rule of water-colour sketching not to be too nice
+about joining the edges of the tints; this lets the light in. Keep the
+syllables as far apart as ever you can, and let the silentness in
+between to clear up the music. How the gods and the wondering men must
+have wondered! Do you know, I am sure Keats often frightened, terrified
+himself with his own visions. You remember he says somewhere he doesn’t
+think any one could dare to read some one or another aloud at<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_105" id="page_105"></a>{105}</span> midnight.
+I believe that often in the midnight he sat and cowered before the
+gigantic sights and sounds that reigned despotically over his fancy.”</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">“O dreams of day and night!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">O monstrous forms! O effigies of pain!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">O spectres busy in a cold, cold gloom!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">O lank-ear’d Phantoms of black-weeded pools!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Why do I know ye? why have I seen ye? why<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Is my eternal essence thus distraught<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To see and to behold these horrors new?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Saturn is fallen, am I too to fall?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Am I to leave this haven of my rest,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">This cradle of my glory, this soft clime,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">This calm luxuriance of blissful light,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">These crystalline pavilions, and pure fanes,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of all my lucent empire? It is left<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Deserted, void, nor any haunt of mine.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The blaze, the splendour, and the symmetry<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I cannot see&mdash;but darkness, death and darkness.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Even here, into my centre of repose,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The shady visions come to domineer,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Insult, and blind and stifle up my pomp&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Fall!&mdash;No, by Tellus and her briny robes!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Over the fiery frontier of my realms<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I will advance a terrible right arm<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Shall scare that infant thunderer, rebel Jove,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And bid old Saturn take his throne again.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_106" id="page_106"></a>{106}</span></p>
+
+<p>“What more magnificent prelude ever was uttered to oath than the portion
+of this speech preceding ‘No, by Tellus’! What more overpowering,
+leading up to an overwhelming threat, than the whole passage going
+before ‘Over the fiery frontier of my realms I will advance a terrible
+right arm’! What menacing deliberativeness there is in this whole
+speech, and what utter completeness of ruin to come is indicated by
+those words, ‘I will advance a terrible right arm’! You feel no sooner
+shall that arm move than ‘rebel Jove’s’ reign will be at an end, and
+that chaos will be left for Saturn to rule and fashion once more into
+order. Shut up the poem now. That’s plenty of <i>Hyperion</i>, and the other
+books of it are inferior. There is more labour and more likeness to
+<i>Paradise Lost</i>.” And so my friend, who is 16,000 miles away, and I
+turned from the Titanic theme, and spoke of the local board of
+guardians, or some young girl whose beauty was making rich misery in the
+hearts of young men in those old days.</p>
+
+<p>There is no other long poem in the volume<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_107" id="page_107"></a>{107}</span> bearing any marks which
+indicate such close connection with any individual reader as in the case
+of <i>Hyperion</i>. <i>Endymion</i> boasts only one mark, and that expressing
+admiration of the relief afforded from monotony of the heroic couplets
+by the introduction in the opening of the double rhyming verses:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing&mdash;”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>The friend to whom this mark is due never handled the volume, never even
+saw it; but once upon a time when he, another man, and I had got
+together, and were talking of the “gallipot poet,” the first friend said
+he always regarded this couplet as most happily placed where it appears.
+So when I reached home I marked my copy at the lines. Now, when I open
+the volume and find that mark, it is as good to me as, better than, a
+photograph of my friend; for I not only see his face and figure, but
+once more he places his index-finger on the table, as we three sit
+smoking, and whispers out the six opening lines, ending<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_108" id="page_108"></a>{108}</span> with the two I
+have quoted. Suppose I too should some day go 16,000 miles away from
+London, and carry this volume with me, shall I not be able to open it
+when I please, and recall what I then saw and heard, what I now see and
+hear, as distinctly as though no long interval of ocean or of months lay
+between to-night and that hour?</p>
+
+<p>Can I ever forget my burly tenor friend, who sang and composed songs,
+and dinted the line in <i>The Eve of St. Agnes</i>,</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“The silver, snarling trumpets ’gan to chide,”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">and declared a hundred times in my unwearied ears that no more happy
+epithet than snarling could be found for trumpets? He over and over
+again assured me, and over and over again I loved to listen to his fancy
+running riot on the line, how he heard and saw brazen and silver and
+golden griffins quarrelling in the roof and around his ears as the
+trumpets blared through the echoing halls and corridors. He, too, marked</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“The music, yearning like a God in pain.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_109" id="page_109"></a>{109}</span></p>
+
+<p class="nind">“Keats,” he would say, “seems to have got not only at the spirit of the
+music, but at the very flesh and blood of it. He has done one thing for
+me,” my friend continued. “Before I read these lines, and others of the
+same kind, in Keats, my favourite tunes always represented an emotion of
+my own mind. Now they stand for individual characters in scenes, like
+descriptions of people in a book. When I hear music now I am with the
+Falstaffs or the Romolas, with Quasimodo or Julius Cæsar.”</p>
+
+<p>I have been regarding the indentures in the volume chronologically. The
+next marks of importance in the order of the years occur, one in <i>The
+Eve of St. Agnes</i>, the other in the <i>Ode to a Nightingale</i>. These marks,
+more than any others, I regard with grateful memory. They are not the
+work of the hand of him for whom I value them. I have good reason to
+look on him as a valid friend. For months between him and me there had
+existed an acquaintance necessarily somewhat close, but wholly
+uninformed with friendship. We spoke to one another as Mr. So-and-so.
+Neither of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_110" id="page_110"></a>{110}</span> us suspected that the other had any toleration of poets or
+poetry. Our commerce had been in mere prose. One day, in mid-winter,
+when a chilling fog hung over London, I chanced to go into a room where
+he was writing alone. After a formal greeting, I complained of the cold.
+He dropped his pen and looked up. “Yes,” he said, “very cold and dark as
+night. Do you know the coldest night that ever was?” I answered that I
+did not. “It was St. Agnes’s Eve, when</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“<span class="leftspc">‘</span>The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold.’<span class="leftspc">”</span><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">And so we fell to talking about Keats, and talked and talked for hours;
+and before the first hour of our talk had passed we had ceased
+“Mistering” one another for ever. The fire of his enthusiasm rose higher
+and higher as the minutes swept by. He knew one poet personally, for
+whose verse I had profound respect, and this poet, he told me,
+worshipped Keats. Often in our talks I laid plots for bringing him back
+to the simple sentence, “You should hear M. talk about Keats.” The<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_111" id="page_111"></a>{111}</span>
+notion that any one who knew M. could think M. would talk to me about
+Keats intoxicated me. “He would not let me listen to him?” I said half
+fearfully. “M. would talk to any one about Keats&mdash;to even a lawyer.” How
+I wished at that moment I was a Lord Chancellor who might stand in M.’s
+path. I have, in a way, been near to that poet since. I might almost
+have said to him,</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“So near, too! You could hear my sigh,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Or see my case with half an eye;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">But must not&mdash;there are reasons why.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>So this friend I speak of now and I came to be great friends indeed. We
+often met and held carnivals of verse, carnivals among the starry lamps
+of poetry. He had a subtle instinct that saw the jewel, however it might
+be set. He owned himself the faculty of the poet, which gave him ripe
+knowledge of all matters technical in the setting.</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Now more than ever seems it rich to die,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To cease upon the midnight with no pain.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">He would quote these two lines and cry, “Was<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_112" id="page_112"></a>{112}</span> ever death so pangless as
+that spoken of here? ‘To <i>cease</i> upon the midnight!’ Here is no
+struggle, no regret, no fear. This death is softer and lighter and
+smoother than the falling of the shadow of night upon a desert of
+noiseless sand.”</p>
+
+<p>For a long time the name of one man had been almost daily in my ears. I
+had been hearing much through the friend to whom I have last referred
+about his intuitive eye and critical acumen. That friend had informed me
+of the influence which his opinion carried; and of how this man held
+Keats high above poets to whom we have statues of brass, whose names we
+give to our streets. My curiosity was excited, and, while my desire to
+meet this man was largely mingled with timidity, I often felt a jealous
+pang at thinking that many of the people with whom I was acquainted knew
+him. At length I became distantly connected with an undertaking in which
+he was prominently concerned. Through the instrumentality of one
+friendly to us both, we met. It was a sacred night for me, and I sat and
+listened, enchanted. After some hours the talk wheeled<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_113" id="page_113"></a>{113}</span> round upon
+sonnets. “Sonnets!” he cried, starting up; “who can repeat the lines
+about Cortez in Keats? You all know it.” Some one began to read or
+repeat the sonnet. Until coming upon the words, “or like stout Cortez.”
+“That’s it, that’s it! Now go on.”</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">He stared at the Pacific&mdash;and all his men<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Look’d at each other with a wild surmise&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Silent, upon a peak in Darien.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>“<span class="leftspc">‘</span>And all his men looked at each other with a <i>wild</i> surmise,’<span class="leftspc">”</span> he
+repeated, “<span class="leftspc">‘</span><i>silent</i> upon a peak in Darien.’ The most enduring group
+ever designed. They are standing there to this day. They will stand
+there for ever and for ever; they are immutable. When an artist carves
+them you may know that Buonarotti is risen from the dead and is once
+more abroad.”</p>
+
+<p>That portion of a book which is called a preface and put first, is
+always the last written. It may be human, but it is not logical, that
+when a man starts he does not know what he has to say first, until he
+finds out by an elaborate guess<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_114" id="page_114"></a>{114}</span> of several hundred pages what he wants
+to say last. It would be unbecoming of me in a collection of ignorant
+essays to affect to know less than a person of average intelligence; but
+I am quite sincere when I say I am not aware who the author is of the
+great aphorism that “After all, there is a great deal of human nature in
+man.” There is, I would venture to say, more human nature than logic in
+man. My copy of Keats is no exception to the general rule of books. The
+preface ought to precede immediately the colophon. Yet it is in the
+forefront of the volume, before even the very title page itself. It
+forms no integral part of the volume, and is unknown to the printer or
+publisher. It was given to me by a thoughtful and kind-hearted friend at
+whose side I worked for a considerable while. One time, years ago, he
+took a holiday and vanished, going from among us I knew not whither. On
+coming back he presented each of his associates with something out of
+his store of spoil. That which now forms the preface to my copy he gave
+me. It consists of twelve leaves; twelve myrtle leaves on a spray.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_115" id="page_115"></a>{115}</span> When
+he was in Rome he bore me in mind and plucked this sprig at the grave of
+the poet. It is consoling to remember Keats is buried so far away from
+where he was born, when we cannot forget that the abominable infamy of
+publishing his love-letters was committed in his own country&mdash;here in
+England. His spirit was lent to earth only for a little while, and he
+gave all of it to us. But we were not satisfied. We must have his
+heart’s blood and his heart too. The gentlemen who attacked his poetry
+when he was alive really knew no better, and tried, perhaps, to be as
+honest as would suit their private ends. But the publication of the dead
+man’s love-letters, fifty years after he had passed away, cannot be
+attributed even to ignorance. If any money was made out of the book it
+would be a graceful act to give it to some church where the burial
+ground is scant, and the parish is in need of a Potter’s Field.</p>
+
+<p>When I take down my copy of Keats, and look through it and beyond it, I
+feel that while it is left to me I cannot be wholly shorn of my friends.
+It is the only album of photographs I<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_116" id="page_116"></a>{116}</span> possess. The faces I see in it
+are not for any eye but mine. It is my private portrait gallery, in
+which hang the portraits of my dearest friends. The marks and blots are
+intelligible to no eye but mine; they are the cherished hieroglyphics of
+the heart. I close the book; I lock up the hieroglyphics; I feel certain
+the book will last my time. Should it survive me and pass into new
+hands&mdash;into the hands of some boy now unborn, who may pluck out of it
+posies of love-phrases for his fresh-cheeked sweetheart&mdash;he will know
+nothing of the import these marginal notes bore to one who has gone
+before him; unless, indeed, out of some cemetery of ephemeral literature
+he digs up this key&mdash;this Rosetta stone.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_117" id="page_117"></a>{117}</span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="DECAY_OF_THE_SUBLIME" id="DECAY_OF_THE_SUBLIME"></a>DECAY OF THE SUBLIME.</h2>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> sublime is dying. It has been pining a long time. At last
+dissolution has set in. Nothing can save it but another incursion of
+Goths and Huns; and as there are no Goths and Huns handy just now, the
+sublime must die out, and die out soon. You can know what a man is by
+the company he keeps. You can judge a people by the ideas they retain
+more than by the ideas they acquire. The philology of a tongue, from its
+cradle to its grave, is the social history of the people who spoke it.
+To-day you may mark the progress of civilisation by the decay bf the
+sublime. Glance at a few of the nations of earth as they stand. Italy
+and Spain still hold with the sublime in literature and art, although,
+being exhausted stocks, they cannot produce it any longer. France is<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_118" id="page_118"></a>{118}</span>
+cynical, smart, artistic, but never was and never can be sublime, so
+long as vanity rules her; and yet, by the irony of selection, sublime is
+one of her favourite words. Central Europe has had her sublime phases,
+but cannot be even thought of now in connection with the quality; and
+Russia and Turkey are barbarous still. If we come to the active pair of
+nationalities in the progress of current civilisation, the United States
+and England, we find the sublime in very poor case.</p>
+
+<p>Young England across the water is the most progressive nation of our
+age, because it is the most practical. If ever there was a man who put
+his foot on the neck of the sublime, that man is Uncle Sam. His
+contribution to the arts is almost nothing. His outrages against
+established artistic canons have been innumerable. He owns a new land
+without traditions. He laughs at all traditions. He has never raised a
+saint or a mummy or a religion (Mormonism he stole from the East), a
+crusader, a tyrant, a painter, a sculptor, a musician, a dramatist, an
+inquisition, a star chamber, a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_119" id="page_119"></a>{119}</span> council of ten. All his efforts have
+been in a strictly practical direction, and most of his efforts have
+been crowned with success. He has devoted his leisure time, the hours
+not spent in cutting down forests or drugging Indians with whisky, to
+laughing at the foolish old notions which the foolish old countries
+cherish. He had a wonderfully fertile estate of two thousand million
+acres, about only one fourth of which is even to this day under direct
+human management. In getting these five hundred million acres of land
+under him he had met all kinds of ground&mdash;valley, forest, mountain,
+plain. But in none of these did he find anything but axes and whisky of
+the least use. No mountain had been sanctified to him by first earthly
+contact with the two Tables of the Law. No plain had been rendered
+sacred as that upon which the miraculous manna fell to feed the chosen
+people. No inland sea had been the scene of a miraculous draught of
+fishes. All the land acquired and cultivated by Uncle Sam came to him by
+the right of whisky and the axe. The mountain was nothing more than so<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_120" id="page_120"></a>{120}</span>
+much land placed at a certain angle that made it of little use for
+tillage. The plains, the rivers, and inland seas had a simply commercial
+value in his eyes. He had no experience of a miracle of any kind, and he
+did not see why he should bow down and respect a mountain, that, to him,
+was no more than so many thousand acres on an incline unfavourable to
+cultivation. Such a condition of the ground was a bore, and he would
+have cut down the mountain as he had cut down the Indian and the forest,
+if he had known how to accomplish the feat. He saw nothing mystic in the
+waters or the moon. Were the rivers and lakes wholesome to drink and
+useful for carriage, and well stocked with fish? These were the
+questions he asked about the waters. Would there be moonlight enough for
+riding and working? was the only question he asked about that “orbèd
+maiden with white fire laden whom mortals call the moon.” His notions,
+his plains, his rivers, his lakes, were all “big,” but he never thought
+of calling them sublime. On his own farm he failed to find any present
+trace of the supernatural;<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_121" id="page_121"></a>{121}</span> and he discovered no trace of the
+supernatural in tradition, for there was no tradition once the red man
+had been washed into his grave with whisky. Hence Uncle Sam began
+treating the supernatural with familiarity, and matters built on the
+supernatural with levity. Now without the supernatural the sublime
+cannot exist any length of time, if at all.</p>
+
+<p>It may be urged it is unreasonable to hold that the Americans have done
+away with the sublime, since in the history of all nations the earlier
+centuries were, as in America, devoted to material affairs. There is one
+fact bearing on this which should not be left out of count, namely, that
+America did not start from barbarism, or was not raised on a site where
+barbarism had overrun a high state of civilisation. The barbarous hordes
+of the north effaced the civilisation of old Rome, and raised upon its
+ashes a new people, the Italians, who in time led the way in art, as the
+old Romans had before them. The Renaissance was a second crop raised off
+the same ground by new men. The arts Rome had borrowed from<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_122" id="page_122"></a>{122}</span> Greece had
+been trampled down by Goths, who, when they found themselves in the land
+of milk and honey, sat down to enjoy the milk and honey, until suddenly
+the germs of old art struck root, and once more all eyes turned to Italy
+for principles of beauty. But America started with the civilisation of a
+highly civilised age. She did not rear her own civilisation on her own
+soil. She did not borrow her arts from any one country. She simply
+peopled her virgin plains with the sons of all the earth, who brought
+with them the culture of their respective nationalities. She has not
+followed the ordinary course of nations, from conflict to power, from
+power to prosperity, from prosperity to the arts, luxury, and decay. She
+started with prosperity, and the first use she made of her prosperity
+was, not to cultivate the fine arts in her own people, but to laugh at
+them in others. In the individual man the sense of humour grows with
+years. In nations the sense of humour develops with centuries. The
+literature of nations begins with battle-songs and hymns, and ends with
+burlesques and blasphemies.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_123" id="page_123"></a>{123}</span></p>
+
+<p>Now although America has begun with burlesques and blasphemies, no one
+can for a moment imagine that America is not going to create a noble
+literature of her own. She is destined not only to found and build up a
+noble literature, but one which will be unique. When she has time, when
+she has let most of those idle one thousand five hundred million acres,
+she will begin writing her books. By that time she will have running in
+her veins choice blood from every race on earth, and it is a matter of
+certainty she will give the world many delights now undreamed of. No
+other nation on earth will have, or ever has had, such an opportunity of
+devoting attention to man in his purely domestic and social relations.
+The United States of to-day has, for practical purposes, no foreign
+policy. She has no foreign rivals, she is not likely to have foreign
+wars, while in her own country she has large bodies of men from every
+people on the world. She owns the largest assorted lot of mankind on the
+globe, and as years go by we may safely conclude she will add to the
+variety and number<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_124" id="page_124"></a>{124}</span> of her sons. In all this appears no hope for the
+sublime. There is no instance in literature of a nation going back from
+laughter to heroics. The two may exist side by side. But that is not the
+case in America. Up to this hour only one class of transatlantic writers
+has challenged the attention of Europe, and that class is humorous and
+profane. Emerson, Bryant, Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Lowell, Holmes, and
+Irving are merely Europeans born in America. But Ward, Harte, Twain, and
+Breitmann are original and American.</p>
+
+<p>America is undoubtedly the literary promise-land of the future. It has
+done nothing up to this. Its condition has forbidden it to achieve
+anything, but great triumphs may be anticipated from it. Crossing the
+Atlantic, what do we find in the other great branch of the
+English-speaking race? Religious publications head the list by a long
+way. They have nothing to do with this subject save in so far as they
+are in the line of the sublime. All forms of the Christian and Jewish
+creeds are sublime. Looking at the other walks of literature, we find
+the death sentence<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_125" id="page_125"></a>{125}</span> of the sublime written everywhere. With the
+exception of Mr. Browning, here or there we have no poet or dramatist
+who attempts it. We have elegant trifles and beautiful form in many
+volumes of second-rate contemporary verse. There never was a time when
+the science of poetry was understood until now. Our critics can tell you
+with mathematical certainty the number of poems as distinguished from
+pieces of verse every well-known man has written. But we are not
+producing any great poetry, and none of the sublime kind. This is the
+age of elegant poetic incentive, of exquisite culture, but it is too
+dainty. We do not rise much above a poem to a shoe, or an ode to a
+ringlet, perfumed with one of Mr. Rimmel’s best admired distillations.
+We have a few poets who are continually trying to find out who or what
+the deuce they are, and what they meant by being born, and so on; but
+then these men are for the eclectic, and not the herd of sensible
+people. We have two men who have done noble work, Browning and Tennyson;
+but, speaking broadly, we find the sublime nowhere.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_126" id="page_126"></a>{126}</span> It is true you
+cannot force genius as you force asparagus; and these remarks are not
+intended to indict the age with having no poetic faculty or aspiration.
+Abundance of poetry of a new and beautiful kind does exist, but it is
+not of the lofty kind born to the men of old.</p>
+
+<p>Turning eyes away from literature, take a few more of the arts. Before
+we go farther, let us admit that one art at least never reached sublimer
+recorded heights than to-day. The music of the generation just past is,
+I believe, in the front rank of the art. It is an art now in the throes
+of an enormous transformation. Not using the phrase in its slangy
+meaning, the music of the future is sure to touch splendours never
+dreamed of by that Raphael of the lyre, Mozart. The only art-Titans now
+wrestling are the musicians; not those paltry souls that pad the poor
+words of inane burlesques, but the great spirits that sit apart, and
+have audiences of the angels. These men, out of their own mouths, assure
+us that they catch the far-off murmurs of such imperial tones as never
+filled the ear of man yet. They cannot gather up the broken chords they
+hear.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_127" id="page_127"></a>{127}</span> They admit they have heard no more than a few bars of the great
+masters who are close upon us; but, they say, if they only reproduce the
+effect these preluding passages have upon them, “Such harmonious madness
+from their lips would flow, the world should listen then as they are
+listening now.”</p>
+
+<p>Go to the Royal Academy and look round you. How pretty! How nice! How
+pathetic! But would you like to lend your arm to Michael Angelo, and go
+round those walls with him? He would prefer the rack, the gridiron of
+St. Laurence. It is true there is no necessity for the sublime; but
+those men who have been in the awful presence of such dreams as <i>Night</i>
+and <i>Morning</i>, by that sculptor, must be pardoned if they prefer it to
+the art you find in Burlington House. One of our great English poets
+said, speaking of the trivial nature of conversation at the beginning of
+this century, that if Lord Bacon were alive now, and made a remark in an
+ordinary assembly, conversation would stop. If casts of <i>Night</i> and
+<i>Morning</i> were placed at the head of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_128" id="page_128"></a>{128}</span> staircase of Burlington House,
+no one with appreciation of art would enter the rooms; the strong would
+linger for ever round those stupendous groups, and the feeble would be
+frighted away. Of course, the vast crowd of art-patrons would pass the
+group with only a casual glance, and a protest against having plaster
+casts occupying ground which ought to be allotted to original work.</p>
+
+<p>Read any speech Burke or Grattan ever spoke, and then your <i>Times</i> and
+the debate last night. How plain it becomes that from no art has the
+sublime so completely vanished as the orator’s. Take those two speakers
+above, and run your eye over Cicero and Demosthenes, the four are of the
+one school, in the great style. Theirs is the large and universal
+eloquence. It is as fresh and beautiful, as pathetic, as sublime now as
+when uttered, although the occasions and circumstances are no longer of
+interest to man. The statistician and the poltroon and the verbatim
+reporter have killed the orator. If any man were to rise in the House
+and make a speech in the manner of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_129" id="page_129"></a>{129}</span> ancients, the honourable members
+would hurry in from all sides to laugh. A few sessions ago a member rose
+in his place, and delivered an oration on a subject not popular with the
+House, but in a manner which echoed the grand old style. At once every
+seat for which there was a member present at the time was occupied; and
+the next morning the daily papers had articles which, while disposing of
+the speaker’s cause in a few lines, devoted columns to the manner in
+which he had pleaded it.</p>
+
+<p>To discover what has led to the decay of the sublime is not difficult,
+and even in an ignorant essay like this, it may be briefly indicated.
+Roughly speaking, it is attributable to the accumulation of certainties.
+Any handbook that cribs from Longinus or Burke will tell you the vague
+is essential to the sublime. To attain it there must be something half
+understood&mdash;not fully known, only partly revealed. To attain it detail
+must be lost, and only a totality presented to the mind. For instance,
+if a great lover of Roman history were suddenly to find himself on the
+top of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_130" id="page_130"></a>{130}</span> Coliseum, the most sublime result to be obtained from the
+situation would be produced by repeating to himself the simple words,
+“This is Rome.” By these words the totality of the city’s grandeur,
+influence, power, and enterprises would be vaguely presented to a
+scholar’s mind dim in the glow of a multitude of half-revealing
+side-lights. If a companion whispered in the scholar’s ears, “This place
+would at one time seat a hundred thousand people,” then the particular
+is reached, and the sublime vanishes like sunshine against a cloud. Most
+of North America has been explored. Africa and Australia have been
+traversed. The source of the Nile has been found. We can read the
+hieroglyphics. We know the elements now flaming in the sun. Many of the
+phenomena in all branches of physiology which were mysteries to our
+fathers are familiar commonplaces of knowledge now. We have learned to
+foretell the weather. We travel a thousand miles for the hundred
+travelled by our fathers. We have daily newspapers to discuss all
+matters, clear away mysteries. We have opened the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_131" id="page_131"></a>{131}</span> grave for the sublime
+with the plough of progress. Though the words stick in my throat, I
+must, I daresay, cry, “God speed the plough!”<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_132" id="page_132"></a>{132}</span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="A_BORROWED_POET" id="A_BORROWED_POET"></a>A BORROWED POET.</h2>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Twenty</span> years ago I borrowed, and read for the first time, the poems of
+James Clarence Mangan. I then lived in a city containing not one-third
+as many people as yearly swell the population of London. The friend of
+whom I borrowed the volume in 1866 is still living in his old home, in
+the house from which I carried away the book then. I saw him last winter
+and he is almost as little aged as the hills he has fronted all that
+time. I have had in those years as many homes as an Arab nomad. He still
+stays in the old place, and in the gray twilight of dark summer mornings
+wakes to hear as of yore the twitter of sparrows and the cawing of rooks
+from the other side of the river, and the hoarse hooting of the
+steamboat hard by.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_133" id="page_133"></a>{133}</span></p>
+
+<p>The volume of Mangan now by me I borrowed of another old friend, who
+passes most of his day within sight of that familiar river not quite a
+hundred yards from the house of the lender of twenty years back. In the
+meantime I have seen no other copy of Mangan.</p>
+
+<p>This latest fact is not much to be wondered at, for I am not
+enterprising in the matter of books&mdash;rarely buy and rarely borrow, and
+have never been in the reading room of the British Museum in my life.
+The book may be common to those who know much about books; but I have
+seen only the two copies I speak of, and these are of the same edition
+and of American origin. I believe a selection from the poems was issued
+a few years ago in Dublin, but a copy has not drifted my way. The
+title-page of the volume before me is missing, but in a list of
+publications at the back I find “<i>The Poems of James Clarence Mangan</i>.
+Containing German Anthology, Irish Anthology, Apocrypha, and
+Miscellaneous Poems. With a Biographical and Critical Introduction, by
+John Mitchel. 1 vol. 12mo. Printed on tinted and calendered paper.
+Nearly 500 pages. $1.”<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_134" id="page_134"></a>{134}</span> Beyond all doubt this is the book, and it was
+published by Mr. P. M. Haverty, of New York.</p>
+
+<p>As far as I know, this is the only edition of Mangan which pretends to
+be even comprehensive. It does not lay claim to completeness. At the
+time the late John Mitchel wrote his introduction he was aware of but
+one other edition of Mangan’s poems&mdash;the German Anthology, published in
+Dublin many years ago. I am nearly sure that since the appearance of
+Mitchel’s edition there have been no verses of Mangan’s published in
+book form on this side of the Atlantic, except the selections I have
+already mentioned, and I do not think any edition whatever has been
+published in this country.</p>
+
+<p>During the twenty years which have elapsed since first I made the
+acquaintance of the poems of James Clarence Mangan, I have read much
+verse and many criticisms of verse, and yet I don’t remember to have
+seen one line about Mangan in any publication issued in England. I
+believe two magazine articles have appeared, but I never saw them.
+Almost during these<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_135" id="page_135"></a>{135}</span> years, or within a period which does not extend
+back far beyond them, criticism of verse has ceased to be a matter of
+personal opinion, and has been elevated or degraded, as you will, into
+an exact science. The opinions of old reviewers&mdash;the Jeffreys and
+Broughams&mdash;are now looked on as curiosities of literature. There is as
+wide a gulf between the mode of treating poetry now and eighty years ago
+as there is between the mode of travelling, or the guess-work that makes
+up the physician’s art; and if in a gathering of literary experts any
+one were now to apply to a new bard the dogmas of criticism quoted for
+or against Byron, Shelley, Keats, and the Lakers in their time, a
+silence the reverse of respectful would certainly follow.</p>
+
+<p>This is not the age of great poetry, but it is the age of “poetical
+poetry,” to quote the phrase of one of the finest critics using the
+English language&mdash;one who has, unfortunately for the culture of that
+tongue and those who use it, written lamentably little. The great danger
+by which we stand menaced at present is, that our perceptions may become
+too exquisite and our poetry<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_136" id="page_136"></a>{136}</span> too intellectual. This, anyway, is true of
+poetry which may at all claim to be an expression of thought. There are
+in our time supreme formists in small things, carvers of cameos and
+walnut shells, and musical conjurors who make sweet melodies with richly
+vowelled syllables. But unfortunately the tendency of the poetic men of
+to-day is towards intellectuality, and this is a humiliating decay. In
+the times of Queen Elizabeth, when all the poets were Shakespeares, they
+cared nothing for their intellects. The intellectual side of a poet’s
+mind is an impertinence in his art.</p>
+
+<p>I do not presume to say what place exactly James Clarence Mangan ought
+to occupy on the greater roll of verse-writers, and I am not sure that
+he is, in the finest sense of the phrase, a “poetical poet;” but he is,
+at all events, the most poetical poet Ireland has produced, when we take
+into account the volume and quality of his song. I shall purposely avoid
+any reference to him as a translator, except in acting on John Mitchel’s
+opinion, and treating one of his “translations” from the Arabic as an
+original<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_137" id="page_137"></a>{137}</span> poem; for during his lifetime he confessed that he had passed
+off original poems of his own as translations; and Mitchel assures us
+that Mangan did not know Arabic. As this essay does not profess to be
+orderly or dignified, or anything more than rambling gossip, put into
+writing for no other reason than to introduce to the reader a few pieces
+of verse he may not have met before, I cannot do better than insert here
+the lines of which I am now speaking:</p>
+
+<h3>THE TIME OF THE BARMECIDES.</h3>
+
+<h4>I.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“My eyes are filmed, my beard is grey,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">I am bowed with the weight of years;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I would I were stretched in my bed of clay<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">With my long-lost youth’s compeers!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">For back to the past, though the thought brings woe,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">My memory ever glides&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To the old, old time, long, long ago,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The time of the Barmecides!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To the old, old time, long, long ago,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The time of the Barmecides.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_138" id="page_138"></a>{138}</span></p>
+
+<h4>II.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Then youth was mine, and a fierce wild will,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And an iron arm in war,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And a fleet foot high upon Ishkar’s hill,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">When the watch-lights glimmered afar,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And a barb as fiery as any I know<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">That Khoord or Beddaween rides,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Ere my friends lay low&mdash;long, long ago,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">In the time of the Barmecides;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Ere my friends lay low&mdash;long, long ago,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">In the time of the Barmecides.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h4>III.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“One golden goblet illumed my board,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">One silver dish was there;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">At hand my tried Karamanian sword<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Lay always bright and bare;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">For those were the days when the angry blow<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Supplanted the word that chides&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">When hearts could glow&mdash;long, long ago,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">In the time of the Barmecides;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">When hearts could glow&mdash;long, long ago,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">In the time of the Barmecides.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h4>IV.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Through city and desert my mates and I<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Were free to rove and roam,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_139" id="page_139"></a>{139}</span><br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Our diapered canopy the deep of the sky,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Or the roof of the palace dome.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Oh, ours was the vivid life to and fro,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Which only sloth derides:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Men spent Life so&mdash;long, long ago,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">In the time of the Barmecides;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Men spent Life so&mdash;long, long ago,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">In the time of the Barmecides.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h4>V.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“I see rich Bagdad once again,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">With its turrets of Moorish mould,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And the Kalif’s twice five hundred men<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Whose binishes flamed with gold.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I call up many a gorgeous show<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Which the Pall of Oblivion hides&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">All passed like snow, long, long ago,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">With the time of the Barmecides;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">All passed like snow, long, long ago,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">With the time of the Barmecides.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h4>VI.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“But mine eye is dim, and my beard is grey,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And I bend with the weight of years&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">May I soon go down to the House of Clay,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Where slumber my Youth’s compeers!<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_140" id="page_140"></a>{140}</span><br /></span>
+<span class="i1">For with them and the Past, though the thought wakes woe,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">My memory ever abides,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And I mourn for the Times gone long ago,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">For the Times of the Barmecides!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I mourn for the Times gone long ago,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">For the Times of the Barmecides!”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>This is the poem claimed by Mangan to be from the Arabic. I have no
+means of knowing whether it is or not. There is one translation from the
+Persian, one from the Ottoman, and according to Mitchel, one from the
+Coptic. But seeing that he turned into verse a great number of Irish
+poems from prose translations done by another, and that he did not know
+a word of that language, I think it may be safely assumed that <i>The Last
+of the Barmecides</i> is original. This poem is so old a favourite of mine
+that I cannot pretend to be an impartial judge of it. When I hear it (I
+can never see a poem I know well and love much) I listen as to the
+unchanged voice of an old friend; I wander in a maze of memories; “I see
+rich Bagdad once again;” I am once more owner of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_141" id="page_141"></a>{141}</span> the magic carpet, and
+am floating irresponsibly and at will on the intoxicating atmosphere of
+the poets over the enchanted groves, and streams, and hills, and seas of
+fairyland, or harkening to voices that years ago ceased to stir in my
+ears, gazing at the faces that have long since moulded the face cloth
+into blunted memories of the face for the grave.</p>
+
+<p>On the 20th of June, 1849, Mangan died in the Meath Hospital, Dublin.
+Having been born in 1803, he was, in 1849, eight years older than Poe,
+who died destitute and forlorn at Baltimore in the same year. Both poets
+had been in abject poverty, both had been unfortunate in love, both had
+been consummate artists, both had been piteously unlucky in a thousand
+ways, and both had died the same year, and in common hospitals. Two more
+miserable stories it is impossible to find anywhere. I would recommend
+those of sensitive natures to confine their reading to the work these
+men did, and not to the misfortunes they laboured under, and the follies
+they committed. I think, of the two, Mangan suffered more acutely; for<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_142" id="page_142"></a>{142}</span>
+he never rose up in anger against the world, or those around him, but
+glided like an uncomplaining ghost into the grave, where, long before
+his death, all his hopes lay buried. He had only a half-hearted pity for
+himself. Poe, in his <i>Raven</i>, is, all the time of his most pathetic and
+terrible complaining, conscious that he complains as becomes a fine
+artist. But the raven’s croak does not touch the heart. It appeals to
+the intellect; it affects the fancy, the imagination, the ear, the eye.
+When Mangan opens his bosom and shows you the ravens that prey upon him,
+he cannot repress something like a laugh at the thought that any one
+could be interested in him and his woes. See:</p>
+
+<h3>THE NAMELESS ONE.</h3>
+
+<p class="c">BALLAD.</p>
+
+<h4>I.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Roll forth, my song, like the rushing river,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">That sweeps along to the mighty sea;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">God will inspire me while I deliver<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">My soul of thee!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_143" id="page_143"></a>{143}</span></p>
+
+<h4>II.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Tell thou the world, when my bones lie whitening<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Amid the last homes of youth and eld,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That there was once one whose veins ran lightning<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">No eye beheld.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h4>III.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Tell how his boyhood was one drear night-hour,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">How shone for <i>him</i>, through his griefs and gloom,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">No star of all heaven sends to light our<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">Path to the tomb.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h4>IV.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Roll on, my song, and to after ages<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Tell how, disdaining all earth can give,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">He would have taught men from wisdom’s pages<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">The way to live.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h4>V.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“And tell how, trampled, derided, hated,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And worn by weakness, disease, and wrong,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">He fled for shelter to God, who mated<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">His soul with song&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_144" id="page_144"></a>{144}</span></p>
+
+<h4>VI.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“With song which alway, sublime or vapid,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Flowed like a rill in the morning beam,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Perchance not deep, but intense and rapid&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">A mountain stream.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h4>VII.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Tell how the Nameless, condemned for years long<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To herd with demons from hell beneath,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Saw things that made him, with groans and tears, long<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">For even death.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h4>VIII.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Go on to tell how, with genius wasted,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Betrayed in friendship, befooled in love,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">With spirit shipwrecked and young hopes blasted,<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">He still, still strove.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h4>IX.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Till, spent with toil, dreeing death for others,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And some whose hands should have wrought for <i>him</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i1">(If children live not for sires and mothers),<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">His mind grew dim.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_145" id="page_145"></a>{145}</span></p>
+
+<h4>X.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“And he fell far through the pit abysmal,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The gulf and grave of Maginn and Burns,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And pawned his soul for the devil’s dismal<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">Stock of returns.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h4>XI.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“But yet redeemed it in days of darkness,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And shapes and signs of the final wrath,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Where death in hideous and ghastly starkness<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">Stood in his path.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h4>XII.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“And tell how now, amid wreck and sorrow,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And want and sickness and houseless nights,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">He bides in calmness the silent morrow<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">That no ray lights.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h4>XIII.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“And lives he still, then? Yes! old and hoary<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">At thirty-nine, from despair and woe,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">He lives enduring what future story<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">Will never know.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_146" id="page_146"></a>{146}</span></p>
+
+<h4>XIV.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Him grant a grave to, ye pitying noble,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Deep in your bosoms! There let him dwell!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">He, too, had tears for all souls in trouble,<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">Here and in hell.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>The burden of all his song is sad, and in his translations he has chosen
+chiefly themes which echoed the harpings of his own soul. He began life
+as a copying clerk in an attorney’s office, and had for some time to
+support wholly, or in the main, a mother and sister. In Mitchel’s
+preface there are many passages almost as fine as the verse of the poet.
+Here is one, long as it is, that must find a place. Mitchel is speaking
+of the days when Mangan was in the attorney’s office:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>“At what age he devoted himself to this drudgery, at what age he
+left it, or was discharged from it, does not appear; for his whole
+biography documents are wanting, the man having never, for one
+moment, imagined that his poor life could interest any surviving
+human being, and having never, accordingly, collected his
+biographical assets, and appointed a literary executor to take care
+of his posthumous fame. Neither did he ever acquire the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_147" id="page_147"></a>{147}</span> habit,
+common enough among literary men, of dwelling upon his own early
+trials, struggles, and triumphs. But those who knew him in after
+years can remember with what a shuddering and loathing horror he
+spoke&mdash;when at rare intervals he could be induced to speak at
+all&mdash;of his labours with the scrivener and attorney. He was shy and
+sensitive, with exquisite sensibilities and fine impulses; eye,
+ear, and soul open to all the beauty, music, and glory of heaven
+and earth; humble, gentle, and unexacting; modestly craving nothing
+in the world but celestial, glorified life, seraphic love, and a
+throne among the immortal gods (that’s all); and he was eight or
+ten years scribbling deeds, pleadings, and bills in Chancery.”</p></div>
+
+<p>There is, I believe, but one portrait of him in existence, and a copy of
+it hangs on the wall of the room in which I am writing, a few feet in
+front of my eyes. It is not a face easy to describe. Beauty is the chief
+characteristic of it. But it is not the beauty that men admire or that
+inspires love in women. It is not the face of a poet or a visionary or a
+thinker. There is no passion in it; not even the passionate sadness of
+his own verse. It is not the face of a man who has suffered greatly, or
+rejoiced in ecstasy. It is the face of a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_148" id="page_148"></a>{148}</span> fleshless, worn man of forty,
+with hair pressed back from the forehead and ear. I have been looking at
+it for a long time, trying to find out something positive about it, and
+I have failed. It is not interesting. It is the face of a man who is
+done with the world and humanity. It is the face of a dead man whose
+spirit has passed away, while the body remains alive. The eyes are open,
+and have light in them; the face would be more complete if the light
+were out, and the lids drawn down and composed for the blind tomb.</p>
+
+<p>He gives a picture of his mental attitude at about the time this
+portrait was taken:&mdash;</p>
+
+<h3>TWENTY GOLDEN YEARS AGO.</h3>
+
+<h4>I.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Oh, the rain, the weary, dreary rain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">How it plashes on the window-sill!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Night, I guess too, must be on the wane,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Strass and Gass around are grown so still.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Here I sit with coffee in my cup&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Ah, ’twas rarely I beheld it flow<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">In the tavern where I loved to sup<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Twenty golden years ago!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_149" id="page_149"></a>{149}</span></p>
+
+<h4>II.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Twenty years ago, alas!&mdash;but stay&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">On my life, ’tis half-past twelve o’clock!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">After all, the hours <i>do</i> slip away&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Come, here goes to burn another block!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">For the night, or morn, is wet and cold;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And my fire is dwindling rather low:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I had fire enough, when young and bold<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Twenty golden years ago.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h4>III.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Dear! I don’t feel well at all, somehow:<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Few in Weimar dream how bad I am;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Floods of tears grow common with me now,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">High-Dutch floods that Reason cannot dam.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Doctors think I’ll neither live nor thrive<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">If I mope at home so&mdash;I don’t know&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1"><i>Am</i> I living <i>now</i>? I <i>was</i> alive<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Twenty golden years ago.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h4>IV.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Wifeless, friendless, flagonless, alone,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Not quite bookless, though, unless I choose;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Left with naught to do, except to groan,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Not a soul to woo, except the Muse.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Oh, this is hard for <i>me</i> to bear&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Me who whilom lived so much <i>en haut</i>&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Me who broke all hearts like china-ware,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Twenty golden years ago.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_150" id="page_150"></a>{150}</span></p>
+
+<h4>V.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Perhaps ’tis better;&mdash;time’s defacing waves<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Long have quenched the radiance of my brow&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">They who curse me nightly from their graves<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Scarce could love me were they living now;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">But my loneliness hath darker ills&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Such dun duns as Conscience, Thought, &amp; Co.,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Awful Gorgons! Worse than tailors’ bills<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Twenty golden years ago.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h4>VI.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Did I paint a fifth of what I feel,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Oh, how plaintive you would ween I was!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">But I won’t, albeit I have a deal<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">More to wail about than Kerner has!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Kerner’s tears are wept for withered flowers;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Mine for withered hopes; my scroll of woe<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Dates, alas! from youth’s deserted bowers,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Twenty golden years ago.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h4>VII.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Yet, may Deutschland’s bardlings flourish long!<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Me, I tweak no beak among them;&mdash;hawks<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Must not pounce on hawks: besides, in song<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">I could once beat all of them by chalks.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Though you find me, as I near my goal,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Sentimentalising like Rousseau,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Oh, I had a great Byronian soul<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Twenty golden years ago!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_151" id="page_151"></a>{151}</span></p>
+
+<h4>VIII.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Tick-tick, tick-tick!&mdash;not a sound save Time’s,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And the wind gust as it drives the rain&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Tortured torturer of reluctant rhymes,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Go to bed and rest thine aching brain!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Sleep!&mdash;no more the dupe of hopes or schemes;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Soon thou sleepest where the thistles blow;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Curious anti-climax to thy dreams<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Twenty golden years ago!”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>I find myself now in a great puzzle. I want, first of all, to say I
+think it most melancholy that Mangan, when of full age and judgment,
+should have thought Byron had “a great Byronian soul.” Observe, he does
+not mean that he had a soul greatly like Byron’s, but that he had a soul
+like the great soul of Byron. I do not believe Byron had a great soul at
+all. I believe he was simply a fine stage-manager of melodrama, the
+finest that ever lived, and that as a property-master he was unrivalled;
+but that to please no one, himself included, could he have written the
+play. I am not descending to so defiling a depth as to talk about
+plagiarism. What I wish to say is, that whether Byron stole<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_152" id="page_152"></a>{152}</span> or not made
+not the least difference in the world, for he never by the aid of his
+gifts or his thefts wrote a poem. I wanted further to say of Byron that
+there was nothing great about him except his vanity. Suddenly I
+remembered some words of the critic of whom I spoke a while back, in
+dealing with the question of poetical poetry and poems. I took down the
+printed page, where I found these lines:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>“Mr. Swinburne’s poetry is almost altogether poetical. Not all the
+poetry of even the Poets is so, and to one who loves this dear and
+intimate quality of which we speak, Coleridge, for instance, is a
+poet of some four poems, Wordsworth of some sixteen, Keats of five,
+Byron of none, though Byron is <i>great and eloquent</i>, but the thing
+we prize so much is far away from eloquence. Poetical poetry is the
+inner garden; there grows the ‘flower of the mind.’<span class="leftspc">”</span></p></div>
+
+<p>Now, my difficulty is plain. My critic, who is also a poet, says Byron
+is great, and I find fault with Mangan for saying Byron had a great
+Byronian soul. Here are two of my select authors against me. Plainly,
+the best thing I can do is say nothing at all about the matter!<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_153" id="page_153"></a>{153}</span></p>
+
+<p><i>Twenty Golden Years Ago</i> is by no means a poetical poem, but there is
+poetry in it. There is no poetical poem by Mangan. But he has written no
+serious verses in which there is not poetry.</p>
+
+<p>After giving Mangan’s own verse account of what he was like in his own
+regard at about forty years of age, I copy what Mitchel saw when the
+poet was first pointed out to him:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>“Being in the College Library [Trinity, Dublin], and having
+occasion for a book in that gloomy apartment of the institution
+called the ‘Fagal Library,’ which is the innermost recess of the
+stately building, an acquaintance pointed out to me a man perched
+on the top of a ladder, with the whispered information that the
+figure was Clarence Mangan. It was an unearthly and ghostly figure,
+in a brown garment; the same garment (to all appearance), which
+lasted till the day of his death. The blanched hair was totally
+unkempt; the corpse-like features still as marble; a large book was
+in his arms, and all his soul was in the book. I had never heard of
+Clarence Mangan before, and knew not for what he was celebrated,
+whether as a magician, a poet, or a murderer; yet took a volume and
+spread it on a table, not to read, but with the pretence of reading
+to gaze on the spectral creature on the ladder.”</p></div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_154" id="page_154"></a>{154}</span></p>
+
+<p>I never met any one who had known Mangan. Mitchel did not know the name
+of the woman who lured him on with smiles that seemed to promise love.
+He always addressed her in his poems as Frances. Some time ago the name
+of the woman was divulged. It is ungallant of me to have forgotten it,
+but such is the case. The address at which Mangan visited her was in
+Mountpleasant Square, Dublin. At the time I saw the name of the lady I
+looked into a directory of 1848 which I happened to have by me, and
+found a different name at the address given in the Square. I know the
+love affair of the poet took place years before his death in 1849, but
+people in quiet and unpretentious houses in Dublin, or correctly
+Ranelagh, often live a whole generation in the same house.</p>
+
+<p>Here I find myself in a second puzzle. So long as I thought merely of
+writing this rambling account of “My Borrowed Poet,” I decided upon
+trying to say something about the stupidity of women and poets in
+general. But I don’t feel in case to do so when I glance up at the face
+of Mangan hanging on the wall, and bring<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_155" id="page_155"></a>{155}</span> myself to realise the fact
+that this face now looking so dead and unburied was young and bright and
+perhaps cheerful when he went wooing in Ranelagh.</p>
+
+<p>Instead of saying anything wise and stupid and commonplace about either
+poets or women, let me quote here stanzas which must have been written
+some day when he saw sunshine among the clouds:&mdash;</p>
+
+<h3>THE MARINER’S BRIDE.</h3>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Look, mother! the mariner’s rowing<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">His galley adown the tide;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I’ll go where the mariner’s going,<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">And be the mariner’s bride!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“I saw him one day through the wicket,<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">I opened the gate and we met&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">As a bird in the fowler’s net,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Was I caught in my own green thicket.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">O mother, my tears are flowing,<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">I’ve lost my maidenly pride&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I’ll go if the mariner’s going,<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">And be the mariner’s bride!<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_156" id="page_156"></a>{156}</span><br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“This Love the tyrant winces,<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">Alas! an omnipotent might,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">He darkens the mind like night,<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">He treads on the necks of Princes!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">O mother, my bosom is glowing,<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">I’ll go whatever betide,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I’ll go where the mariners going,<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">And be the mariner’s bride!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Yes, mother! the spoiler has reft me<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">Of reason and self-control;<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">Gone, gone is my wretched soul,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And only my body is left me!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The winds, O mother, are blowing,<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">The ocean is bright and wide;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I’ll go where the mariner’s going,<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">And be the mariner’s bride.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>This appears among the Apocrypha, and is credited by Mangan to the
+“Spanish;” but it is safe to assume when he is so vague that the poem is
+original. It is one of the most bright and cheerful he has given us. The
+only touch of sorrow we feel is for the poor mother who is about to lose
+so impulsive and vivacious a daughter. The time of this delightful
+ballad is not clearly defined, but we may be absolutely<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_157" id="page_157"></a>{157}</span> certain that we
+of this moribund nineteenth century will never meet except at a function
+of a recondite spiritual medium even the great grandchild of the
+Mariner’s Bride. How much more is our devout gratitude due to a good and
+pious spiritualist than to any riotous and licentious poet! The former
+can give us intercourse with the illustrious defunct of history; the
+latter can give us no more than the image of a figment, the phantom of a
+shade, the echo of sounds that never vibrated in the ear of man. All
+persons who believe the evidence adduced by poets are the victims of
+subornation.</p>
+
+<p>A saw-mill does not seem a good subject for a “copy of verses.” Mangan
+died single and in poverty, and was buried by his friends. Listen:&mdash;</p>
+
+<h3>THE SAW-MILL.</h3>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“My path lay towards the Mourne again,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">But I stopped to rest by the hill-side<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That glanced adown o’er the sunken glen<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Which the Saw-and Water-mills hide,<br /></span>
+<span class="i5">Which now, as then,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_158" id="page_158"></a>{158}</span>   The Saw-and Water-mills hide.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“And there, as I lay reclined on the hill,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Like a man made by sudden <i>qualm</i> ill,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I heard the water in the Water-mill,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And I saw the saw in the Saw-mill!<br /></span>
+<span class="i5">As I thus lay still<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">I saw the saw in the Saw-mill!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“The saw, the breeze, and the humming bees,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Lulled me into a dreamy reverie,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Till the objects round me&mdash;hills, mills, trees,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Seemed grown alive all and every&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i5">By slow degrees<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Took life as it were, all and every!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Anon the sound of the waters grew<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To a Mourne-ful ditty,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And the song of the tree that the saw sawed through<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Disturbed my spirit with pity,<br /></span>
+<span class="i5">Began to subdue<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">My spirit with tenderest pity!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“<span class="leftspc">‘</span>Oh, wanderer, the hour that brings thee back<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Is of all meet hours the meetest.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Thou now, in sooth art on the Track,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And nigher to Home than thou weetest;<br /></span>
+<span class="i5">Thou hast thought Time slack,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">But his flight has been of the fleetest!<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_159" id="page_159"></a>{159}</span><br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“<span class="leftspc">‘</span>For this it is that I dree such pain<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">As, when wounded, even a plank will;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">My bosom is pierced, is rent in twain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">That thine may ever bide tranquil.<br /></span>
+<span class="i5">May ever remain<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Henceforward untroubled and tranquil.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“<span class="leftspc">‘</span>In a few days more, most Lonely One!<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Shall I, as a narrow ark, veil<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Thine eyes from the glare of the world and sun<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">’Mong the urns of yonder dark vale&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i5">In the cold and dun<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Recesses of yonder dark vale!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“<span class="leftspc">‘</span>For this grieve not! Thou knowest what thanks<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The Weary-souled and Meek owe<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To Death!’ I awoke, and heard four planks<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Fall down with a saddening echo.<br /></span>
+<span class="i5"><i>I heard four planks</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i2"><i>Fall down with a hollow echo.</i>”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>This was the epithalamium of James Clarence Mangan sung by himself.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_160" id="page_160"></a>{160}</span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_ENGLISH_OPIUM-EATER" id="THE_ENGLISH_OPIUM-EATER"></a>THE ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER.</h2>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">I bought</span> my copy new for fourpence-halfpenny, in Holywell Street. It was
+published by George Routledge and Sons, of the Broadway, London. The
+little volume is made up of a “Preface,” by Thomas de Quincey;
+“Confessions of an English Opium-eater;” and “Notes from the Pocket-book
+of a late Opium-eater;” including “Walking Stewart,” “On the Knocking at
+the Gates in <i>Macbeth</i>,” and “On Suicide.” When it last left my hands it
+boasted a paper cover, on which appeared the head of the illustrious
+Laker. At my elbow now it lies, divested of its shield; and I sit face
+to face with the title-page, as though my author had taken off his hat
+and overcoat, and I were asking him which he preferred, clear or thick
+soup, while the servant stood behind filling his glass<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_161" id="page_161"></a>{161}</span> with
+Amontillado. How that cover came to be removed I do not know. The last
+borrower was of the less destructive sex, and I am at a great loss to
+account for the injury.</p>
+
+<p>I object to the presence of “Walking Stewart,” and “On Suicide,”
+otherwise I count my copy perfect. With the exception of <i>Robinson
+Crusoe</i> and Poe’s <i>Tales</i> I have read nothing so often as the
+<i>Opium-eater</i>. Only twice in my life up to five-and-twenty years of age
+did I sit up all night to read a book: once when about midnight I came
+into possession of <i>Enoch Arden</i>, and a second time when, at the same
+witching hour I drew a red cloth-bound edition of the <i>Opium-eater</i> out
+of my pocket, in my lonely, dreary bedroom, five hundred miles from
+where I am now writing. The household were all asleep, and I by no means
+strong of nerve. The room was large, the dwelling ghostly. I sat in an
+embrasure of one of the windows, with a little table supporting the
+candles on one side, and on the other a small movable bookcase. Thus I
+was in a kind of dock, only open on one side, that fronting the room. It
+was in<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_162" id="page_162"></a>{162}</span> the beginning of autumn, and a low, warm wind blew the
+complaining rain against the pane on a level with my ear. At that time I
+had not seen London, and I remember being overpowered and broken before
+the spectacle of that sensitive and imaginative boy in the text, hungry
+and forlorn, in the unsympathetic mass of innumerable houses, every door
+of which was shut against him.</p>
+
+<p>As I read on and the hour grew late, the succession of splendours and
+terrors wrought on my imagination, until I felt cold and exhausted, and
+had scarcely strength to sit upright in my chair. My hand trembled, and
+my mind became tremulously apprehensive of something vague and awful; I
+could not tell what. Sounds of the night which I had heard a thousand
+times before, which were as familiar to me as the bell of my parish
+church, now assumed dire, uncertain imports. The rattling of the sash
+was not the work of the wind, not the work of ghostly hands, but worse
+still, of human hands belonging to men in some more dire extremity than
+the approach of death. The beating<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_163" id="page_163"></a>{163}</span> of the rain against the glass was
+made to cover voices trying to tell me secrets I could not hear and
+live, and which yet I would have given my life to know.</p>
+
+<p>I cannot tell why I was so exhilarated by terror. The <i>Confessions</i>
+alone are not calculated to produce inexplicable disturbance of the
+mind. It may be I had eaten little or nothing that day; it may be I had
+steeped myself too deeply in nicotine. All I know for certain is that I
+was in such a state of abject panic I had not courage to cross the room
+to my bed. It was in the dreary, pitiless, raw hour before the dawn I
+finished the book. Then I found I durst not rise. I put down the book
+and looked at the candles. They would last till daylight.</p>
+
+<p>I would have given all the world to lie on that bed over there, with my
+back secure against it, warmed by it, comforted by it. But that open
+space was more terrible to me than if it were filled with flame. I
+should have been much more at my ease in the dark, yet I could not bring
+myself to blow out the lights;<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_164" id="page_164"></a>{164}</span> not because I dreaded the darkness, but
+because I shrank from encountering the possibilities of that awful
+moment of twilight between the full light of the candles and the blank
+gloom.</p>
+
+<p>When I thought of blowing out the lights and imagined the dread of
+catching a glimpse of some spectacle of supreme horror, I imprudently
+gave my imagination rein, and set myself to find out what would terrify
+me most. All at once, and before I had made more than the inquiry of my
+mind, I saw in fancy between me and the bed, a thing of unapproachable
+terror; I had not been recently reading <i>Christabel</i>, and yet it must
+have been remotely from that poem I conjured the spectre which so awed
+me. I placed out in the open of the room on the floor, between me and
+the door, and close to a straight line drawn between me and the bed, a
+figure shrouded in a black cloak, from hidden shoulder to invisible
+feet. Over the head of this figure was cast a cowl, which completely
+concealed the head and face. At any moment the cloak might open and
+disclose the body of that figure. I knew the body<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_165" id="page_165"></a>{165}</span> of that figure was a
+“thing to dream of, not to see.” I felt sure I should lose my reason if
+the cloak opened and discovered the loathsome body. I had no idea what I
+should see, but I knew I should go mad.</p>
+
+<p>In my dock by the window, and with the light behind my eyes I felt
+secure. But at that moment no earthly consideration, no consideration
+whatever, would have induced me to face that ghostly form in the flicker
+of expiring light. I was not under any delusion. I knew then as well as
+I know now that there was no object on which the normal human eye could
+exercise itself between me and the bed. I deliberately willed the figure
+to appear, and although once I had summoned it I could not dismiss it, I
+had complete and self-possessed knowledge that I saw nothing with my
+physical eye. Moreover, full of potentiality for terror as that figure
+was in its present shape and attitude, it had no dread for me. I was
+fascinated by considering possibilities which I knew could not arise so
+long as the present circumstances remained unchanged. In<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_166" id="page_166"></a>{166}</span> other words, I
+knew I could trust my reason to keep my imagination in subjection, so
+long as my senses were not confused or my attention scared. If I
+attempted to extinguish the candles that figure might waver! if I moved
+across the floor it might get behind my back, and as I caught sight of
+it over my shoulder, the cloak might fall aside! Then I should go mad.
+Thus I sat and waited until daylight came. Then I fell asleep in my
+chair.</p>
+
+<p>As I have said, the copy of the <i>Opium-eater</i> I then had was bound in
+red cloth. It was a much handsomer book than the humble one published by
+Routledge. Since that memorable night many years ago in my high, dreary,
+lonely bedroom, I cannot tell you all the copies of the <i>Opium-eater</i>
+which have been mine. I remember another, bound in dark blue cloth, with
+copious notes. There was a third, the outside seeming of which I forget,
+but which I think formed part of two volumes of selections from De
+Quincey. I love my little sixpenny volume for one reason chiefly. I can
+lend it without fear, and lose it without a pang.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_167" id="page_167"></a>{167}</span> Why, the beggarliest
+miser alive can’t think much of fourpence-halfpenny! I have already
+dispensed a few copies of the <i>Opium-eater</i>, price fourpence-halfpenny.
+As it lies on my table now, I take no more care of it than one does of
+yesterday’s morning paper. When I read it I double it back, to show to
+myself how little I value the gross material of the book. Any one coming
+in likely to appreciate the book, and who has not read it is welcome to
+carry it off as a gift. Yet if I am free with the volume, I am jealous
+of the author. I do not mention his name to people I believe unwilling
+or unable to worship him becomingly.</p>
+
+<p>But when I meet a true disciple what prodigal joy environs and suffuses
+me! What talks of him I have had, and speechless raptures in hearing of
+him! How thick with gold the air of evenings has been, spent with him
+and one who loved him! I recall one glorious summer’s day, when an old
+friend and I (we were then, alas! years and years younger than we are
+to-day), had toiled on through mountain heather for hours, until we were
+half-baked<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_168" id="page_168"></a>{168}</span> by the sun and famished with thirst. Suddenly we came upon
+the topmost peak of all the hills, and saw, many miles away, the
+unexpected sea. As we stood, shading our eyes with our hands, my
+companion chanted out, “Obliquely to the right lay the many-languaged
+town of Liverpool; obliquely to the left ‘the multitudinous sea.’<span class="leftspc">”</span>
+“Whose is that?” I asked eagerly, notwithstanding my drought. “What
+isn’t Shakespeare’s is De Quincey’s.” “Where did you find it?” “In the
+<i>Opium-eater</i>.” I remember cursing my memory because I had forgotten
+that passage. When I got home I looked through the copy I then had, and
+could not find the sentence. I wrote to my friend, saying I could not
+come upon his quotation. He answered that he now believed it did not
+occur in the body of the <i>Confessions</i>, but in a note in some edition,
+he could not remember which. What a sense of miserable desolation I had
+that this edition had never come my way!</p>
+
+<p>There are only three marks of any kind in my present copy of the
+<i>Confessions</i>, one dealing<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_169" id="page_169"></a>{169}</span> with the semi-voluntary power children have
+over the coming and going of phantoms painted on the darkness. This mark
+is very indistinct, and, as I remember nothing about it, I think it must
+have been made by accident. The part indicated by it is only
+introductory to an unmarked passage immediately following which has
+always fascinated my imagination. It is in the “Pains of Opium,” and
+runs:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>“In the middle of 1817, I think it was, that this faculty became
+positively distressing to me: at night, when I lay awake in bed,
+vast processions passed along in mournful pomp, friezes of
+never-ending stories, that to my feelings were as sad and solemn as
+if they were stories drawn from times before Œdipus and
+Priam&mdash;before Tyre&mdash;before Memphis. And at the same time a
+corresponding change took place in my dreams: a theatre seemed
+suddenly opened and lighted up within my brain, which presented
+nightly spectacles of more than earthly splendour.”</p></div>
+
+<p>How thankful we ought to be that it has never been our fate to sit in
+that awful theatre of prehistoric woes! There is surely nothing more
+appalling in the past than the interminably vain activities of that
+mysterious<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_170" id="page_170"></a>{170}</span> atomie, Egyptian man. Who could bear to look upon the three
+hundred thousand ant-like slaves swarming among the colossal monoliths
+piled up in thousands for the pyramid of Cheops! The bare thought makes
+one start back aghast and shudder.</p>
+
+<p>I find the next mark opposite another awful passage dealing with
+infinity, on this occasion infinity of numbers, not of time:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>“The waters now changed their character,&mdash;from translucent lakes,
+shining like mirrors, they now became seas and oceans. And now came
+a tremendous change, which, unfolding itself slowly like a scroll,
+through many months, promised an abiding torment; and, in fact, it
+never left me until the winding-up of my case. Hitherto the human
+face had mixed often in my dreams, but not despotically, not with
+any special power of tormenting. But now, that which I have called
+the tyranny of the human face began to unfold itself. Perhaps some
+part of my London life might be answerable for this. Be that as it
+may, now it was that upon the rocking waters of the ocean the human
+face began to appear: the sea appeared paved with innumerable
+faces, upturned to the heavens&mdash;faces imploring, wrathful,
+despairing, surged upwards by thousands, by myriads, by
+generations, by centuries.”</p></div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_171" id="page_171"></a>{171}</span></p>
+
+<p>Upon closer looking, I see an attempt has been made to erase the mark
+opposite this passage. Joining the fact with the faintness of the line
+opposite the former quotation I am driven to the conclusion that there
+is only one “stetted” note of admiration in the book. It is a whole page
+of the little volume. It begins on page 91, and ends on page 92. To show
+you how little I care for my copy of the <i>Confessions</i>, I shall cut it
+out. Even a lawyer would pay me more than fourpence-halfpenny for
+copying a page of the book, and, as I have said before, the volume has
+no extrinsic value for me. Excepting the Bible, I am not familiar with
+any finer passage of so great length in prose in the English language:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>“The dream commenced with a music which now I often heard in
+dreams; a music of preparation and awakening suspense; a music like
+the opening of the Coronation Anthem, and which, like <i>that</i>, gave
+the feeling of a vast march&mdash;of infinite cavalcades filing off&mdash;and
+the tread of innumerable armies. The morning was come of a mighty
+day&mdash;a day of crisis and of final hope for human nature, then
+suffering some mysterious eclipse, and labouring in some dread
+extremity. Somewhere,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_172" id="page_172"></a>{172}</span> I knew not where&mdash;somehow, I knew not
+how&mdash;by some beings, I knew not whom&mdash;a battle, a strife, an agony
+was conducting, was evolving like a great drama, or piece of music;
+with which my sympathy was the more insupportable from my confusion
+as to its place, its cause, its nature, and its possible issue. I,
+as is usual in dreams (where, of necessity, we make ourselves
+central to every movement), had the power and yet had not the
+power, to decide it. I had the power, if I could raise myself, to
+will it; and yet again had not the power, for the weight of twenty
+Atlantics was upon me, or the oppression of inexpiable guilt.
+‘Deeper than ever plummet sounded,’ I lay inactive. Then, like a
+chorus, the passion deepened. Some greater interest was at stake;
+some mightier cause than ever yet the sword had pleaded or trumpet
+had proclaimed. Then came sudden alarms; hurryings to and fro;
+trepidations of innumerable fugitives, I knew not whether from the
+good cause or the bad; darkness and lights; tempest and human
+faces; and at last, with the sense that all was lost, female forms,
+and the features that were all the world to me, and but a moment
+allowed, and clasped hands, and heart-breaking partings, and
+then&mdash;everlasting farewells! and with a sigh such as the caves of
+hell sighed when the incestuous mother uttered the abhorred name of
+death, the sound was reverberated&mdash;everlasting farewells! and again
+and yet again reverberated&mdash;everlasting farewells! And I awoke in
+struggles, and cried aloud, ‘I will sleep no more!’<span class="leftspc">”</span></p></div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_173" id="page_173"></a>{173}</span></p>
+
+<p>Upon reading this passage over I am glad I am not familiar with any
+finer one in English prose&mdash;it would be impossible to endure it. In
+these sentences it is not the consummate style alone that overwhelms
+one, the matter is nearly as fine as the manner. How tremendously the
+numbers and sentences are marshalled! How inevitable, overbearing,
+breathless is the onward movement! What awful expectations are aroused,
+and shadowy fears vaguely realized! As the spectral pageant moves on
+other cohorts of trembling shades join the ghostly legion on the blind
+march! All is vaporous, spectral, spiritual, until when we are wound up
+to the highest pitch of physical awe and apprehension, we stop suddenly,
+arrested by failure of the ground, insufficiency of the road, and are
+recalled to life and light and truth and fellowship with the kindly race
+of man by the despairing human shriek of incommunicable, inarticulable
+agony in the words, “I will sleep no more!” In that despairing cry the
+tortured soul abjectly confesses that it has been vanquished and driven
+wild by the spirit-world.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_174" id="page_174"></a>{174}</span> It is when you contrast the finest passages
+in Macaulay with such a passage as this, that you recognise the
+difference between a clever writer and a great stylist.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_175" id="page_175"></a>{175}</span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="A_GUIDE_TO_IGNORANCE" id="A_GUIDE_TO_IGNORANCE"></a>A GUIDE TO IGNORANCE.</h2>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">For</span> a long time I have had it in my mind to write a guide to ignorance.
+I have been withheld partly by a feeling of diffidence and partly by a
+want of encouragement from those to whom I mentioned the scheme. I have
+submitted a plan of my book to a couple of publishers, but each of these
+assured me that such a work would not be popular. In their
+straightforward commercial way they told me they could see “no money in
+the idea.” I differ from them; I think the book would be greeted with
+acclaim and bought with avidity.</p>
+
+<p>Novelties are, I know, always dangerous speculations except in the form
+of clothes, when they are certain of instant and immense adoption. The
+mind of man cannot conceive the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_176" id="page_176"></a>{176}</span> pattern for trousers’ cloth or the
+design for a bonnet that will not be worn. There is nothing too high or
+too low to set the fashion to men and women in dress. Conquerors were
+crowned with mural wreaths, of which the chimney-pot hat is the lineal
+descendant; pigs started the notion of wearing rings in their noses, and
+man in the southern seas followed the example; kangaroos were the
+earliest pouch-makers and ladies took to carrying reticules.</p>
+
+<p>But an innovation in the domain of education or thought is a widely
+different thing from a frolic in gear. It is easy to set going any craze
+which depends merely or mostly on the way of wearing the hair or the
+height of the cincture. Hence æstheticism gained many followers in a
+little time. But remember it took ages and ages to reconcile people to
+wearing any clothes at all. Once you break the ice the immersion in a
+new custom may become as rapid as the descent of a round shot into the
+sea. The great step was, so to speak, from woad to wampum, with just an
+Atlantic<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_177" id="page_177"></a>{177}</span> of time between the two. If you went to Poole any day this
+week and asked him to make you a suit of wampum he would plead no
+insuperable difficulty. If you asked him to make you a suit of woad he
+would certainly detain you while he inquired as to your sanity and sent
+for your friends. Yet it is only one step, one film, from woad to
+wampum.</p>
+
+<p>Up to this time in the history of man there has, with few exceptions,
+been an infatuated pursuit of this will-o’-the-wisp, knowledge. Why
+should not man now turn his glance to ignorance, if it were only for a
+little while and for the sake of fair play? The idea is of course
+revolutionary, so also is every other new idea revolutionary, and (I am
+not now referring to politics) it is only from revolutionary ideas we
+derive what we regard as advantages. The earth and heavens themselves
+are revolutionary. Why then should we not fairly examine the chance of a
+revolution in the aim of man?</p>
+
+<p>The disinclination to face new attitudes of thought comes from the
+inherent laziness of man, and hence at the outset of my career<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_178" id="page_178"></a>{178}</span> towards
+that guide I should find nearly the whole race against me. Humboldt, who
+met people of all climes and races and colours, declares laziness to be
+the most common vice of human nature. Hence the initial obstacle is
+almost insuperable. But it is only almost, not quite insuperable. Men
+can be stirred from indolence only by a prospect of profit in some form.
+Even in the Civil Service they are incited to make the effort to
+continue living by the hope of greater leisure later in life, for with
+years comes promotion and promotion means less labour.</p>
+
+<p>By a little industry in the pursuit of ignorance greater repose would be
+attained in the immediate future. It would be very difficult to prove
+that up to this hour progress has been of the slightest use or pleasure
+to man. Higher pleasures, higher pains. Complexities of consciousness
+are merely a source of distraction from centralisation. The jelly fish
+may, after all, be the highest ideal of living things, and we may, if
+the phrase be admitted, have been developing backward from him. Of all
+the creatures on earth man is the most stuck<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_179" id="page_179"></a>{179}</span> up. He arrogates
+everything to himself and because he can split a flint or make a bow or
+gun-barrel he thinks he centres the universe, and insists that the
+illimitable deeps of space are focused upon him. Astronomers, a highly
+respectable class of people, assert there are now visible to us one
+hundred million fixed stars, one hundred million suns like our own. Each
+may have its system of planets, such as earth, and each planet again its
+attendant satellites. With that splendid magnanimity characteristic of
+our race, man would rather pitch the hundred million suns into chaos
+than for a moment entertain the idea that he is a humbug and of no use
+whatever. And yet after all the jelly-fish may be a worthier fellow than
+the best of us.</p>
+
+<p>I do not of course insist on reversion to the jelly-fish. In this
+climate his habits of life are too suggestive of ague and rheumatism. In
+fact I do not know that I am urging reversion to anything, even to the
+flocks of pastoral man. But I am saying that as myriads of facilities
+are given for acquiring<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_180" id="page_180"></a>{180}</span> knowledge, one humble means ought to be devised
+for acquiring ignorance. If I had anywhere met with the encouragement
+which I think I merited, I should have undertaken to write the book
+myself.</p>
+
+<p>I should open by saying it was not until I had concluded a long and
+painful investigation that I considered myself in any way qualified to
+undertake so grave and important a task as writing a guide to ignorance:
+that I had not only inquired curiously into my own fitness, but had also
+looked about carefully among my friends in the hope of finding some one
+better qualified to carry out this important undertaking. But upon
+gauging the depth of my own knowledge and considering conscientiously
+the capacity of my acquaintances, I came to the conclusion that no man I
+knew personally had so close a personal intimacy with ignorance as
+myself. There are few branches, I may say no branch, of knowledge except
+that of ignorance in which any one of my friends was not more learned
+than myself. I was born in such profound ignorance<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_181" id="page_181"></a>{181}</span> that I had no
+personal knowledge of the fact at the time. I had existed for a long
+time before I could distinguish between myself and things which were
+not.</p>
+
+<p>As a boy I was averse from study; and since I have grown to manhood I
+have acquired so little substantive information that I could write down
+in a bold hand on one page of this book every single fact, outside facts
+of personal experience, of which I am possessed.</p>
+
+<p>I know that the Norman invasion occurred in 1066, and the Great Fire in
+1666. I know that gunpowder is composed of saltpetre, sulphur, and
+charcoal, and sausages of minced meat and bread under the name of Tommy.
+I am aware Milton and Shakespeare were poets, and that needle-grinders
+are short lived. I know that the primest brands of three-shilling
+champagnes are made in London. I can give the Latin for seven words, and
+the French for four. I can repeat the multiplication table (with the
+pence) up to six times. I know the mere names of a number of people and
+things; but, as far as clear and definite information goes, I don’t
+believe I could<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_182" id="page_182"></a>{182}</span> double the above brief list. I am, I think, therefore,
+warranted in concluding that few men can have a more close or exhaustive
+personal acquaintance with ignorance. If you want learning at secondhand
+you must go to the learned: if you want ignorance at first hand you
+cannot possibly do better than come to me.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place let us consider the “Injury of Knowledge.” How much
+better off the king would be if he had no knowledge! Suppose his mental
+ken had never been directed to any period before the dawn of his own
+memory, he would have no disquieting thoughts of the trouble into which
+Charles I. or Richard II. drifted. He would be filled with no envy of
+the good old King John, who, from four or five ounces of iron in the
+form of thumb-screws, and a few hundredweight of rich Jew, filled up the
+royal pockets as often as they showed any signs of growing empty. And,
+above all, he would be spared the misery of committing dates to memory.
+How it must limit the happiness of a constitutional sovereign to know
+anything about the constitution! Why should he be<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_183" id="page_183"></a>{183}</span> burdened with the
+consciousness of rights and prerogatives? Would he not be much happier
+if he might smoke his cigar in his garden without the fear of the
+Speaker or the Lord Chancellor before his eyes? The Commons want their
+Speaker, the Lords want their Lord Chancellor&mdash;let them have them. The
+king wants neither. Why should he be troubled with any knowledge of
+either? Although he is a king is he not a man and a brother also? Why
+should he be worried out of his life with reasons for all he does? The
+king feels he can do no wrong. That ought to be enough for him. Most men
+believe the same thing of themselves, but few others share the faith.
+The king can do no wrong, then in mercy’s name let the man alone.
+Suppose it is a part of my duty to look out of the oriel window at dawn,
+noon, and sunset, why should I be bored with cause, reason, and
+precedent for this? Let me look out of window if it is my duty to do so;
+but, before and after looking out of the window, let me enjoy my life.</p>
+
+<p>Take the statesman. How knowledge must<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_184" id="page_184"></a>{184}</span> hamper him! He is absolutely
+precluded from acting with decision by the consciousness of the
+difficulties which lay in the path of his predecessors. He has to make
+up his subject, to get facts and figures from his subordinates and
+others. He has to arrange the party manœuvres before he launches his
+scheme, by which time all the energy is gone out of him, and he has not
+half as much faith in his bill as if he had never looked at the <i>pros</i>
+and <i>cons</i>. “Never mind manœuvring, but go at them,” said Nelson. The
+moment you begin to manœuvre you confess your doubtfulness of
+success, unless you can take your adversary at a disadvantage; but if
+you fly headlong at his throat, you terrify him by the display of your
+confidence and valour.</p>
+
+<p>The words of Nelson apply still more closely to the general. His
+knowledge that fifty years ago the British army was worsted on this
+field, unnerves, paralyses him. If he did not know that shells are
+explosive and bullets deadly, he would make his dispositions with twice
+the confidence, and his temerity would fill the foe<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_185" id="page_185"></a>{185}</span> with panic. His
+simple duty is to defeat the enemy, and knowing anything beyond this
+only tends to distract his mind and weaken his arm. In the middle of one
+of his Indian battles, and when he thought the conflict had been decided
+in favour of British arms, a messenger rode hastily up to the general in
+command, who was wiping his reeking forehead on his coat-sleeve: “A
+large fresh force of the enemy has appeared in such a place; what is to
+be done?” Gough rubbed his forehead with the other sleeve, and shouted
+out, “Beat ’em!” Obviously no better command could have been given. What
+the English nation wanted the English army to do with the enemy was to
+“beat ’em.” In the pictures of the Victoria Cross there is one of a
+young dandy officer with an eyeglass in his eye and a sword in his hand,
+among the thick of the foe. He knows he is in that place to kill some
+one. He is quite ignorant of the fact that the enemy is there to kill
+him, and he is taking his time and looking through his eyeglass to try
+to find some enticing man through whom to run his sword. One of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_186" id="page_186"></a>{186}</span>
+Wellington’s most fervent prayers was, “Oh, spare me my dandy officers!”
+Now dandies are never very full of knowledge, and yet the greatest Duke
+thought more of them than of your learning-begrimed sappers or your
+science-bespattered gunners.</p>
+
+<p>If an advocate at the bar knew one quarter of the law of the land, he
+could never get on. In the first place, he would know more than the
+judges, and this would prejudice the bench against him. With regard to a
+barrister, the best position for him to assume, if he is addressing a
+jury, is, “Gentlemen, the indisputable facts of the case, as stated to
+you by the witnesses, are so-and-so. In presence of so distinguished a
+lawyer as occupies the bench in this court, I do not feel myself
+qualified to tell you what the law is; that will be the easy duty of his
+lordship.” Even in Chancery cases, the barrister would best insure
+success by merely citing the precedent cases, in an off-hand way, “Does
+not your lordship think the case of Burke <i>v.</i> Hare meets the exact
+conditions of the one under consideration?” The indices<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_187" id="page_187"></a>{187}</span> are all the
+pleader need look at. The judge will surely strain a point for one who
+does not bore him with extracts and arguments, but leaves all to
+himself, and lets the work of the court run smoothly and just as the
+president wishes.</p>
+
+<p>Knowledge is an absolute hindrance to the doctor of medicine. Supposing
+he is a man of average intelligence (some doctors are), he is able to
+diagnose, let me say, fever. You or I could diagnose fever pretty
+well&mdash;quick pulse, dry skin, thirst, and so on. But as the doctor leans
+over the patient, he is paralysed by the complication of his knowledge.
+Such a theory is against feeding up, such a theory against slops, such a
+theory against bleeding, such a theory in favour of phlebotomy; there
+are the wet and the dry, the hot and the cold methods; and while the
+doctor is deliberating, vacillating, or speculating, the patient has
+ample opportunity of dying, or nature of stepping in and curing the man,
+and thus foiling the doctor. Is there not much more sense and candour in
+the method adopted by the Irish hunting<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_188" id="page_188"></a>{188}</span> dispensary doctor, who, before
+starting with the hounds, locked up all drugs, except the Glauber’s
+salts, a stone or two of which he left in charge of his servant, with
+instructions it was to be meted out impartially to all comers, each
+patient receiving an honest fistful as a dose? It is a remarkable fact
+that within this century homœopathy has gained a firm hold on an
+important section of the community, and yet, notwithstanding the growth
+of what the allopathists or regular profession regard as ignorant
+quackery, the span of human life has had six years added to it in eighty
+years. Still homœopathy is a practical confession of ignorance; for
+it says, in effect, “We don’t know exactly what Nature is trying to do,
+but let us give her a little help, and trust in luck.” Whereas allopathy
+pretended to know everything and to fight Nature. Here, in the result of
+years added to man’s life by the development of the ignorant system, we
+see once more the superiority of ignorance over knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>How full of danger to the unwedded men is knowledge owned by the widow!
+She has<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_189" id="page_189"></a>{189}</span> knowledge of the married state, in which she was far removed
+from all the troubles and responsibilities of life. She had her
+pin-money, her bills paid, stalls taken for her at the opera, agreeable
+company around her board, no occasion to face money difficulties. Now
+all that is changed. There is no elasticity in her revenue, no margin
+for the gratification of her whims; she has to pay her own bills, secure
+her own stalls; she cannot very well entertain company often, and all
+the unpleasantnesses of business matters press her sorely. Her knowledge
+tells her that, if she could secure a second husband, all would be
+pleasant again. It may be said that here knowledge is in favour of the
+widow. Yes; but it is against the “Community.” Remember, the “Community”
+is always a male.</p>
+
+<p>There is hardly any class or member of the community that does not
+suffer drawback or injury from knowledge. As I am giving only a crude
+outline of a design, I leave a great deal to the imagination of the
+reader. He will easily perceive how much happier and more free would be
+the man of business, the girl, the boy,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_190" id="page_190"></a>{190}</span> the scientist, the
+controversialist, and, above all, the literary man, if each knew little
+or nothing, instead of having pressed upon the attention from youth
+accumulated experiences, traditions, discoveries, and reasonings of many
+centuries.</p>
+
+<p>To the “Delights of Ignorance,” I should devote the consideration of man
+devoid of knowledge under various circumstances and in various
+positions.</p>
+
+<p>By the sea who does not love to lie “propt on beds of amaranth and moly,
+how sweet (while warm airs lull, blowing lowly), with half-dropt eyelids
+still, beneath a heaven dark and holy, to watch the long bright river
+drawing slowly his waters from the purple hill&mdash;to hear the dewy echoes
+calling from cave to cave through the thick-twined vine&mdash;to watch the
+emerald-coloured waters falling through many a woven acanthus wreath
+divine! Only to see and hear the far-off sparkling brine, only to hear
+were sweet, stretched out beneath the pine.” Just so! Is not that much
+better than bothering about gravitation and that wretched old clinker
+the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_191" id="page_191"></a>{191}</span> moon, and the tides, and how sea-water is made up of oxygen and
+hydrogen and chloride of sodium and bromide of something else, and fifty
+other things, not one of which has a tolerable smell when you meet it in
+a laboratory? Isn’t it better than thinking of the number of lighthouses
+built on the coast of Albion, and the tonnage which yearly is reported
+and cleared at the custom-houses of London, Liverpool, and that
+prosperous seaport of Bohemia! Isn’t it much better than improving the
+occasion by reading a hand-book on hydraulics or hydrostatics? Who on
+the seashore wants to know anything? There will always, down to the last
+syllable of recorded time, be finer things unknown about the sea than
+can be said about all other matters in the world. Trying to know
+anything about the sea is like shooting into the air an arrow attached
+to a pennyworth of string with a view to sounding space. If we threw all
+the knowledge we have into the ocean the Admiralty standards of
+high-water mark would not have to be altered one-millionth part of a
+line.</p>
+
+<p>What a blessing ignorance would be in<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_192" id="page_192"></a>{192}</span> an inn! Who would not dispense
+with a knowledge of all the miseries that follow in the wake of the vat
+when one is thirsty, and has before him amber sunset-coloured ale, and
+in his hand a capacious, long, cool-meaning churchwarden? Who would at
+such a moment cumber his mind with the unit of specific gravity used by
+excisemen in testing beer? Who would at such a moment care to calculate
+the toll exacted by the Chancellor of the Exchequer before each cool
+gulp may thrill with amazing joy the parched gullet?</p>
+
+<p>Who, when upon a journey, would care to know the precise pressure
+required to blow the boiler of the engine to pieces, or the number of
+people killed in collisions during the corresponding quarter of last
+year? Should we not be better in sickness for not knowing the exact
+percentage of deaths in cases of our class? In adversity should we not
+be infinitely happier were we in ignorance of the chance we ran of
+gaining a good position or of cutting our throats? Should we not enjoy
+our prosperity all the more if we were not, morning<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_193" id="page_193"></a>{193}</span> and evening,
+exercised by the fluctuations of the share-list, fluctuations in all
+likelihood destined never to increase or diminish our fortunes one
+penny? And oh, for ignorance in sleep! For sleep without dream, or
+nightmare, or memory! For sleep such as falls upon the body when the
+soul is done with it and away!</p>
+
+<p>But all this is only rambling talk and likely to come to nothing. I fear
+I shall never find a publisher for my great work. Upon reading over what
+I have written I am impressed by the faintness of the outline it
+displays of the book. In fact there is hardly any outline at all. It is
+no more clear than the figures thrown by a magic-lantern upon a fog. I
+have done nothing more than wave the sacred lamp of ignorance before
+your eyes. I daresay my friend the jelly-fish would shake his fat sides
+with laughter if he became aware of this futile effort to show how far
+we are removed from his state of blissful calm. I feel infinitely
+depressed and discouraged. I feel that not only will I not be hailed as
+a prophet in my own<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_194" id="page_194"></a>{194}</span> country, but that the age will have nothing to do
+with my scheme. It may be thought by many that there is something like
+treason in thus enrolling oneself under the banner of the jelly-fish.
+Egypt, Assyria, Greece, Carthage, and Rome have gone back from
+knowledge, and even the jelly-fish does not flourish on their sites. But
+is the condition of their sites the worse for lacking the jelly-fish?
+Perhaps the “silence, and desolation, and dim night” are better in those
+places than the blare of trumpets and the tramp of man. So far as we
+know man is the only being capable of doing evil or offending heaven.
+His absence may by nature be considered very good company. Whatever part
+of earth he can handle and move he has turned topsy-turvy. One day earth
+will turn on him and wipe him out altogether.</p>
+
+<p>For me and my great scheme for the book there is no hope. Man has always
+been accounted a poor creature when judged by a fellow man whom he does
+not appreciate. How can I be expected to go on taking an interest in<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_195" id="page_195"></a>{195}</span>
+man when not the most credulous or the most crafty publisher in London
+will as much as look at my <i>Guide to Ignorance</i>? I feel that my life is
+wasted and that my functions have been usurped by the School Board. I
+cool the air with sighs for the days when a philosopher might teach his
+disciples in the porch or the grove. I feel as if I could anticipate
+earth and turn on man. But some of the genial good nature of the
+jelly-fish still lingers in my veins. I will not finally desert man
+until man has finally deserted me. I had by me a few scattered essays in
+the style of the book I projected in vain. If in them the reader has not
+found ample proof of my fitness to inculcate the philosophy of Ignorance
+I shall abandon Man to his fate. I have relieved my mind of some of its
+teeming store of vacuity. I can scarcely hope I have added to the
+reader’s hoard. But it would be consoling to fancy that upon laying down
+this book the reader’s mind will if possible be still more empty than
+when he took it up.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_196" id="page_196"></a>{196}</span></p>
+
+<p class="c"><small>
+<span class="smcap">Richard Clay and Sons</span>,<br />
+LONDON AND BUNGAY.</small>
+</p>
+
+<p><a name="transcrib" id="transcrib"></a></p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary=""
+style="padding:2%;border:3px dotted gray;">
+<tr><th align="center">Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:</th></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">the face of a charletan=> the face of a charlatan {pg 13}</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">acccording to Mitchel=> acccording to Mitchel {pg 140}</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">are focussed upon him.=> are focused upon him. {pg 179}</td></tr>
+</table>
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Ignorant Essays, by Richard Dowling
+
+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/license
+
+
+Title: Ignorant Essays
+
+Author: Richard Dowling
+
+Release Date: September 29, 2016 [EBook #53169]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IGNORANT ESSAYS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Chuck Greif, MFR and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive)
+
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+
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+
+
+
+
+
+                           IGNORANT ESSAYS.
+
+
+
+
+                         _IGNORANT_
+
+                                 _ESSAYS._
+
+                    [Illustration: text decoration]
+
+                                LONDON:
+
+                           WARD AND DOWNEY,
+
+                 12, YORK STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C.
+
+                                 1887.
+
+                       [_All Rights Reserved._]
+
+                        RICHARD CLAY AND SONS,
+
+                          LONDON AND BUNGAY.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+                                PAGE
+
+THE ONLY REAL GHOST IN FICTION     1
+
+THE BEST TWO BOOKS                30
+
+LIES OF FABLE AND ALLEGORY        55
+
+MY COPY OF KEATS                  83
+
+DECAY OF THE SUBLIME             117
+
+A BORROWED POET                  132
+
+THE ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER          160
+
+A GUIDE TO IGNORANCE             175
+
+
+
+
+
+IGNORANT ESSAYS.
+
+
+
+
+THE ONLY REAL GHOST IN FICTION.
+
+
+My most ingenious friend met me one day, and asked me whether I
+considered I should be richer if I had the ghost of sixpence or if I had
+not the ghost of sixpence.
+
+“What side do you take?” I inquired, for I knew his disputatious turn.
+
+“I am ready to take either,” he answered; “but I give preference to the
+ghost.”
+
+“What!” I said. “Give preference to the ghost!”
+
+“Yes. You see, if I haven’t the ghost of sixpence I have nothing at
+all; but if I have the ghost of a sixpence----”
+
+“Well?”
+
+“Well, I am the richer by having the ghost of a sixpence.”
+
+“And do you think when you add one more delusion to those under which
+you already labour”--he and I could never agree about the difference
+between infinity and zero--“that you will be the better off?”
+
+“I have not admitted a ghost is a delusion; and even if I had I am not
+prepared to grant that a delusion may not be a source of wealth. Look at
+the South Sea Bubble.”
+
+I was willing, so there and then we fell to and were at the question--or
+rather, the questions to which it led--for hours, until we finally
+emerged upon the crystallization of cast-iron, the possibility of a
+Napoleonic restoration, or some other kindred matter. How we wandered
+about and writhed in that talk I can no more remember than I can recall
+the first articulate words that fell into my life. I know we handled
+ghosts (it was broad day and in a public street) with a freedom and
+familiarity that must have been painful to spirits of refinement and
+reserve. I know we said much about dreams, and compared the phantoms of
+the open lids with the phantoms of the closed eyes, and pitted them one
+against another like cocks in a main, and I remember that the case of
+the dreamer in Boswell’s Johnson came up between us. The case in Boswell
+submitted to Johnson as an argument in favour of a man’s reason being
+more acute in sleep than in waking, showed the phantom antagonistic able
+to floor the dreamer in his proper person. Johnson laughed at such a
+delusion, for, he pointed out, only the dreamer was besotted with sleep
+he would have perceived that he himself had furnished the confounding
+arguments to the shadowy disputant. That is very good, and seems quite
+conclusive as far as it goes; but is there nothing beyond what Johnson
+saw? Was there no ghostly prompter in the scene? No _suggeritore_
+invisible and inaudible to the dreamer, who put words and notes into the
+mouth of the opponent? No thinner shade than the spectral being visible
+in the dream? If in our waking hours we are subject to phantoms which
+sometimes can be seen and sometimes cannot, why not in our sleeping
+hours also? Are all ghosts of like grossness, or do some exist so fine
+as to be beyond our carnal apprehension, and within the ken only of the
+people of our sleep? If we ponderable mortals are haunted, who can say
+that our insubstantial midnight visitors may not know wraiths finer and
+subtler than we, may not be haunted as we are? In physical life
+parasites have parasites. Why in phantom life should not ghosts have
+ghosts?
+
+The firm, familiar earth--our earth of this time, the earth upon which
+we each of us stand at this moment--is thickly peopled with living
+tangible folk who can eat, and drink, and talk, and sing, and walk, and
+draw cheques, and perform a number of other useful, and hateful, and
+amusing actions. In the course of a day a man meets, let us say, forty
+people, with whom he exchanges speech. If a man is a busy dreamer, with
+how many people in the course of one night does he exchange speech? Ten,
+a hundred, a thousand? In the dreaming of one minute by the clock a man
+may converse with half the children of Adam since the Fall! The command
+of the greatest general alive would not furnish sentries and vedettes
+for the army of spirits that might visit one man in the interval between
+one beat of the pendulum of Big Ben and another!
+
+Shortly after that talk with my friend about the ghost of the sixpence,
+I was walking alone through one of the narrow lanes in the tangle of
+ways between Holborn and Fleet Street, when my eye was caught by the
+staring white word “Dreams” on a black ground. The word is, so to speak,
+printed in white on the black cover of a paper-bound book, and under the
+word “Dreams” are three faces, also printed in white on a black ground.
+Two of the faces are those of women: one of a young woman, purporting to
+be beautiful, with a star close to her forehead, and the other of a
+witch with the long hair and disordered eyes becoming to a person of her
+occupation. I dare say these two women are capable not only of
+justification, but of the simplest explanation. For all I know to the
+contrary, the composition may be taken wholly, or in part, from a
+well-known picture, or perhaps some canon of ghostly lore would be
+violated if any other design appeared on the cover. About such matters I
+know absolutely nothing. The word “Dreams” and the two female faces are
+now much less prominent than when I saw the book first, for, Goth that I
+am, long ago I dipped a brush in ink and ran a thin wash over the
+letters and the two faces; as they were, to use artist’s phrases, in
+front of the third face, and killing it.
+
+The third face is that of a man, a young man clean shaven and handsome,
+with no ghastliness or look of austerity. His arms are resting on a
+ledge, and extend from one side of the picture to the other. The left
+arm lies partly under the right, and the left hand is clenched softly
+and retired in half shadow. The right arm rises slightly as it crosses
+the picture, and the right wrist and hand ride on the left. The fore and
+middle fingers are apart, and point forward and a little downward,
+following the sleeve of the other arm. The third finger droops still
+more downward, and the little finger, with a ring on it, lies directly
+perpendicular along the cuff of the sleeve beneath. The hand is not well
+drawn, and yet there is some weird suggestiveness in the purposeless
+dispersion of the fingers.
+
+Fortunately upon my coming across the book, the original cost of which
+was one shilling, I had more than the ghost of a sixpence, and for
+two-thirds of that sum the book became mine. It is the only art purchase
+I ever made on the spur of the moment; I knew nothing of the book then,
+and know little of it now. It says it is the cut-down edition of a much
+larger work, and what I have read of it is foolish. The worst of the
+book is that it does not afford subject for a laugh. Thomas Carlyle is
+reported to have said in conversation respecting one of George Eliot’s
+latest stories that “it was not amusing, and it was not instructive; it
+was only dull--dull.” This book of dreams is only dull. However, there
+are some points in it that may be referred to, as this is an idle time.
+
+“To dream you see an angel or angels is very good, and to dream that you
+yourself are one is much better.” The noteworthy thing in connection
+with this passage being that nothing is said of the complexion of the
+angel or angels! Black or white it is all the same. You have only to
+dream of them and be happy. “To dream that you play upon bagpipes,
+signifies trouble, contention, and being overthrown at law.” Doubtless
+from the certainty, in civilised parts, of being prosecuted by your
+neighbours as a public nuisance. I would give a trifle to know a man who
+did dream that he played upon the bagpipes. Of course, it is quite
+possible he might be an amiable man in other ways.
+
+“To dream you have a beard long, thick, and unhandsome is of a good
+signification to an orator, or an ambassador, lawyer, philosopher or any
+who desires to speak well or to learn arts and sciences.” That
+“ambassador” gleams like a jewel among the other homely folk. I remember
+once seeing a newspaper contents-bill after a dreadful accident with the
+words “Death of fifty-seven people and a peer.” “To dream that you have
+a brow of brass, copper, marble, or iron signifies irreconcilable hatred
+against your enemies.” The man capable of such a dream I should like to
+see--but through bars of metal made from his own sleep-zoned forehead.
+“If any one dreams that he hath encountered a cat or killed one, he will
+commit a thief to prison and prosecute him to the death; for the cat
+signifies a common thief.” Mercy on us! Does the magistrate who commits
+usually prosecute, and is thieving a hanging matter now? This is
+necromancy or nothing; prophecy, inspiration, or something out of the
+common indeed.
+
+“To dream one plays or sees another play on a clavicord, shows the death
+of relations, or funeral obsequies.” I now say with feelings of the most
+profound gratitude that I never to my knowledge even saw a clavicord. I
+do not know what the beastly, ill-omened contrivance is like. The most
+recondite musical instrument I ever remember to have performed on is the
+Jew’s harp; and although there seems to be something weak, uncandid and
+treacherous in the spelling of “clavicord,” I presume the two are not
+identical. In any case I am safe, for I have never dreamed of playing
+even on the Jew’s harp. Here however is a cheerful promise from a
+painful experience--one wants something encouraging after that
+terrifying “clavicord.” “For a man to dream that his flesh is full of
+corns, shows that a man will grow rich proportionately to his corns.” I
+can breathe freely once more, having got away from outlandish musical
+instruments and within the influence of the familiar horn.
+
+As might be expected, it is not useful to dream about the devil. Let
+sleeping dogs lie. “To dream of eating human flesh” is also a bad way of
+spending the hours of darkness. It is lucky to dream you are a fool. You
+see, even in sleep, the virtue of candour brings reward. “To dream that
+you lose your keys signifies anger.” And very naturally too. “To dream
+you kill your father is a bad sign.” I had made up my mind not to go
+beyond the parricide, but I am lured on to quote this, “To dream of
+eating mallows, signifies exemption from trouble and dispatch of
+business, because this herb renders the body soluble.” I will not say
+that Nebuchadnezzar may not at one time have eaten mallows among other
+unusual herbs, but I never did. That however is not where the wonder
+creeps in. It is at the reason. If you eat mallows you will have no
+trouble _because_ this herb renders the body _soluble_. Why is it good
+to render the body soluble, and what is the body soluble in? One more
+and I am done. “To dream one plays, or sees another play, upon the
+virginals, signifies the death of relations, or funeral obsequies.” From
+bagpipes, clavicords, and virginals, we hope we may be protected. And
+yet if these are the only instruments banned, a person having an
+extensive acquaintance with wind and string instruments of the orchestra
+may be musical in slumber without harm to himself or threat to his
+friends.
+
+In the interpretation of dreams Artemidorus was the most learned man
+that ever lived. He gave the best part of his life to collecting matter
+about dreams, and this he afterwards put together in five books. He
+might better have spent his time in bottling shadows of the moon.
+
+It was however for the face of the man on the cover that I bought and
+have kept the book. The face is that of a man between thirty and
+thirty-five years of age. It is regular and handsome. The forehead leans
+slightly forward, and the lower part of the face is therefore a little
+foreshortened. It is looking straight out of the picture; the shadows
+fall on the left of the face, on the right as it fronts you. The nose is
+as long and broad-backed as the nose of the Antinous. The mouth is large
+and firm and well-shaping with lips neither thick nor thin. The interval
+between the nostrils and verge of the upper lip is short. The chin is
+gently pointed and prominent. The outline of the jaws square. The
+modelling of the left cheek is defectively emphasised at the line from
+above the hollow of the nostrils downward and backward. The brows are
+straight, the left one being slightly more arched than the right. The
+forehead is low, broad, compact, hard, with clear lines. The lower line
+of the temples projects beyond the perpendicular. The hair is thick and
+wavy and divided at the left side, depressed rather than divided, for
+the parting is visible no further up the head than a splay letter V.
+
+The eyes are wide open, and notwithstanding the obtuse angle made by the
+facial line in the forward pose of the head, they are looking out level
+with their own height upon the horizon. There is no curiosity or
+speculation in the eyes. There is no wonder or doubt; no fear or joy.
+The gaze is heavy. There is a faint smile, the faintest smile the human
+face is capable of displaying, about the mouth. There is no light in the
+eyes. The expression of the whole face is infinitely removed from
+sinister. In it there is kindliness with a touch of wisdom and pity. It
+asks no question; desires to say no word. It is the face of one who
+beyond all doubt knows things we do not know, things which can scarcely
+be shaped into words, things we are in ignorance of. It is not the face
+of a charlatan, a seer, or a prophet.
+
+It is the face of a man once ardent and hopeful, to whom everything that
+is to be known has lately been revealed, and who has come away from the
+revelation with feelings of unassuageable regret and sorrow for Man. It
+says with terrible calmness, “I have seen all, and there is nothing in
+it. For your own sakes let me be mute. Live you your lives. _Miserere
+nobis!_”
+
+My belief is that the extraordinary expression of that face is an
+accident, a happy chance, a result that the artist never foresaw. Who
+drew the cover I cannot tell. No initials appear on it and I have never
+made inquiries. Remember that in pictures and poems (I know nothing of
+music), what is a miracle to you, has in most cases been a miracle to
+the painter or poet also. Any poet can explain how he makes a poem, but
+no poet can explain how he makes poetry. He is simply writing a poem and
+the poetry glides or rushes in. When it comes he is as much astonished
+by it as you are. The poem may cost him infinite trouble, the poetry he
+gets as a free gift. He begins a poem to prepare himself for the
+reception of poetry or to induce its flow. His poem is only a
+lightning-rod to attract a fluid over which he has no control before it
+comes to him. There may be a poetic art, such as verse-making, but to
+talk about the art of poetry is to talk nonsense. It is men of genteel
+intellects who speak of the art of poetry. The man who wrote the _Art of
+Poetry_ knew better than to credit the possible existence of any such
+art. He himself says the poet is born, not made.
+
+I am very bad at dates, but I think Le Fanu wrote _Green Tea_ before a
+whole community of Canadian nuns were thrown into the most horrible
+state of nervous misery by excessive indulgence in that drug. Of all the
+horrible tales that are not revolting, _Green Tea_ is I think the most
+horrible. The bare statement that an estimable and pious man is haunted
+by the ghost of a monkey is at the first blush funny. But if you have
+not read the story read it, and see how little of fun is in it. The
+horror of the tale lies in the fact that this apparition of a monkey is
+the only _probable_ ghost in fiction. I have not the book by me as I
+write, and I cannot recall the victim’s name, but he is a clergyman,
+and, as far as we know to the contrary, a saint. There is no reason _on
+earth_ why he should be pursued by this malignant spectre. He has
+committed no crime, no sin even. He labours with all the sincerity of a
+holy man to regain his health and exorcise his foe. He is as crimeless
+as you or I and infinitely more faultless. He has not deserved his fate,
+yet he is driven in the end to cut his throat, and you excuse _that_
+crime by saying he is mad.
+
+I do not think any additional force is gained in the course of this
+unique story by the importation of malignant irreverence to Christianity
+in the latter manifestations of the ape. I think the apparition is at
+its best and most terrible when it is simply an indifferent pagan,
+before it assumes the _rôle_ of antichrist. This ape is at his best as a
+mind-destroyer when the clergyman, going down the avenue in the
+twilight, raised his eyes and finds the awful presence preceding him
+along the top of the wall. There the clergyman reaches the acme of
+piteous, unsupportable horror. In the pulpit with the brute, the priest
+is fighting against the devil. In the avenue he has not the
+strengthening or consoling reflection that he is defending a cause,
+struggling against hell. The instant motive enters into the story the
+situation ceases to be dramatic and becomes merely theatrical. Every
+“converted” tinker will tell you stirring stories of his wrestling with
+Satan, forgetting that it takes two to fight, and what a loathsome
+creature he himself is. But the conflict between a good man and the
+unnecessary apparition of this ape is pathetic, horribly pathetic, and
+full of the dramatic despair of the finest tragedy.
+
+It is desirable at this point to focus some scattered words that have
+been set down above. The reason this apparition of the ape appears
+probable is _because_ it is unnecessary. Any one can understand why
+Macbeth should see that awful vision at the banquet. The apparition of
+the murdered dead is little more than was to be expected, and can be
+explained in an easy fashion. You or I never committed murder,
+therefore we are not liable to be troubled by the ghost of Banquo. In
+your life or mine Nemesis is not likely to take heroic dimensions. The
+spectres of books, as a rule, only excite our imaginative fears, not our
+personal terrors. The spectres of books have and can have nothing to do
+with us any more than the sufferings of the Israelites in the desert.
+When a person of our acquaintance dies, we inquire the particulars of
+his disease, and then discover the predisposing causes, so that we may
+prove to ourselves we are not in the same category with him. We do not
+deny our liability to contract the disease, we deny our likelihood to
+supply the predisposing causes. He died of aneurysm of the aorta: Ah, we
+say, induced by the violent exercise he took--we never take violent
+exercise. If not of aneurysm of the aorta, but fatty degeneration of the
+heart: Ah, induced by the sedentary habits of his latter years--we take
+care to secure plenty of exercise. If a man has been careful of his
+health and dies, we allege that he took all the robustness out of his
+constitution by over-heedfulness; if he has been careless, we say he
+took no precautions at all; and from either of these extremes we are
+exempt, and therefore we shall live for ever.
+
+Now here in this story of _Green Tea_ is a ghost which is possible,
+probable, almost familiar. It is a ghost without genesis or
+justification. The gods have nothing to do with it. Something, an
+accident due partly to excessive tea-drinking, has happened to the
+clergyman’s nerves, and the ghost of this ape glides into his life and
+sits down and abides with him. There is no reason why the ghost should
+be an ape. When the victim sees the apparition first he does not know it
+to be an ape. He is coming home in an omnibus one night and descries two
+gleaming spots of fire in the dark, and from that moment the life of the
+poor gentleman becomes a ruin. It is a thing that may happen to you or
+me any day, any hour. That is why Le Fanu’s ghost is so horrible. You
+and I might drink green tea to the end of our days and suffer from
+nothing more than ordinary impaired digestion. But you or I may get a
+fall, or a sunstroke, and ever afterwards have some hideous familiar.
+To say there can be no such things as ghosts is a paltry blasphemy. It
+is a theory of the smug, comfortable kind. A ghost need not wear a white
+sheet and have intelligible designs on personal property. A ghost need
+not be the spirit of a dead person. A ghost need have no moral mission
+whatever.
+
+I once met a haunted man, a man who had seen a real ghost; a ghost that
+had, as the ape, no ascertainable moral mission but to drive his victim
+mad. In this case too the victim was a clergyman. He is, I believe,
+alive and well now. He has shaken off the incubus and walks a free man.
+I was travelling at the time, and accidentally got into chat with him on
+the deck of a steamboat by night. We were quite alone in the darkness
+and far from land when he told me his extraordinary story. I do not of
+course intend retailing it here. I look on it as a private
+communication. I asked him what brought him to the mental plight in
+which he had found himself, and he answered briefly, “Overwork.” He was
+then convalescent, and had been assured by his physicians that with
+care the ghost which had been laid would appear no more. The spectre he
+saw threatened physical harm, and while he was haunted by it he went in
+constant dread of death by violence. It had nothing good or bad to do
+with his ordinary life or his sacred calling. It had no foundation on
+fact, no basis on justice. He had been for months pursued by the figure
+of a man threatening to take away his life. He did not believe this man
+had any corporeal existence. He did not know whether the creature had
+the power to kill him or not. The figure was there in the attitude of
+menace and would not be banished. He knew that no one but himself could
+see the murderous being. That ghost was there for him, and there for him
+alone.
+
+Respecting the Canadian nuns whose convent was beleaguered and infested
+by ghostly enemies that came not by ones or twos but in battalions, I
+had a fancy at the time. I do not intend using the terminologies or
+theories of the dissecting room, or the language of physiology found in
+books. I am not sure the fancy is wholly my own, but some of it is
+original. I shall suppose that the nerves are not only capable of
+various conditions of health and disease, but of large structural
+alteration in life; structural alteration not yet recorded or observed
+in fact; structural alteration which, if you will, exists in life but
+disappears instantly at death. In fine, I mean rather to illustrate my
+fancy than to describe anything that exists or could exist. Before
+letting go the last strand of sense, let me say that talking of nerves
+being highly strung is sheer nonsense, and not good nonsense either. The
+muscles it is that are highly strung. The poor nerves are merely
+insulated wires from the battery in the head. Their tension is no more
+affected by the messages that go over them, than an Atlantic cable is
+tightened or loosened by the signals indicating fluctuations in the
+Stock Exchanges of London and New York.
+
+The nerves, let us suppose, in their normal condition of health have
+three skins over the absolute sentient tissue. In the ideal man in
+perfect health, let us say Hodge, the man whose privilege it is to “draw
+nutrition, propagate, and rot,” the three skins are always at their
+thickest and toughest. Now genius is a disease, and it falls, as ladies
+of Mrs. Gamp’s degree say, “on the nerves.” That is, the first of these
+skins having been worn away or never supplied by nature, the patient
+“sees visions and dreams dreams.” The man of genius is not exactly under
+delusions. He does not think he is in China because he is writing of
+Canton in London, but his optic nerve, wanting the outer coating, can
+build up images out of statistics until the images are as full of line
+and colour and as incapable of change at will as the image of a barrel
+of cider which occupies Hodge’s retina when it is imminent to his
+desires, present to his touch. The sensibility of the nerves of genius
+is greater than the sensibility of the nerves of Hodge. Not all the
+eloquence of an unabridged dictionary could create an image in Hodge’s
+mind of a thing he had never seen. From a brief description a painter of
+genius could make a picture--not a likeness of course--of Canton,
+although he had never been outside the four corners of these kingdoms.
+The painting would not, in all likelihood, be in the least like Canton,
+but it would be very like the image formed in the painter’s mind of that
+city. In the painter such an image comes and goes at will. He can either
+see it or not see it as he pleases. It is the result of the brain
+reacting on the nerve. It relies on data and combination. It is his
+slave, not his master. Before it can be formed there must be great
+increase of sensibility. Hodge is crude silver, the painter is the
+polished mirror. The painter can see things which are not, things which
+he himself makes in his mind. His invention is at least as vivid as his
+memory.
+
+I suppose then that the man of genius, the painter or poet, is one who,
+having lost the first skin, or portion of the first skin of his nerves,
+can create and see in his mind’s eye things never seen by the eye of any
+other man, and see them as vividly as men of no genius can see objects
+of memory.
+
+Now peel off the second skin. The more exquisitely sensitive or the
+innermost skin of the nerve is exposed. Things which the eye of genius
+could not invent or even dream of are revealed. A drop of putrid water
+under the microscope becomes a lake full of terrifying monsters large
+enough to destroy man. Heard through the microphone the sap ascending a
+tree becomes loud as a torrent. Seen through a telescope nebulous spots
+in the sky become clusters of constellations. Divested of its second
+skin the nerve becomes sensitive to influences too rare and fine for the
+perception of the optic nerve in a more protected state. Beings that
+bear no relation whatever to weight or the law of impenetrability, float
+about and flash hither and thither swifter than lightning. The air and
+other ponderable matter are nothing to them. They are no more than the
+shadows or reflections of action, the imperishable progeny of thought.
+Here lies disclosed to the partly emancipated nerve the Canton of the
+painter’s vision. Here the city he made to himself is as firm and sturdy
+and solid and full of life as the Canton of this day on the southern
+coast of China. Here throng the unrecorded visions of all the poets.
+Here are the counterfeits of all the dead in all their phases. Here
+float the dreams of men, the unbroken scrolls of life and action and
+thought complete of all beings, man and beast, that have lived since
+time began. In the world of matter nothing is lost; in the world of
+spirit nothing is lost either.
+
+If instead of taking the whole of this imaginary skin off the optic
+nerve, we simply injure it ever so slightly, the nerve may become alive
+to some of these spirits; and this premature perception of what is
+around all of us, but perceived by few, we call seeing ghosts. It may be
+objected that all space is not vast enough to afford room for such a
+stupendous panorama. When we begin to talk of limits of space to
+anything beyond our knowledge and the touch of our inch-tape, we talk
+like fools. There is no good in allotting space with a two-foot rule. It
+is all the same whether we divide zero into infinity or infinity into
+zero. The answer is the same; “I don’t know how many times it goes.”
+Take a cubic inch of air outside your window and see the things packed
+into it. Here interblent we find all together resistance and light and
+sound and odour and flavour. We must stop there, for we have got to the
+end, not of what _is_ packed into that cubic inch of air, but to the end
+of the things in it revealed to our senses. If we had five more senses
+we should find five more qualities; if we had five thousand senses, five
+thousand qualities. But even if we had only our own senses in higher
+form we should see ghosts.
+
+If the third skin were removed from the optic nerve all things we now
+call opaque would become transparent, owing to the naked nerve being
+sensitive to the latent light in every body. The whole round world would
+become a crystal ball, the different degrees of what we now call opacity
+being indicated merely by a faint chromatic modification. What we now
+regard as brilliant sunlight would then be dense shadow. Apocalyptic
+ranges of colour would be disclosed, beginning with what is in our
+present condition the least faint trace of tint and ascending through a
+thousand grades to white, white brighter far than the sun our present
+eyes blink upon. Burnished brass flaming in our present sun would then
+be the beginning of the chromatic scale descending in the shadow of
+yellow, burnished copper of red, burnished tin of black, burnished steel
+of blue. So intense then would the sensibility of the optic nerve become
+that the satellites attendant on the planets in the system of the suns,
+called fixed stars, would blaze brighter than our own moon reflected in
+the sea. To the eye matter would cease to be matter in its present,
+gross obstructive sense. It would be no more than a delicate transparent
+pigment in the wash of a water-colour artist. The gross rotundity of the
+earth would be, in the field of the human eye, a variegated transparent
+globe of reduced luminousness and enormous scales and chords of colour.
+The Milky Way would then be a concave measureless ocean of prismatic
+light with pendulous opaline spheres.
+
+The figures of dreams and ghosts may be as real as we are pleased to
+consider ourselves. What arrogance of us to say they are our own
+creation! They may look upon themselves as superior to us, as we look
+upon ourselves as superior to the jelly-fish. No doubt we are to ghosts
+the baser order, the spirits stained with the woad of earth, low
+creatures who give much heed to heat and cold, and food and motion. They
+are the sky-children, the chosen people. They are nothing but
+circumscribed will wedded to incorporeal reasons of the nobler kind, and
+with scopes the contemplation of which would split our tenement of clay.
+They are the arch-angelic hierarchs of man, the ultimate condition of
+the race, the spirit of this planet distilled by the sun.
+
+
+
+
+THE BEST TWO BOOKS.
+
+
+In no list I met of the best hundred books, when that craze took the
+place of spelling-bees and the fifteen puzzle, do I recollect seeing
+mention made of my two favourite works. These two books stand completely
+apart in my esteem, and if I were asked to name the volume that comes
+third, I should have to make a speech of explanation. The first of them
+is not in prose or verse, it is not a work of theology or philosophy or
+science or art or history or fiction or general literature. It is at
+once the most comprehensive and impartial book I know. This paragraph is
+assuming the aspect of a riddle. Being in a mild and passionless way a
+lover of my species, I am a loather of riddles. So I will go no further
+on the downward way, but declare the name, title, and style of my book
+to be Nuttall’s _Standard Dictionary_.
+
+I am well aware there is a great deal to be said against Nuttall’s
+_Dictionary_ as a dictionary, but I am not speaking of it in that sense.
+I am treating it as a dear companion, a true friend, a _vade mecum_. Let
+those who have a liking for discovering spots in the sun glare at the
+orb until they have a taste for nothing else but spots in the sun. I
+find Nuttall so close to my affections that I can perceive no defects in
+him. I cannot bear to hold him at arm’s length, for critical
+examination. I hug him close to me, and feel that while I have him I am
+almost independent of all other books printed in the English language.
+
+Cast your eyes along your own bookshelves of English authors; every
+word, liberally speaking, that is in each and every volume on your
+shelves is in my Nuttall! Here is the juice of the language, from
+Shakespeare to Huxley, in a concentrated solution. Here is a book that
+starts by telling you that A is a vowel, and does not desert you until
+it informs you that zythum is a beverage, a liquor made from malt and
+wheat; a fact, I will wager, you never dreamed of before! And between A
+and zythum, what a boundless store of learning is disclosed! This is the
+only single-volume book I know of which no man living is or ever can be
+the master. Charles Lamb would not allow that dictionaries are books at
+all. In his days they were white-livered charlatans compared with the
+full-blooded enthusiast, Nuttall.
+
+If such an unkind thing were desirable as to diminish the conceit of a
+man of average reading and intelligence, there is no book could be used
+with such paralysing effect upon him as this one. It is almost
+impossible for any student to realise the infinite capacity for
+ignorance with which man is gifted until he is brought face to face with
+such a book as Nuttall. The list of words whose meanings are given
+occupies 771 very closely printed pages of small type in double column.
+The letter A takes up from 1 to 52. How many words unfamiliar to the
+ordinary man are to be found in this fifteenth part of the dictionary!
+On the top of every folio there occur four words, one at the head of
+each column. Barring the right of the candidates in ignorance to guess
+from the roots how many well-informed people know or would use any of
+the following words--absciss, acidimeter, acroteleutic, adminicular,
+adminiculator, adustion, aerie, agrestic, allignment, allision,
+ambreine, ampulla, ampullaceous, android, antiphonary, antiphony,
+apanthropy, aponeurosis, appellor, aramaic, aretology, armilla,
+armillary, asiarch, assentation, asymptote, asymptotical, aurate,
+averruncator, aversant, axotomous, or axunge? And yet all these are at
+the heads of columns under A alone! Take, now, one column haphazard
+perpendicularly, and with the same reservation as before, who would use
+antimaniac, antimask, antimasonic, antimeter, antimonite, antinephritic,
+antinomian, antinomy, antipathous, antipedobaptist, antiperistaltic,
+antiperistasis, or antiphlogistic? The letter A taken along the top of
+the pages or down one column is not a good letter for the confusion of
+the conceited; because viewed across the top of the page it is pitifully
+the prey of prefixes which lead to large families of words, and viewed
+down the column (honestly selected at haphazard), it is the bondslave of
+one prefix. When, however, one starts a theory, it is not fair to pick
+and choose. I have, of course, eschewed derivatives in coming down the
+column; across the column I did not do so, as the chance of a prime word
+being at the bottom of one column and its derivate at the top of the
+next ought to count two in my favour. I am aware this claim may be
+disputed; I have disputed it with myself at much too great length to
+record here, and I have decided in my own favour.
+
+Of course the mere reading of the dictionary in a mechanical way would
+produce no more effect than the repetition of numerals abstracted from
+things. There is no greater suggestiveness in saying a million than in
+saying one. But what an enlargement of the human capacity takes place
+when a person passes from the idea of one man to the idea of a million
+men. Take the first word quoted from the head of the column. I had
+wholly forgotten the meaning of absciss. I cannot even now remember
+that I ever knew the meaning of it, though of course I must, for I was
+supposed to have learned conic sections once. Why any one should be
+expected to learn conic sections I cannot guess. As far as I can now
+recall, they are the study of certain possible systems and schemes of
+lines in a wholly unnecessary figure. I believe the cone was invented by
+some one who had conic sections up his sleeve, and devised the miserable
+spinning of the triangle merely to gratify his lust of cruelty to the
+young. The only one use to which cones are put, as far as I am aware, is
+for a weather signal on the sea coast. The only section of a cone put to
+any pleasant use is a frustum when it appears in the bark of the cork
+tree; and even this conic section is not of much use to pleasure until
+it is removed from the bottle. Conic sections are reprehensible in
+another way. They are, in the matter of difficulty, nothing better than
+impostors. They are really “childlike and bland,” and will, when you
+have conquered your schoolboy terror of them, be found agreeable
+after-dinner reading.
+
+But I must return to Nuttall. The systematic study of the book is to be
+deplored. It is, like the Essays of Elia, not to be read through at a
+sitting, but to be dipped into curiously when one is in the vein. The
+charm of Lamb is in the flavour; and one cannot reach the more remote
+and finer joys of taste if one eats quickly. There is no cohesion, and
+but little thought in Nuttall. It is as a spur, an incentive, to thought
+I worship the book, and as a storehouse for elemental lore. You have
+known a thing all your life, let us say, and have called it by a
+makeshift name. You feel in your heart and soul there must be a more
+close-fitting appellation than you employ for it, and you endure a sense
+of feebleness and dispersion of mind. One day you are idly glancing
+through your Nuttall, and suddenly the clouds, the nebulous mists of a
+generalized term, roll away, and out shines, clear and sharply defined,
+the particular definition of the thing. From childhood I have, for
+example, known a pile-driver, and called it a pile-driver for years and
+years. All along something told me pile-driver was no better than a
+loose and off-hand way of describing the machine. It partook of the
+barbarous nature of a hieroglyphic. You drew, as it were, the figure of
+a post, and of a weight descending upon it. The device was much too
+pictorial and crude. Moreover, it was, so described, a thing without a
+history. To call a pile-driver a pile-driver is no more than to describe
+a barn-door cock onomatopoetically as cock-a-doodle-doo--a thing
+repellent to a pensive mind. But in looking over Nuttall I accidentally
+alighted on this: “Fistuca, fis’--tu-ka, _s._ A machine which is raised
+to a given height by pulleys, and then allowed suddenly to fall on the
+head of a pile; a monkey (L. a rammer).” Henceforth there is, in my
+mind, no need of a picture for the machine. So to speak, the abstract
+has become concrete. I would not, of course, dream of using the word
+fistuca, but it is a great source of internal consolation to me.
+Besides, I attain with it to other eminences of curiosity, which show me
+fields of inquiry I never dreamed of before.
+
+I have not met the word monkey in this sense until now. I look out
+monkey in my book, and find one of the meanings “a pile-driver,” and
+that the word is derived from the Italian “_monna_, contraction for
+_madonna_.” Up to this moment I did not know from what monkey was
+derived, although I had heard that from monkey man was derived. All this
+sets one off into a delicious doze of thought and keeps one carefully
+apart from his work. For “who would fardels bear to groan and sweat
+under a weary” load of even pens, when he might lie back and close his
+eyes, and drift off to the Rome of Augustus or the Venice of to-day?
+Philology as mere philology is colourless, but if one uses the records
+of verbal changes as glasses to the past and present, what panchromatic
+hues sweep into the pale field of the dictionary! What myriads of dead
+men stand up out of their graves, and move once more through scenes of
+their former activities! What reimpositions of old times on old earth
+take place! What bravery of arms and beauty of women are renewed; what
+glowing argosies, long mouldered, sparkle once more in the sun! What
+brazen trumpets blare of conquest, and dust of battle roll along the
+plain! What plenitude of life, of movement, of man is revealed! A
+dictionary is to me the key-note in the orchestra where mankind sit
+tuning their reeds for the overture to the final cataclysm of the world.
+
+My second book would be Whitaker’s _Almanack_. Owing to miserable
+ill-luck I have not been able to get a copy of the almanac for this
+year. I offered fair round coin of the realm for it before the Jubilee
+plague of ugliness fell upon the broad pieces of her most gracious
+Majesty. But, alas! no copy was to be had. I was too late in the race.
+All the issue had been sold. The last edition of which I have a copy is
+that for 1886. I have one for each year of the ten preceding, and I
+cannot tell how crippled and humiliated I feel in being without one for
+1887.
+
+This is another of the books that Charles Lamb classes among the
+no-books. As in the case of Nuttall, there was no Whitaker in his day,
+and certainly no almanac at all as good. At first glance this book may
+seem dry and sapless as the elm ready sawn for conversion into parish
+coffins. But how can anything be considered dry or dead when two hundred
+thousand of its own brothers are at this moment dwelling in useful amity
+among our fellowmen? It in one way contrasts unfavourably with almanacs
+which can claim a longer life, there are no vaticinations in it. But if
+the gift of prophecy were possessed by other almanacs, why did they not
+foretell that they would be in the end known as humbugs, and cut their
+conceited throats? I freely own I am a bigot in this matter; I have
+never given any other almanac a fair chance, and, what is worse, I have
+firmly made up my mind not to give any other one any chance at all. What
+is the good of being loyal to one’s friends if one’s loyalty is at the
+beck of every upstart acquaintance, no matter how great his merits or
+how long his purse? I place my faith in Whitaker, and am ready to go to
+the stake (provided it is understood that nothing unpleasant takes place
+there) chaunting my belief and glorying in my doom.
+
+If you took away Whitaker’s _Almanack_ from me I do not know how I
+should get on. It is a book for diurnal use and permanent reference. One
+edition of it ought to be printed on bank note paper for the pocket, and
+another on bronze for friezes for the temple of history. It is worth all
+the Livys and Tacituses that ever breathed and lied. It is more truthful
+than the sun, for that luminary is always eight minutes in advance of
+where it seems to be. It is as impartial and veracious as fossilising
+mud. It contains infinitely more figures than Madame Tussaud’s, and
+teaches of everything above and under the sun, from stellar influences
+to sewage.
+
+How is the daily paper to be understood lacking the aid of Whitaker? Who
+is the honourable member for Berborough, of whom the Chanceller of the
+Exchequer spoke in such sarcastic terms last night? For what place sits
+Mr. Snivel, who made that most edifying speech yesterday? How old is
+the Earl of Champagne, who has been appointed Governor of Labuan? Where
+is Labuan? What is the value in English money of £T97,000, and 2,784,000
+roubles? What are the chances of a man of forty (yourself) living to be
+a hundred? and what is the chance of a woman of sixty-four (your
+mother-in-law) dying next year? How much may one deduct from one’s
+income with a view to income tax before one needs begin to lie? What
+annuity ought a man of your age be able to get for the five thousand
+pounds you expect on the death of your mother-in-law? How much will you
+have to pay to the state if you article your son to a solicitor or give
+him a little capital and start him in an honest business as a
+pawnbroker? How old is the judge that charged dead against the prisoner
+whom the jury acquitted without leaving the box? What railway company
+spends the most money in coal? legal charges? palm oil? Is there
+anything now worth a gentleman’s while to smuggle on his return from the
+Continent? What is the tonnage of the ironclad rammed yesterday morning
+by another ironclad of the Channel squadron? When may one begin to eat
+oysters? What was the most remarkable event last year? How much longer
+is it likely to pay to breed farmers in England?
+
+These are only a few, very few, of the queries Whitaker will answer
+cheerfully for you. Indeed, you can scarcely frame any questions to
+which it will not make a reply of some kind or other. It contains,
+moreover, either direct or indirect reference to every man in the United
+Kingdoms of Great Britain and Ireland. If you occupy a prominent
+official position in any walk in life, you will find yourself herein
+mentioned by name. If you are a simple and prudent trader, you will have
+your name and your goods described elaborately among the advertisements.
+If you come under neither of these heads you are sure to be included,
+not distinguished perhaps personally, under the statistics of the Insane
+or Criminal classes.
+
+All the information on the points indicated may be said to lie within
+the parochial domain of the book. But it has a larger, a universal
+scope, and takes into view all the civilized and half civilized nations
+of all the earth. It contains multitudinous facts and figures about
+Abyssinia, Afghanistan, Annam, Argentine Republic, Austro-Hungary,
+Baluchistan, Belgium, Bokhara, Bolivia, Borneo, Brazil, Bulgaria,
+Eastern Roumelia, Burmah, Corea, Central America, Chili, China, Cochin
+China, Colombia, Congo State, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador,
+Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Hawaiian Islands, Hayti, Italy, Japan,
+Liberia, Madagascar, Mexico, Montenegro, Morocco, Nepal, Netherlands,
+Oman, Orange Free State, Paraguay, Persia, Peru, Portugal, Roumania,
+Russia, Sarawak, Servia, Siam, Sokoto, Spain, Sweden and Norway,
+Switzerland, Tibet, Transvaal, Tripoli, Tunis, Turkey, United States,
+Uruguay, Venezuela, and Zanzibar!
+
+The list takes away one’s breath. The mere recital of it leaves one
+faint and exhausted. Passing the most elementary knowledge of these
+nations and countries through the mind is like looking at a varying
+rainbow while the ears are solicited by a thousand tunes. The names, the
+mere names, of Mexico and Brazil stop my heart with amazement. The
+Aztecs and the Amazon call up such visions of man in decay and nature in
+naked strength that I pause like one in a gorgeous wood held in fear by
+its unfamiliarity. What has the Amazon done in the ages of its
+unlettered history? What did the Aztecs know before they began to revert
+to birds? Then Morocco and Tripoli, what memories and mysteries of man!
+And Sokoto--of which little is known but the name; and that man was here
+before England was dissevered from the mainland of Europe. Turkey, as it
+even now lies crippled and shorn, embraces within its stupendous arms
+the tombs of the greatest empire of antiquity. Only to think of China is
+to grow old beyond the reach of chroniclers. Compared with China,
+Turkey, India, and Russia, even Greece and Rome are mushroom states, and
+Germany and France virgin soil.
+
+But when I am in no humour for contemplation and alarms of eld I take up
+my Whitaker for 1886, and open it at page 285. There begins the most
+incredible romance ever written by man, and what increases its
+incredibility is that it happens to be all true.
+
+At page 285 opens an account of the British Empire. The first article is
+on India, and as one reads, taking in history and statistics with
+alternate breaths, the heart grows afraid to beat in the breast lest its
+motion and sound might dispel the enchantment and bring this “miracle of
+rare device” down about one’s head. The opening statement forbids
+further progress for a time. When one hears that “the British Empire in
+India extends over a territory as large as the continent of Europe
+without Russia,” it is necessary to pause and let the capacity of the
+mind enlarge in order to take in this stupendous fact with its
+stupendous significances.
+
+Here are 254 millions of people living under the flag of Britain! Here
+is a vast country of the East whose history goes back for a thousand
+years from this era, which knew Alexander the Great and was the scene of
+Tamerlane’s exploits, subject to the little island on the western verge
+of modern Europe. Here, paraded in the directest and most prosaic
+fashion, are facts and figures that swell out the fancy almost
+intolerably. Here is one feudatory state, one dependent province, almost
+as populous as the whole empire over which Don Pedro II. reigns in South
+America. Here is a public revenue of eighty millions sterling a year,
+and Calcutta, including suburbs, with a population close upon a million.
+Here are no fewer than fifty-three towns and cities of more than fifty
+thousand people each. Here is a gross number of seven hundred and
+fourteen thousand towns and villages! Is not this one item incredible?
+Just three quarters of a million, not of people or even houses, but of
+“towns and villages!” The population of Madras alone is five-sixths of
+that of the United Kingdom, that of the North-West Provinces and Oudh
+considerably more, and that of Bengal nearly twice as much as England,
+Ireland, Scotland, and Wales together. The Native States have many more
+inhabitants than any country in Europe, except Russia. Bombay equals
+Spain. The Punjaub exceeds Turkey in Asia. Assam exceeds Turkey in
+Europe. The Central Provinces about equal Belgium and Holland together;
+British Burmah, Switzerland. Berar exceeds Denmark, and all taken
+together contain more than the combined populations of the United States
+of America, Austria, Germany, France, Turkey, Italy, Spain, Portugal,
+Holland, and Belgium! All ours absolutely, or in the feudatory leash;
+with more Mohammedans than are to be found in the Sultan’s dominions,
+and a larger revenue than is enjoyed by any country on earth except
+England, France, United States of America, Austria, and Russia!
+
+These are facts and figures enough to set one dreaming for a month. This
+is not an age for epic poetry. It is exceedingly unlikely any poet in
+the present age will seek the framework for his great work in the past.
+The past was all very well in its own day until it was found out.
+Certitudes in bygone centuries have been shaken. The present time is
+wildly volcanic. Now the hidden, throbbing, mad, fierce, upheaving fires
+bulge out the crust of earth under fabrics whilom regarded as
+indestructible, and split their walls, and warp their pillars, and
+choke their domes. It was a good thing for Milton and Dante they lived
+and wrote long ago, for the iconoclasts of to-day are trying to build a
+great wall across heaven and tear up the sacred pavement of hell. They
+tell us the Greek armies were a mob of disorderly and timid cits, and
+that speculations as to the reported dealings of Dr. Faustus with any
+folk but respectable druggists are too childish for the nursery or
+Kaffirs. The golden age is no longer the time that will never come
+again. The past is a fire that has burnt out, a flame that has vanished.
+To kneel before what has been is to worship impotent shadows. Up to this
+man has been wandering in the desert, and until now there have not been
+even trustworthy rumours of the land of promise. But to us has come a
+voice prophesying good things. The Canaan of the ages is in the future
+of time. Taking this age at its own estimate I have long thought the
+subject for the finest epic lying within possibility in our era is the
+building of the railway to India. Into a history of that undertaking
+would flow all the affluents of the ancient world. The stories of
+Baalbec and Nineveh that are finished, and of Aleppo and Damascus that
+survive, would fall into this prodigious tale of peaceful conquest. The
+line would have for marge Assyria on one hand, Egypt on the other; it
+would reach from the land of the Buddhist through the land of the
+Mohammedan to the land of the Christian. It would be a work undertaken
+in honour of the modern god, Progress, through the graves of the oldest
+peoples, to link the three great forms of faith. All the action of the
+epic would take place on earth, and all the actors would be men. There
+would be no need for evolving the god from the machine, for the machine
+itself would be the god. It would be the history of man from his birth
+till this hour. It would be most fitly written in English, for English
+is the most capacious and virile language yet invented by man.
+
+But a mere mortal, such as I, cannot stay in India always, or even abide
+for ever by the way. Although I have _Whitaker’s Almanack_ before me
+all the time, I have strayed a little from it. In thinking of the lands
+through which that heroic line of railway would pass, I have almost
+forgotten the modest volume at my elbow. Yet fragile as it looks, one
+volume similar to it will last as long as the Pyramids, will come in
+time to be as old as the oldest memory is now; that is, if the ruins of
+England endure as long as those of Egypt, for a copy of it lies built up
+under Cleopatra’s Needle.
+
+I turn over the last page of “British India” in my _Almanack_. We are
+not yet done with orient lands and seas. The article over-leaf is headed
+“Other British Possessions in the East.” Here, if one wants incitement
+towards prose or verse, dreaming or doing, commerce or pillage, is
+matter to his hand. The places one may read of are--Aden, Socotra,
+Ceylon, Hong-Kong, Labuan, British North Borneo, and Cyprus. Then in my
+book comes “The Dominion of Canada,” with its territory “about as large
+as Europe”! and a revenue equal to Portugal, which discovered and once
+held India. After Canada come “Other American Possessions,” including
+British Guiana, which, except for the sugar of Demerara, is little heard
+of; it occupies a space of earth as large as all Great Britain. So
+little do people of inferior education know of this dependency, that
+once, when a speaker in the House of Commons spoke of the “island of
+Demerara,” there was not a single member present who knew that Demerara
+was not an island, but part of the mainland of South America. Last in
+the list comes British Honduras, about as big as Wales.
+
+After America, we have our enormous outlying farm in the southern
+hemisphere, “British Possessions in Australasia.” There the land owned
+by England is again about the size of Europe! Then follow “British
+Possessions in the West Indies,” small in mileage, great in fertility
+and richness of produce, and with a population twice that of Eastern
+Roumelia. The “British Possessions in Africa” are considerably larger
+than France, with about half as many inhabitants as Denmark. The
+territories owned in the Southern Atlantic are Ascension, the Falkland
+Islands, South Georgia, and St. Helena. This prodigious list ends with
+the European Possessions, namely, Malta, Gibraltar, Heligoland, the
+Channel Islands, and Isle of Man.
+
+By this time the hand is tired writing down the mere names of the riches
+belonging to Great Britain. Towards the close of my list from Whitaker
+my energy drooped, and a feeling of enervating satiety came upon me. I
+am surfeited with splendours, and, like a tiger filled with flesh, I
+must sleep. But in that sleep what dreams may come! How the imagination
+expands and aspires under the stimulus of a page of tabulated figures!
+How the fancy is excited, provoked, by the spectacle of an endless sea
+in which every quarter of the globe affords a bower for Britannia when
+it pleases her aquatic highness to adventure abroad upon the deep, into
+the farthest realms of the morning, into the regions of the dropping
+sun. Here, in my best two books, are the words of the most copious
+language that man ever spoke, and the facts and figures of the greatest
+realm over which man ever ruled. _Civis Romanus sum!_ I will sleep. I
+will dream that I am alone with my two books. I will speak in this
+imperial, this dominant dialect, as I move by sea and land among the
+peoples who live under the flag flying above me now. Who would encumber
+himself with finite poetry or romance when he may take with him the
+uncombined vocabulary, with its infinite possibilities of affinities,
+and the history of the countries and the peoples that lie beneath this
+flag, and bear in his heart the astounding and exalting
+consciousness--_Civis Romanus sum!_
+
+
+
+
+LIES OF FABLE AND ALLEGORY.
+
+
+Some little while ago the battered and shattered remains of an old
+bookcase with the sedimentary deposit of my own books, reached me after
+a journey of many hundred miles from its former resting place. The front
+of the bookcase is twisted wirework, which, when I remember it first,
+was lined with pink silk. Not a vestige, not a shred of the silk remains
+and the half dozen shelves now depend for preservation in position on a
+frame as crazy as Her Majesty’s ship _Victory_, and certainly older. The
+bookcase had belonged to my grandfather before Trafalgar, and some of
+the books I found in it among the sediment were printed before the Great
+Fire of London. In all there were about a couple or three hundred books,
+none of which would be highly valued by a bibliophile. Owing to my
+being in a very modest way a wanderer on the face of the realm, these
+books had been out of my possession for nearly twenty years, and dusty
+and dilapidated as they were when they reached me I took them in my arms
+as long-lost friends. I had finished the last sentence with the word
+children, but that would not do for two reasons. These books were not
+mine as this one I am now writing is, and long-lost children change more
+than they have changed, or more than friends change. Children grow and
+outpace us and leave us behind and are not so full of companionable
+memories as friends. There is hardly time to make friends of our adult
+children before we are beckoned away. The friends we make and keep when
+we are young have always twenty years’ start of our children in
+friendship. A man may be friendly with his son of five but a father and
+son cannot be full friends until the son is twenty years older.
+
+Again, as to the impropriety of speaking of the books as long-lost
+children I have another scruple. I am in great doubt as to whether the
+recovery of a long-lost child is at all desirable. A long-lost child
+means a young girl or boy of our own who is lost when under ten years of
+age and recovered years afterwards. I do not know that the recovery of
+the missing one is a cause of gratitude. Remember it is not at all the
+child we lost. It is a child alleged or alleging itself to be the child
+we lost. It is more correctly not a child at all, but a lad or lass whom
+we knew when young, and whose acquaintance we have to make over again.
+Our personality has become dim to it, and we have to occupy ourselves
+seriously in trying to identify the unwieldy bulk of the stranger with
+our memory of the wanderer. When the boy went from us we mourned for him
+as dead, and now he comes back to us from the tomb altered all out of
+memory. He is not wholly our child. There is an interregnum in our reign
+over him and we do not know what manner of king has held sway in our
+stead, or, if knowing the usurper, we cannot measure the extent or force
+of his influence. How much of this young person is really our very own?
+how much the development of untoward fate? Is the memory of our lost one
+dearer than the presence of this lad who is half stranger? What we lost
+and mourned was ours surely; how much of what we have regained belongs
+to us?
+
+With books no such question arises. They are our very own. They have
+suffered no increment, but rather loss. What we remember of them and
+find again in them fills us with joy; what we have forgotten and recall
+excites a surprise which makes us feel rich. We reproach ourselves with
+not having loved them sufficiently well, and swear upon them to endow
+them with warmer affection henceforth. In turning over the books in the
+old case I lighted upon one which I believe to be the volume that came
+earliest into my possession. It is Cobbett’s _Spelling-Book_, and by the
+writing on the title page I see it was given to me by my father on the
+second of February, 1854. It is in a very battered and tattered
+condition. I find a youthful autograph of my own on the fly-leaf, the
+Christian name occupying one line, the surname the second; on a third
+line is the name of the town, and on a fourth the number of the street
+and part of the name of the street, the last being, I blush to say,
+ill-spelt. Surely there never was a book hated as I hated this one! At
+that time I had declared my unalterable determination of never learning
+to read. I possessed, until recently, a copy of Valpy’s Latin Grammar of
+about the same date, and I remember I worshipped the Latin Grammar
+compared with the Spelling-Book. I knew _rosa_ before I could read words
+of two syllables, and at this moment I do not know much more Latin than
+I did then. The Spelling-Book was published by Anne Cobbett, at 137,
+Strand, in 1849. It is almost incredible that so short a time ago the
+atrocious woodcuts could be got in England for love or money. There is
+no attempt whatever at overlaying in the printing; the cut pages are all
+what are called “flat pulls.” Here and there through the pages of
+chilling columns of words of one, two, three or more syllables are
+pencil marks indicating the limits of a day’s lesson. What a ruthless
+way they had with us children in those days! When I look at those
+appalling columns of arid words I applaud my childish determination of
+never learning to read if the art were to be acquired only by traversing
+those fearful deserts of unintelligible verbiage. Fancy a child of
+tender years confronted with antitrinitarian, consubstantiality,
+discontinuation, excommunication, extraordinarily, immateriality,
+impenetrability, indivisibility, naturalization, plenipotentiary,
+recapitulation, supererogation, transubstantiation, valetudinarian, and
+volatilization, not one of which is as difficult to spell as one quarter
+the words of one syllable, and not one of which could be understood by a
+child or would be used by a single man out of a thousand in all his
+life. The country had penal settlements then, why in the name of mercy
+did they not send children to the settlements and give them a chance to
+keep their reason and become useful citizens when their time of
+punishment had expired? I am happy to say I find no pencil marks among
+those leviathan words above. I suppose I never got into the deep waters
+where they “wallowing unwieldy in their gait tempest the ocean.”
+
+I wonder was the foundation of a lifelong dislike to Cobbett’s writings
+laid in me at that early time of my existence? Anyway I do not remember
+the day when I did not dislike everything I read of Cobbett’s, and I
+dislike everything of his I read now. I wonder, also, was it at that
+early date the seed of my hatred of fable or allegory was sown? To me
+the fables in the back of that Spelling-Book were always odious, now
+they are loathsome. With the cold-blooded “morals” attendant upon them
+they are the worst form of literary torture I know. I am aware that the
+bulk of them are not original, but Cobbett inserted them in his book,
+and I give him full credit for evil intention. Yet in later years it was
+not his taste for fable that repelled me but his intense combativeness.
+He is never comfortable unless he is mangling some one. It was a pity he
+ever left the army. He would have been a credit to his corps at close
+quarters with a clubbed musket. Even in the Spelling-Book, intended for
+young children, his “Stepping-Stone to Cobbett’s English Grammar” takes
+the form of a dialogue, in which he, the “Teacher,” smashes the
+unfortunate Scholar and Mr. William. Cobbett sprang from the people and
+was a Saxon pure and simple, and the Saxon is the element in the English
+people which has been most undistinguished when unmingled with other
+blood. The Saxon of fifteen hundred years ago is the yokel of to-day,
+and he never was more than a yokel intellectually. The enormous
+intellectual fertility of England is owing to successive invasions, and
+chiefly to the Norman Conquest. All the great and noble and sweet faces
+in English history are Norman, or largely Norman. The awful faces of the
+Gibbon type make periods of English history like a night spectral with
+evil dreams.
+
+Does any one past the condition of childhood really like fables? Mind, I
+do not say past the years of childhood. But does any one of fully mature
+intellect like fables or pleasantly endure allegories? I think not. In
+the vigour of all lives there must be _lacunæ_ of intense indolence,
+backwaters of the mind, where one is willing to float effortless and
+take the things that come as though they were good things rather than
+work at the oars in pursuit of novelties. At such times it is easier to
+persuade ourselves we are amused by books that we admired when we lacked
+experience and discernment than to break new ground and encounter fresh
+obstacles. I am leaving out of account the dull worthy people who say
+they like a book because other people say they like it. These good
+people live in a continual state of self-justification. They are much
+more serenely secure in what they imagine to be their opinions than
+those travailing souls that really have opinions of their own. Their
+life is easy, and in lazy moments one sighs for the repose they enjoy.
+But do not the people with active minds often adhere to childish likings
+merely from indolence? A certain question they settled in their own
+minds when they were ten; it is too much trouble to treat it as an open
+matter at thirty. Consistency in a politician is invariably a sign of
+stupidity, because no man (outside fundamental questions of morals) can
+with credit to his sense remain stationary in opinion for thirty years
+where all is change. The very data on which he based an opinion in the
+year one are vapourized in the year thirty. The foundation of all
+political theories is first principles of some kind, and the only
+support a philosophic mind rejects with disdain is a first principle of
+any kind. Now, the fables we tolerate, nay, admire as children, are in
+imaginative literature what first principles are in that branch of
+imaginary philanthropy called politics. It is much easier to say every
+man has a right to eight shillings a day than to find out what each
+particular man has a right to, or if man has a right to anything at all.
+It is much easier to say one does like Fontaine than at thirty years of
+age to acquire a disgust of him and his fables.
+
+The lying insincerity of fables and their morals always shocks me, and
+the gross blindness of the fabulist to any view of transactions but that
+adopted by him to point his precept, fills me with contempt for him as
+an artist. In the Spelling-Book I do not feel myself at liberty to
+select the fables as I choose. I will take only one, the first that
+comes. It is about the swallow and the sparrow. It is a very bad
+specimen for my contention, but as I am the challenger I have not the
+choice of weapons, and I accept the first presented by Cobbett.
+
+A swallow coming back to her old nest in the spring finds it occupied by
+a sparrow and his brood of young ones. The swallow demands possession on
+the grounds of having built the nest and brought up three broods in it.
+The sparrow will not budge. The swallow summons a number of swallows,
+and they wall up the sparrow and he and his brood die of hunger.
+
+The first notice of bias the reader gets is that the swallow is called
+she, and the sparrow he. Why? For the dishonest purpose of enlisting
+sympathy with the swallow. There is no evidence or statement the sparrow
+was aware when taking possession of the nest that it would be reclaimed
+by the swallow. How was the sparrow to know that the swallow was not
+dead and buried by the mole? The nest was derelict. Again, when the
+swallow returned the sparrow had young ones, which it would be dangerous
+to remove from the nest. How was the sparrow to know the swallow was
+telling the truth, and that the nest was hers? Then, even supposing the
+sparrow to be all in the wrong, the punishment was out of all proportion
+to the offence. The sparrow had done no harm beyond intruding. He had
+not injured the furniture, or burned any of the swallow’s gas, or broken
+into the wine-cellar. Justice would have been vindicated by the
+expulsion of the intruder and his brood. But what takes place instead?
+The door is built up, and the sparrow with his innocent young is
+murdered! Surely if this is a fruitful fable, the moral is immoral. This
+is the old Mosaic theory of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,
+and a little, or rather a great deal more. It is hideously un-Christian.
+I believe Cobbett professed Christianity. Why did he put this odious
+vengeful story in the forefront of his exemplars of righteous doing?
+
+But the worst part of the story is in the Moral. “Thus it always is with
+the unjust,” says the Chorus of the fabulist. He means that the unjust
+are always nailed up in their houses with their blameless children and
+starved to death. Now neither Cobbett nor any other sane preacher
+believes anything of the kind. This is a lie, pure and simple; a lie no
+doubt told with a good object, but a lie all the same. Cobbett had too
+much common-sense not to know that it is not always “thus” with the
+“unjust.” As a rule, the unjust go scot free when they stop short of
+crime. The people who say otherwise are yielding to a feminine,
+sentimental weakness. Poetic justice no doubt does exist--in poetry.
+Most men are as unjust as they dare be, and most men get on comfortably
+from their cradles to their graves. It is only the fools, the men of
+ungovernable passions and impulses and the blunderers who suffer. Man is
+at heart a rapacious brute. All his centuries of civilization have not
+quelled the predatory spirit in him. Any man will become a thief if he
+only be sufficiently tempted when he is sufficiently desperate. The
+crime of the sparrow in appropriating the swallow’s nest is
+intelligible, the crime of the swallow in murdering the sparrow and his
+brood is intelligible, the crime of lying committed by the moralist is
+abominable. When the child to whom Cobbett lied grows up, he will know
+the lie, despise the liar, and have nothing left of the precious fable
+but a shaken faith in the words of all men, whether they be liars like
+Cobbett and the other moralists, or truth-tellers like the ordinary
+everyday folk, who do not pose as teachers and latter-day prophets. It
+is very improving to reflect on the freedom these teachers give
+themselves in act when enforcing their theories in writing. In order
+that Cobbett might exemplify his principles against the credit system,
+he signed his name across the face of acceptances for seventy thousand
+pounds!
+
+Cobbett’s Grammar was written for sailors and soldiers and such men. I
+gave the only copy of it I ever had to a sailor who had abandoned living
+on the sea to live by the sea, who had eschewed the paint-pot and the
+stage aboard the merchant service for the palette and stool of the
+studio. It is years since I have seen the book, but I remember the
+contemptuous way in which the ex-soldier disposes of prosody. He says to
+his pupil in effect: You need pay no attention to this branch of
+grammar, as it deals only with the _noise_ made by words. Cobbett’s
+treatment of prosody does not occupy more than one line or one line and
+a half of print. It is briefer than Dr. Johnson’s Syntax:
+
+     “The established practice of grammarians requires that I should
+     here treat of the Syntax; but our language has so little inflexion,
+     or variety of terminations, that its construction neither requires
+     nor admits many rules. Wallis, therefore, has totally neglected it;
+     and Jonson, whose desire of following the writers upon the learned
+     languages made him think a syntax indispensably necessary, has
+     published such petty observations as were better omitted.
+
+     “The verb, as in other languages, agrees with the nominative in
+     number and person; as _Thou fliest from good; He runs to death_.
+
+     “Our adjectives are invariable.
+
+     “Of two substantives the noun possessive is the genitive; as _His
+     father’s glory; the sun’s heat_.
+
+     “Verbs transitive require an oblique case; as _He loves me; You
+     fear him_.
+
+     “All prepositions require an oblique case: _He gave this to me; He
+     took this from me; He says this of me; He came with me_.”
+
+That is all the merciful Dr. Samuel Johnson has to say about syntax. Oh,
+Lindley Murray! Oh, memories of youth! Does it seem possible that
+Johnson could have enjoyed the luxury of speaking in this light and airy
+and debonair way of English grammar in his day, and that Lindley Murray
+could have matured his awful Grammar in so few years afterwards?
+Recollect there were not forty years between the lexicographer and the
+grammarian. Could not Lindley Murray have left the unfortunate English
+language alone? Johnson says no one need bother about syntax, and
+Cobbett says no one need bother about prosody. Thus we have only
+orthography and etymology to look after, when in comes Murray and spoils
+all! It is doubtful if the language will ever recover the interference
+of that Yankee merchant who invented syntax and made the life of dull
+school boys and girls a path of thorns and agony.
+
+An allegory is a fable for fools of larger growth. I am writing in an
+off-hand way, and I will not pause to examine the question nicely; but
+is there any such thing as a successful allegory? I have no experience
+of one. I seem to hear a loud shout of “_The Pilgrim’s Progress_.” Well,
+I never could read the book through, and I have tried at least twenty
+times. I have put the reading of that book before myself in the most
+solemn manner. I have told myself over and over again that I ought to
+read it as an educational exercise. In vain. How any man with
+imagination can bear the book I do not know. Bunyan had inexhaustible
+invention, but no imagination. He saw a reason for things, not the
+things themselves. No creation of the imagination can lack consequence
+or verisimilitude. On almost every page of the _Progress_ there is
+violation of sequence, outrage against verisimilitude. Christian has a
+great burden on his back and is in rags. He cannot remove the burden.
+(Why?) He is put to bed (with the burden on his back), then he is
+troubled in his mind (the burden is forgotten, and the vision altered
+completely and fatally); again we are reminded that he has the burden
+on his back when he tells Evangelist of it. Why can he not loose the
+burden on his back? How is it secured so that he cannot remove it? He
+cannot see a wicket gate across a very wide field, but he sees a shining
+light (where?), and then he begins to run (burden and all) away from his
+wife and children (which is immoral and abhorrent to the laws of God and
+man). For the mere selfish ease of his body he deserts his wife and
+children, who must be left miserably poor, for is he not in rags? The
+neighbours come out and mock at him for running across a field. Why? How
+do they know why he runs, and what neighbours are there to come out and
+mock at one when one is running across a large field? The Slough of
+Despond is in this field (for he has not passed through the wicket
+gate), and he does not seem to know of the Slough, or think of avoiding
+it. Fancy any man not knowing of such a filthy hole within a field of
+his home! How is it that Pliable and Obstinate have no burdens on their
+backs? It is not the will of the King that the Slough should be
+dangerous to wayfarers: this surely is blasphemy. The whole thing is
+grotesquely absurd and impossible to imagine. There is no sobriety in
+it, no sobriety of keeping in it; and no matter how wild the effort or
+vision of imagination may be there must always be sobriety of keeping in
+it or it is delirium not imagination, disease not inspiration. As far as
+I can see there is no trace of imagination, or even fancy, in the
+_Pilgrim’s Progress_. The story never happened at all. It is a horrible
+attempt to tinkerise the Bible.
+
+One of the things I cannot understand about Macaulay is that he stands
+by Bunyan’s silly book. Macaulay was a man of vast reading and
+acquirements and of common-sense tastes. He was not a poet, but he was
+very nearly one, and ought to have responded in sympathy with poets. In
+politics he belonged to that most melancholy of all sects, the Whigs,
+and it may be that the spirit of political compromise to which he had
+familiarised himself in public life had slipped unknown to him into his
+literary briefs. Anyway, he himself says that the _Pilgrim’s Progress_
+is the only book which was promoted from the kitchen to the
+drawing-room. There is no difficulty in accounting for the fact that the
+book was popular among scullions and cooks, but how it ever gained
+currency among people of moderate education and taste cannot be
+explained. It is the most dull and tedious and monstrous book of any
+note in the English language, and how any man with a gleam of
+imagination can like it is more than I can understand. If one has been
+familiar with it when young, one may tolerate it on the score of
+tenderness--tenderness for memories and laziness in new enterprises; but
+I never yet knew any one with even fancy who, meeting it for the first
+time after the dawn of adolescence, could even endure it.
+
+It is like celebrating one’s own apotheosis to drop Bunyan and take up
+Spenser. Here we share the air with an immortal god and not a bilious
+enthusiast. When I have laid aside the _Spelling-Book_ and the
+_Pilgrim’s Progress_, and opened the _Faerie Queen_, I feel as though
+the leaden clouds of the north had rolled away, disclosing the blue of
+Ægean skies; as though for squalid porridge and buttermilk had been
+substituted ambrosia and nectar; as though for fallow and stubble had
+drifted under my feet soft meadow-grass dense with flowers; as though
+the moist and clayey crags had changed into purple hills, the
+green-mantled pools to azure lakes, the narrow waters of a stagnant mere
+to the free imperial waves and tides of the ocean. It is better than
+escaping out of an East-end slum into the green lanes and roads of
+Warwickshire.
+
+And yet, melancholy truth! the _Faerie Queen_ is most unpopular and most
+unreadable. It has with justice, I think, been said that of ten thousand
+people who begin the _Faerie Queen_, not ten read half way through it,
+and only one arrives at the end. I find by a mark in my copy that I have
+got a good deal more than half through it, but that I have not reached
+the last line of this most colossal fragment of a poem. What a mercy the
+rest of it was drowned in the Irish sea! My _Faerie Queen_ occupies 792
+pages of five stanzas to the page; that is, between thirty-five and
+thirty-six thousand verses, two hundred and sixty to seventy thousand
+words, or equal in length to a couple of ordinary three-volume novels!
+And still it is _unperfite_! I find that although I have owned the book
+for twenty years, I have got no further than page 472, so that I have
+read only three-fifths of the fragment of this stupendous poem.
+
+It is not the length alone that defeats the reader. In all the field of
+English verse there is no poem of great length that comes upon the mind
+with more full and easy flow. The stanza after a long while becomes, no
+doubt, monotonous, but it is the monotony of a vast and freightful river
+that moves majestically, bearing interminable argosies of infinite
+beauty and variety and significance. After one hundred pages one might
+put down the book, wearied by the melodious monotony of the imperial
+chords. I have never been able to read anything like a hundred, anything
+like fifty pages at a time. I think I have rarely exceeded as many
+stanzas. Spenser is the poets’ poet, and the _Faerie Queen_ the poets’
+poem, and yet even the poets cannot read it freely and fully, as one
+reads Milton or Shakespeare or Shelley or Keats or the readable parts of
+Coleridge, all of whom are poets’ poets also.
+
+The allegory bars the way. One reads on smoothly and joyously about a
+wood or a nymph, or a knight or a lady, or a castle or a dragon, and is
+half drunk on the wealthy poet’s mead (is not Spenser the wealthiest of
+English poets?), when suddenly Dan Allegory comes along and assures you
+that it is not a wood or a nymph, or a knight or lady, or a castle or
+dragon, but a virtue or a vice posing in property clothes; that in fact
+things are not what they seem, but visions are about. Cobbett intended
+his fables for little children, and Bunyan his allegory for the company
+of the stewpans, but Spenser’s story is for the ears of ladies and of
+knights; why then does he try to spoon-feed them with virtuous
+sentiment? There is not, as far as I know, a trace of dyspepsia in all
+the _Faerie Queen_, and yet he has sicklied it over “with the pale cast
+of thought.” In this Vale of Tears there are quite as many virtuous
+persons as any reasonable man can desire. Why should our poets--those
+rare and exquisite manifestations of our possibilities--turn themselves
+into moralists, who are, bless you, as common as grocers, as plentiful
+as mediocrity. In fact, nine-tenths of the civilised race of man are
+moralists. But poets ought not to be theorists. They are not sent to us
+for the purpose of converting us, but for the purpose of delighting us.
+They ought to be catholic and pagan. They are among the settled property
+of joy to which all mankind are heirs. They come in among the flowers
+and colours of the sky and earth, and the vocal rapture of the birds,
+and the perfumes of the breeze, and the love of woman and children and
+friends and kind. They are sent to us for our mere delight. They never
+grow less or fade away or change. They have nothing to do with dynasties
+or creeds or codes of manners. They are apart from all bias and strife.
+The will of Heaven itself is against poets preaching, for no poet has
+ever written hymns that were not a burden upon his reputation as a
+singer, and did not weigh him to the ground, compared with his flight
+when free and catholic and pagan.
+
+After entertaining the nightmares of dulness born of Cobbett and Bunyan,
+how one’s shoulders swing back, one’s chest opens, and one’s breath
+comes with large and ample coolness and joy as one reads--
+
+    “The ioyous day gan early to appeare;
+     And fayre Aurora from the deawy bed
+     Of aged Tithone gan herselfe to reare
+     With rosy cheekes, for shame as blushing red:
+     Her golden locks, for hast, were loosely shed
+     About her eares, when Una her did marke
+     Clymbe to her charet, all with flowers spred,
+     From heven high to chace the chearelesse darke;
+     With mery note her lowd salutes the mountain larke.”
+
+Or again here--
+
+    “Then forth he called that his daughter fayre,
+     The fairest Un’, his onely daughter deare,
+     His onely daughter and his onely hayre;
+     Who forth proceeding with sad sober cheare,
+     As bright as doth the morning starre appeare
+     Out of the east with flaming lockes bedight,
+     To tell that dawning day is drawing neare
+     And to the world does bring long wished light:
+     So fair and fresh that lady shewd herselfe in sight.”
+
+Is it not a miserable destiny to be obliged to read stanza after stanza
+redolent of such rich perfumed words about the lady, and then to find
+that Una is not a mortal or a spirit even--but Truth! An abstraction! A
+whim of degrading reason! A figment of a moralist’s heated and
+disordered brain. Any Lie of a poet is better than any Truth of a
+moralist. Why did Spenser stoop to run on the same intellectual plain as
+the accidental teacher? The teacher would have done admirably for Truth,
+but all the worthy essayists of England in the “spacious days of Queen
+Elizabeth,” put together, could not have written the stanzas about Una
+as Spenser saw her. This poaching of poets on the preserves of moralists
+is one of the most shameful things in the history of art.
+
+There are few poets it is harder to select quotations from than Spenser.
+The fact is, all the _Faerie Queen_ ought to be quoted except the
+blinding allegory. I find that in years of my movement from the opening
+of the poem to page 472, the limit I have reached, I have marked a
+hundred passages at least, some of them running through pages. In no
+other poem--except Shelley’s _Alastor_--do I notice such grievous,
+continuous pencil scores. What is one to do? Whither is one to turn? As
+I handle the book I am lost in a deeper forest of delight than ever
+knight of Gloriana’s trod. Here I find a passage of several stanzas
+marked. I am much too lazy to copy them, and the spelling is troublesome
+often. But who can resist this?--
+
+                        “---- And, when she spake,
+    Sweete wordes, like dropping honny, she did shed,
+    And twixt the perles and rubins softly brake
+    A silver sound, that heavenly musicke seemed to make.
+
+        *       *       *       *       *
+
+    Upon her eyelids many graces sate
+    Under the shadow of her even browes.”
+
+I have quoted the three lines and a half of the earlier stanza merely
+that they may act as an overture to the last two lines. Surely there are
+no two lovelier lines in the language! In the last line the words seem
+to melt together of their own propinquity.
+
+Here is an alexandrine that haunts me night and day--
+
+    “Sweete is the love that comes alone with willingnesse.”
+
+As a rule, I hate writing with the books I am speaking of near me; they
+fetter one cruelly when they are at hand. There is a tendency to verify
+one’s memory, and read up the context of favourite lines. This is
+checking to the speed and chilling to the spirits. When I was saying
+something about the _Spelling-Book_ and the _Pilgrim’s Progress_, I had
+the copies within arm’s length, for I did not know either well enough to
+trust to memory. Since I got done with them I have placed them in
+distant safety. But one likes to handle Spenser--to have it nigh. My
+copy is lying at my left elbow in the blazing sun as I write now. It
+seems to me I shall never again look into the _Spelling-Book_ or the
+_Pilgrim’s Progress_. Fables and allegories are only foolishnesses fit
+for people of weak intellect and children. Well, when I put down this
+pen, and before this ink is dry, I shall have resumed my interrupted
+reading of the _Faerie Queen_ at page 473. My intellect is too weak and
+my heart too childish to resist the seduction of Spenser’s verse. So
+much for my own theory of allegory and my respect for my own theory.
+
+
+
+
+MY COPY OF KEATS.
+
+
+The only copy of Keats I ever owned is a modest volume published by
+Edward Moxon and Co. in the year 1861. By writing on its yellow fly-leaf
+I find it was given to me four years later, in September 1865. At that
+time it was clean and bright, opened with strict impartiality when set
+upon its back, and had not learned to respond with alacrity to hasty
+searches for favourite passages.
+
+The binding is now racked and feeble from use; and if, as in army
+regulations, service under warm suns is to be taken for longer service
+in cooler climes, it may be said that to the exhaustion following
+overwork have been added the prejudices of premature age.
+
+It is not bound as books were bound once upon a time, when they
+outlasted the tables and chairs, even the walls; ay, the very races and
+names of their owners. The cover is simple plain blue cloth; on the back
+is a little patch of printing in gold, with the words Keats’s _Poetical
+Works_ in the centre of a twined gilt ribbon and twisted gilt flowers.
+The welt at the back is bleached and frayed; the corners of the cover
+are battered and turned in. There is a chink between the cover and the
+arched back; and the once proud Norman line of that arc is flattened and
+degraded, retaining no more of its pristine look of sturdy strength than
+a wheaten straw after the threshing.
+
+In a list of new books preceding the biography of the poet I find the
+volume I speak of under the head “POETRY--_Pocket Editions_;” described
+as “Keats’s _Poetical Works_. With a Memoir by R. M. Milnes. Price 3_s._
+6_d._ cloth.” It was from no desire to look my gift-horse in the mouth I
+alighted upon the penultimate fact disclosed in the description. When I
+become owner of any volume my first delight in it is to read the
+catalogue of new books annexed, if there be any, before breaking my fast
+upon the subject-matter of the writer in my hand--as a poor gentleman
+in a spacious restaurant, who, having ordered luncheon, consisting of
+bread and cheese, butter, and a half-pint of bitter ale, takes up the
+bill of fare and the list of wines, and designs for his imagination a
+feast his purse denies to his lips.
+
+If any owner of a cart of old books in Farringdon Street asked you a
+shilling for such a copy of Keats as mine, you would smile at him. You
+would think he had acquired the books merely to satisfy his own taste,
+and now displayed them to gratify a vanity that was intelligible; you
+would feel assured no motive towards commerce could underlie ever so
+deeply such a preposterous demand.
+
+My copy will, I think, last my time. Already it has been in my hands
+more than half the years of a generation; and I feel that its severest
+trials are over. In days gone by it made journeys with me by sea and
+land, and paid long visits to some friends, both when I went myself, and
+when I did not go. Change of air and scene have had no beneficial effect
+upon it. Journey after journey, and visit after visit, the full cobalt
+of the cloth grew darker and dingier, the boards of the cover became
+limper and limper, and the stitching at the back more apparent between
+the sheets, like the bones and sinews growing outward through the flesh
+of a hand waxing old.
+
+Once, when the book had been on a prolonged excursion away from me, it
+returned sadly out of sorts. Had it been a dear friend come back from
+India on sick-leave, after an absence from temperate skies of twenty
+years, I could not have observed a more disquieting change. The cover
+was darkened so that the original hue had almost wholly disappeared,
+save at the edges, that, like the Indian veteran’s forehead, were of
+startling and unwholesome pallor. Its presence in such guise aroused a
+gnawing solicitude which undermined all peace. I could not endure the
+symptoms of its speedy decline, the prospect of its dissolution; and to
+shield its case from harm and my sensibilities from continual assault, I
+wrapped it with sighs and travail of heart in a gritty cover of
+substantial brown paper.
+
+For a while, the consciousness that my book was safe compensated for
+the unfamiliarity of its appearance and my constitutional antipathy to
+contact with brown paper, even a lively image of which makes me cringe.
+
+But as days went on the brown paper entered into my soul and rankled.
+What! was my Keats to be clad in that wretched union garb, that livery
+of poverty acknowledged, that corduroy of the bookshelf? Intolerable!
+Should I, who had, like other men, only my time to live, be denied all
+friendly sight of the natural seeming of my prime friend? My Keats would
+last my time; and why should I hide my friend in an unparticularised
+garb, the uniform of the mean or the needy, merely that those who came
+after me might enjoy a privilege of which senseless timidity sought to
+rob me? No; that should not be. I would cast away the badge of beggary,
+and, like a man, face the daily decay of my old companion. I tore the
+paper off, threw it upon the fire, and set my disenthralled Keats in its
+own proper vesture on the shelf among its comrades and its peers.
+
+There is no man, how poor soever, who has not some taste which, for his
+circumstances, must be regarded as expensive; and in that “sweet
+unreasonableness” of human nature, not at all limited to “the Celt,” men
+take a kind of foolish pride in their particular extravagances. You know
+a man that declares he would sooner go without his dinner than a clean
+shirt; another who would prefer one good cigar to a pound of cavendish;
+one who would rather travel to the City of winter mornings by train
+without an overcoat than by vulgar tramcar in fur and pilot cloth; a
+fourth who would more gladly give his right hand than forget his Greek;
+a fifth who pays the hire of a piano and does without the beer which as
+a Briton is his birthright; a sixth who starves himself and stints his
+family for the love of a garden. For my own part, I felt the using of my
+Keats without protection of any kind to be beyond my means, but I
+gloried in this extravagance. It seemed rich to be thus hand and glove
+with the book: to touch it when and where I would, and as much as ever I
+liked: to feel assured that even with free using and free lending it
+would outlast my short stay here, as the blossoms of the roses in a
+friend’s hedge outlast your summer visit. Was it not fine, did it not
+strike a chord of kingly generosity, to be able to say to a friend,
+“Here is my copy of Keats. Take it, use it, read it. There is plenty of
+it for you and me”? I would rather have the lending of my Keats than the
+bidding to a banquet.
+
+So it fell out that my favourite went more among my friends than ever,
+and accumulated at a usurious rate all manner of marks and stains, and
+defacements, and dog-ears, and other unworded comments, as well as
+verbal comments expressed in pencil and ink. It is true that a rolling
+stone gathers no moss, but a rolling snowball gathers more snow, and
+moss and snow are of about equal value. Oliver Wendell Holmes says, if I
+may trust my memory, that only three things improve with years: violins,
+wine, and meerschaum pipes. He loves books, and knows books as well as
+any man now living--almost as well as Charles Lamb did when he was with
+us; and yet Dr. Holmes does not think books worthy of being included in
+the list of things that time ripens. Is this ingratitude or
+carelessness, or does it mean that books dwell apart, and are no more to
+be classed with mere tangible things than angels, or mathematical
+points, or the winds of last winter? Is a book to him an ethereal record
+of a divine trance? an insubstantial painting of a splendid dream? the
+music of a yesterday fruitful in heavenly melody? the echo of a syren’s
+song haunting a sea shell?
+
+Does not De Quincey tell us that, having lent some books to Coleridge,
+the poet not only wrote the lender’s name in them, but enriched the
+margins with observations and comments on the texts? Who would not give
+a tithe of the books he has for one volume so gloriously illuminated? I
+remember when I was a lad, among lads, a friend of ours picked up
+secondhand Cary’s Dante, in which was written the name of a poet still
+living, but who is almost unknown. We loved the living poet for his
+work, and when the buyer told us that the Dante bore not only the poet’s
+name, but numerous marginal notes and hints in his handwriting, we all
+looked upon the happy possessor with eyes of envious respect. The
+precious volume was shown to us, not in groups, for in gatherings there
+is peril of a profaning laugh, or an unsympathetic sneer. One by one we
+were handed the book, on still country roads, upon the tranquil heights
+of hills, where we were alone with the brown heather and the plover, or
+on some barren cliff above the summer sea. The familiar printed text
+sank into insignificance beside the blurred pencil lines. Any one might
+buy a fair uncut copy for a crown piece. The text was common
+property--“’twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands.” But
+here before us lay revealed the private workings of a poetic
+imagination, fired by contact with a master of the craft. To us this
+volume disclosed one of our heroes, clad in the homely garb of prose,
+speaking in his own everyday speech, and lifting up his voice in
+admiration, wonder, awe, to the colossal demi-god, in whose presence we
+had stood humiliated and afeard.
+
+My Keats has suffered from many pipes, many thumbs, many pencils, many
+quills, many pockets. Not one stain, one gape, one blot of these would
+I forego for a spick and span copy in all the gorgeous pomp of the
+bookbinder’s millinery. These blemishes are aureolæ to me. They are
+nimbi around the brows of the gods and demi-gods, who walk in the
+triumph of their paternal despot on the clouds metropolitan that
+embattle the heights of Parnassus.
+
+What a harvest of happy memories is garnered in its leaves! How well I
+remember the day it got that faint yellow stain on the page where begins
+the _Ode on a Grecian Urn_. It was a clear, bright, warm, sunshiny
+afternoon late in the month of May. Three of us took a boat and rowed
+down a broad blue river, ran the nose of the boat ashore on the gravel
+beach of a sequestered island and landed. Pulling was warm work, and we
+all climbed a slope, reached the summit, and cast ourselves down on the
+long lush cool grass, in the shade of whispering sycamores, and in a
+stream of air that came fresh with the cheering spices of the hawthorn
+blossom.
+
+One of our company was the best chamber reader I have ever heard. His
+voice was neither very melodious nor very full. Perhaps he was all the
+better for this because he made no effort at display. As he read, the
+book vanished from his sight, and he leaned over the poet’s shoulder,
+saw what the poet saw, and in a voice timid with the sense of
+responsibility, and yet elated with a kind of fearing joy, told of what
+he saw in words that never hurried, and that, when uttered, always
+seemed to hang substantially in the air like banners.
+
+He discovered and related the poet’s vision rather than simulated
+passion to suit the scene. I remember well his reading of the passage:
+
+    “Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
+     Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
+     Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
+     Though winning near the goal--yet, do not grieve;
+     She cannot fade though thou hast not thy bliss,
+     For ever wilt thou love and she be fair!”
+
+He rehearsed the whole of the ode over and over again as we lay on the
+grass watching the vast chestnuts and oaks bending over the river, as
+though they had grown aweary of the sun, and longed to glide into the
+broad full stream.
+
+As he read the lines just quoted, he gave us time to hear the murmur,
+and to breathe the fragrance of those immortal trees. “Nor ever can
+those trees be bare,” in the text has only a semicolon after it. Yet
+here he paused, while three wavelets broke upon the beach, as if he
+could not tear himself away from contemplating the deathless verdure,
+and realising the prodigious edict pronounced upon it. “Bold lover,
+never, never canst thou kiss, though winning near the goal.” At the
+terrible decree he raised his eyes and gazed with heavy-lidded, hopeless
+commiseration at this being, who, still more unhappy than Tithonus, had
+to immortality added perpetual youth, with passion for ever strong, and
+denial for ever final.
+
+“Yet do not grieve.” This he uttered as one who pleads forgiveness of a
+corpse--merely to try to soothe a conscience sensible of an obligation
+that can never now be discharged. “She cannot fade, though thou hast not
+thy bliss, for ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!” Here the reader,
+with eyes fixed and rayless, seemed by voice and pose to be sunk,
+beyond all power of hope, in an abyss of despair. The barren
+immutability of the spectacle appeared to weigh upon him more
+intolerably than the wreck of a people. He spoke the words in a long
+drawn-out whisper, and, after a pause, dropped his head, and did not
+resume.
+
+I recollect that when the illusion he wrought up so fully in my mind had
+passed away in that long pause, and when I remembered that the fancy of
+the poet was expending itself, not on beings whom he conceived
+originally as human, but on the figures of a mere vase, I was seized
+with a fierce desire to get up and seek that vase through all the world
+until I found it, and then smash it into ten thousand atoms.
+
+When I had written the last sentence, I took up the volume to decide
+where I should recommence, and I “turned the page, and turned the page.”
+I lived over again the days not forgotten, but laid aside in memory to
+be borne forth in periods of high festival. I could not bring myself
+back from the comrades of old, and the marvels of the great magician, to
+this poor street, this solitude, and this squalid company of my own
+thoughts--thoughts so trivial and so mean compared with the imperial
+visions into which I had been gazing, that I was glad for the weariness
+which came upon me, and grateful to gray dawn that glimmered against the
+blind and absolved me from further obligation for that sitting.
+
+On turning over the leaves without reading, I find _Hyperion_ opens most
+readily of all, and seems to have fared worst from deliberate and
+unintentional comment. Much of the wear and tear and pencil marks are to
+be set down against myself; for when I take the book with no definite
+purpose I turn to _Hyperion_, as a blind man to the warmth of the sun.
+Some qualities of the poem I can feel and appreciate; but always in its
+presence I am weighed down by the consciousness that my deficiency in
+some attribute of perception debars me from undreamed-of privileges.
+
+I recall one evening in a pine glen, with one man and _Hyperion_. It
+would be difficult to match this man or me as readers. I don’t think
+there can be ten worse employing the English language to-day. I not
+only do not by any inflection of voice expound what I utter, but I am
+often incapable of speaking the words before me. I take in a line at a
+glance, see its import with my own imagination apart from the verbiage,
+which leaves not a shadow of an impression on my mind. When I come to
+the next line I grow suddenly alive to the fact that I have to speak off
+the former one. I am in a hurry to see what line two has to show; so,
+instead of giving the poet’s words for line one, I give my own
+description of the vision it has conjured up in my mind. This is bad
+enough in all conscience; but the friend of whom I speak now, behaves
+even worse. His plan of reading is to stop his voice in the middle of
+line one, and proceed to discuss the merits of line two, which he had
+read with his eye, but not with his lips, and of which the listener is
+ignorant, unless he happen to know the poem by rote.
+
+On that evening in the glen I pulled out Keats, and turned, at my
+friend’s request, to _Hyperion_, and began to read aloud. He was more
+patient than mercy’s self; but occasionally, when I did a most
+exceptionally bad murder on the text, he would writhe and cry out, and I
+would go back and correct myself, and start afresh.
+
+He had a big burly frame, and a deep full voice that shouted easily, and
+some of the comments shouted as I read are indicated by pencil marks in
+the margin. The writing was not done then, but much later, when he and I
+had shaken hands, and he had gone sixteen thousand miles away. As he was
+about to set out on that long journey, he said, “In seven years more
+I’ll drop in and have a pipe with you.” It had been seven years since I
+saw him before. The notes on the margin are only keys to what was said;
+for I fear the comment made was more bulky than the text, and the text
+and comment together would far exceed the limits of such an essay as
+this. I therefore curtail greatly, and omit much.
+
+I read down the first page without meeting any interruption; but when I
+came in page two on
+
+              “She would have ta’en
+    Achilles by the hair and bent his neck,”
+
+he cried out, “Stop! Don’t read the line following. It is bathos
+compared with that line and a half. It is paltry and weak beside what
+you have read. ‘Ta’en Achilles by the hair and bent his neck.’ By Jove!
+can you not see the white muscles start out in his throat, and the look
+of rage, defeat and agony on the face of the Greek bruiser? But how flat
+falls the next line: ‘Or with a finger stay’d Ixion’s wheel.’ What’s the
+good of stopping Ixion’s wheel? Besides, a crowbar would be much better
+than a finger. It is a line for children, not for grown men. It exhausts
+the subject. It is too literal. There is no question left to ask. But
+the vague ‘Ta’en Achilles by the hair and _bent_ his neck’ is perfect.
+You can see her knee in the hollow of his back, and her fingers twisted
+in his hair. But the image of the goddess dabbling in that river of hell
+after Ixion’s wheel is contemptible.”
+
+He next stopped me at
+
+    “Until at length old Saturn lifted up
+     His faded eyes, and saw his kingdom gone.”
+
+“What an immeasurable vision Keats must have had of the old bankrupt
+Titan, when he wrote the second line! Taken in the context it is simply
+overwhelming. Keats must have sprung up out of his chair as he saw the
+gigantic head upraised, and the prodigious grief of the grey-haired god.
+But Keats was not happy in the matter of full stops. Here again what
+comes after weakens. We get no additional strength out of
+
+    “‘And all the gloom and sorrow of the place
+      And that fair kneeling Goddess.’
+
+The ‘gloom and sorrow’ and the ‘goddess’ are abominably
+anticlimacteric.”
+
+    “Yes, there must be a golden victory;
+     There must be gods thrown down and trumpets blown
+     Of triumph calm, and hymns of festival
+     Upon the gold clouds metropolitan,
+     Voices of soft proclaim, and silver stir
+     Of strings in hollow shells; and there shall be
+     Beautiful things made new, for the surprise
+     Of the sky-children; I will give command:
+     Thea! Thea! Thea! where is Saturn?”
+
+“Read that again!” cried my friend, clinging to the grass and breathing
+hard. “Again!” he cried, when I had finished the second time. And then,
+before I could proceed, he sprang to his feet, carrying out the action
+in the text immediately following:
+
+      “This passion lifted him upon his feet,
+    And made his hands to struggle in the air.”
+
+“Come on, John Milton,” cried my friend, excitedly sparring at the
+winds,--“come on, and beat that, and we’ll let you put all your
+adjectives behind your nouns, and your verb last, and your nominative
+nowhere! Why man,”--this being addressed to the Puritan poet--“it
+carried Keats himself off his legs; that’s more than anything you ever
+wrote when you were old did for you. There’s the smell of midnight oil
+off your later spontaneous efforts, John Milton.
+
+“When Milton went loafing about and didn’t mind much what he was writing
+he could give any of them points”--(I deplore the language) “any of
+them, ay, Shakespeare himself points in a poem. In a poem, sir” (this
+to me), “Milton could give Shakespeare a hundred and one out of a
+hundred and lick the Bard easily. How the man who was such a fool as to
+write Shakespeare’s poems had the good sense to write Shakespeare’s
+plays I can never understand. The most un-Shakesperian poems in the
+language are Shakespeare’s. I never read Cowley, but it seems to me
+Cowley ought to have written Shakespeare’s poems, and then his obscurity
+would have been complete. If Milton only didn’t take the trouble to be
+great he would have been greater. As far as I know there are no English
+poets who improved when they ceased to be amateurs and became
+professional poets, except Wordsworth and Tennyson. Shelley and Keats
+were never regular race-horses. They were colts that bolted in their
+first race and ran until they dropped. It was a good job Shakespeare
+gave up writing rhymes and posing as a poet. It was not until he
+despaired of becoming one and took to the drama that he began to feel
+his feet and show his pace. If he had suspected he was a great poet he
+would have adopted the airs of the profession and been ruined. In his
+time no one thought of calling a play a poem--that was what saved the
+greatest of all our poets to us. The only two things Shakespeare didn’t
+know is that a play may be a poem and that his plays are the finest
+poems finite man as he is now constructed can endure. It is all nonsense
+to say man shall never look on the like of Shakespeare again. It is not
+the poet superior to Shakespeare man now lacks, but the man to apprehend
+him.”
+
+I looked around uneasily, and found, to my great satisfaction, that
+there was no stranger in view. My friend occupied a position of
+responsibility and trust, and it would be most injurious if a rumour got
+abroad that not only did he read and admire verse, but that he held
+converse with the shades of departed poets as well. In old days men who
+spoke to the vacant air were convicted of necromancy and burned; in our
+times men offending in this manner are suspected of poetry and
+ostracized.
+
+As soon as my friend was somewhat calmed, and had cast himself down
+again and lit a pipe, I resumed my reading. He allowed me to proceed
+without interruption until I came to:
+
+                      “His palace bright,
+    Bastion’d with pyramids of glowing gold,
+    And touch’d with shade of bronzed obelisks,
+    Glared a blood-red through all its thousand courts,
+    Arches, and domes, and fiery galleries;
+    And all its curtains of Aurorian clouds
+    Flushed angerly: while sometimes eagles’ wings,
+    Unseen before by Gods or wondering men,
+    Darken’d the place; and neighing steeds were heard,
+    Not heard before by Gods or wondering men.”
+
+“Prodigious!” he shouted. “Go over that again. Keep the syllables wide
+apart. It is a good rule of water-colour sketching not to be too nice
+about joining the edges of the tints; this lets the light in. Keep the
+syllables as far apart as ever you can, and let the silentness in
+between to clear up the music. How the gods and the wondering men must
+have wondered! Do you know, I am sure Keats often frightened, terrified
+himself with his own visions. You remember he says somewhere he doesn’t
+think any one could dare to read some one or another aloud at midnight.
+I believe that often in the midnight he sat and cowered before the
+gigantic sights and sounds that reigned despotically over his fancy.”
+
+                  “O dreams of day and night!
+    O monstrous forms! O effigies of pain!
+    O spectres busy in a cold, cold gloom!
+    O lank-ear’d Phantoms of black-weeded pools!
+    Why do I know ye? why have I seen ye? why
+    Is my eternal essence thus distraught
+    To see and to behold these horrors new?
+    Saturn is fallen, am I too to fall?
+    Am I to leave this haven of my rest,
+    This cradle of my glory, this soft clime,
+    This calm luxuriance of blissful light,
+    These crystalline pavilions, and pure fanes,
+    Of all my lucent empire? It is left
+    Deserted, void, nor any haunt of mine.
+    The blaze, the splendour, and the symmetry
+    I cannot see--but darkness, death and darkness.
+    Even here, into my centre of repose,
+    The shady visions come to domineer,
+    Insult, and blind and stifle up my pomp--
+    Fall!--No, by Tellus and her briny robes!
+    Over the fiery frontier of my realms
+    I will advance a terrible right arm
+    Shall scare that infant thunderer, rebel Jove,
+    And bid old Saturn take his throne again.”
+
+“What more magnificent prelude ever was uttered to oath than the portion
+of this speech preceding ‘No, by Tellus’! What more overpowering,
+leading up to an overwhelming threat, than the whole passage going
+before ‘Over the fiery frontier of my realms I will advance a terrible
+right arm’! What menacing deliberativeness there is in this whole
+speech, and what utter completeness of ruin to come is indicated by
+those words, ‘I will advance a terrible right arm’! You feel no sooner
+shall that arm move than ‘rebel Jove’s’ reign will be at an end, and
+that chaos will be left for Saturn to rule and fashion once more into
+order. Shut up the poem now. That’s plenty of _Hyperion_, and the other
+books of it are inferior. There is more labour and more likeness to
+_Paradise Lost_.” And so my friend, who is 16,000 miles away, and I
+turned from the Titanic theme, and spoke of the local board of
+guardians, or some young girl whose beauty was making rich misery in the
+hearts of young men in those old days.
+
+There is no other long poem in the volume bearing any marks which
+indicate such close connection with any individual reader as in the case
+of _Hyperion_. _Endymion_ boasts only one mark, and that expressing
+admiration of the relief afforded from monotony of the heroic couplets
+by the introduction in the opening of the double rhyming verses:
+
+    “Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing
+     Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing--”
+
+The friend to whom this mark is due never handled the volume, never even
+saw it; but once upon a time when he, another man, and I had got
+together, and were talking of the “gallipot poet,” the first friend said
+he always regarded this couplet as most happily placed where it appears.
+So when I reached home I marked my copy at the lines. Now, when I open
+the volume and find that mark, it is as good to me as, better than, a
+photograph of my friend; for I not only see his face and figure, but
+once more he places his index-finger on the table, as we three sit
+smoking, and whispers out the six opening lines, ending with the two I
+have quoted. Suppose I too should some day go 16,000 miles away from
+London, and carry this volume with me, shall I not be able to open it
+when I please, and recall what I then saw and heard, what I now see and
+hear, as distinctly as though no long interval of ocean or of months lay
+between to-night and that hour?
+
+Can I ever forget my burly tenor friend, who sang and composed songs,
+and dinted the line in _The Eve of St. Agnes_,
+
+    “The silver, snarling trumpets ’gan to chide,”
+
+and declared a hundred times in my unwearied ears that no more happy
+epithet than snarling could be found for trumpets? He over and over
+again assured me, and over and over again I loved to listen to his fancy
+running riot on the line, how he heard and saw brazen and silver and
+golden griffins quarrelling in the roof and around his ears as the
+trumpets blared through the echoing halls and corridors. He, too, marked
+
+    “The music, yearning like a God in pain.”
+
+“Keats,” he would say, “seems to have got not only at the spirit of the
+music, but at the very flesh and blood of it. He has done one thing for
+me,” my friend continued. “Before I read these lines, and others of the
+same kind, in Keats, my favourite tunes always represented an emotion of
+my own mind. Now they stand for individual characters in scenes, like
+descriptions of people in a book. When I hear music now I am with the
+Falstaffs or the Romolas, with Quasimodo or Julius Cæsar.”
+
+I have been regarding the indentures in the volume chronologically. The
+next marks of importance in the order of the years occur, one in _The
+Eve of St. Agnes_, the other in the _Ode to a Nightingale_. These marks,
+more than any others, I regard with grateful memory. They are not the
+work of the hand of him for whom I value them. I have good reason to
+look on him as a valid friend. For months between him and me there had
+existed an acquaintance necessarily somewhat close, but wholly
+uninformed with friendship. We spoke to one another as Mr. So-and-so.
+Neither of us suspected that the other had any toleration of poets or
+poetry. Our commerce had been in mere prose. One day, in mid-winter,
+when a chilling fog hung over London, I chanced to go into a room where
+he was writing alone. After a formal greeting, I complained of the cold.
+He dropped his pen and looked up. “Yes,” he said, “very cold and dark as
+night. Do you know the coldest night that ever was?” I answered that I
+did not. “It was St. Agnes’s Eve, when
+
+    “‘The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold.’”
+
+And so we fell to talking about Keats, and talked and talked for hours;
+and before the first hour of our talk had passed we had ceased
+“Mistering” one another for ever. The fire of his enthusiasm rose higher
+and higher as the minutes swept by. He knew one poet personally, for
+whose verse I had profound respect, and this poet, he told me,
+worshipped Keats. Often in our talks I laid plots for bringing him back
+to the simple sentence, “You should hear M. talk about Keats.” The
+notion that any one who knew M. could think M. would talk to me about
+Keats intoxicated me. “He would not let me listen to him?” I said half
+fearfully. “M. would talk to any one about Keats--to even a lawyer.” How
+I wished at that moment I was a Lord Chancellor who might stand in M.’s
+path. I have, in a way, been near to that poet since. I might almost
+have said to him,
+
+    “So near, too! You could hear my sigh,
+     Or see my case with half an eye;
+     But must not--there are reasons why.”
+
+So this friend I speak of now and I came to be great friends indeed. We
+often met and held carnivals of verse, carnivals among the starry lamps
+of poetry. He had a subtle instinct that saw the jewel, however it might
+be set. He owned himself the faculty of the poet, which gave him ripe
+knowledge of all matters technical in the setting.
+
+    “Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
+     To cease upon the midnight with no pain.”
+
+He would quote these two lines and cry, “Was ever death so pangless as
+that spoken of here? ‘To _cease_ upon the midnight!’ Here is no
+struggle, no regret, no fear. This death is softer and lighter and
+smoother than the falling of the shadow of night upon a desert of
+noiseless sand.”
+
+For a long time the name of one man had been almost daily in my ears. I
+had been hearing much through the friend to whom I have last referred
+about his intuitive eye and critical acumen. That friend had informed me
+of the influence which his opinion carried; and of how this man held
+Keats high above poets to whom we have statues of brass, whose names we
+give to our streets. My curiosity was excited, and, while my desire to
+meet this man was largely mingled with timidity, I often felt a jealous
+pang at thinking that many of the people with whom I was acquainted knew
+him. At length I became distantly connected with an undertaking in which
+he was prominently concerned. Through the instrumentality of one
+friendly to us both, we met. It was a sacred night for me, and I sat and
+listened, enchanted. After some hours the talk wheeled round upon
+sonnets. “Sonnets!” he cried, starting up; “who can repeat the lines
+about Cortez in Keats? You all know it.” Some one began to read or
+repeat the sonnet. Until coming upon the words, “or like stout Cortez.”
+“That’s it, that’s it! Now go on.”
+
+    “Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
+       He stared at the Pacific--and all his men
+     Look’d at each other with a wild surmise--
+       Silent, upon a peak in Darien.”
+
+“‘And all his men looked at each other with a _wild_ surmise,’” he
+repeated, “‘_silent_ upon a peak in Darien.’ The most enduring group
+ever designed. They are standing there to this day. They will stand
+there for ever and for ever; they are immutable. When an artist carves
+them you may know that Buonarotti is risen from the dead and is once
+more abroad.”
+
+That portion of a book which is called a preface and put first, is
+always the last written. It may be human, but it is not logical, that
+when a man starts he does not know what he has to say first, until he
+finds out by an elaborate guess of several hundred pages what he wants
+to say last. It would be unbecoming of me in a collection of ignorant
+essays to affect to know less than a person of average intelligence; but
+I am quite sincere when I say I am not aware who the author is of the
+great aphorism that “After all, there is a great deal of human nature in
+man.” There is, I would venture to say, more human nature than logic in
+man. My copy of Keats is no exception to the general rule of books. The
+preface ought to precede immediately the colophon. Yet it is in the
+forefront of the volume, before even the very title page itself. It
+forms no integral part of the volume, and is unknown to the printer or
+publisher. It was given to me by a thoughtful and kind-hearted friend at
+whose side I worked for a considerable while. One time, years ago, he
+took a holiday and vanished, going from among us I knew not whither. On
+coming back he presented each of his associates with something out of
+his store of spoil. That which now forms the preface to my copy he gave
+me. It consists of twelve leaves; twelve myrtle leaves on a spray. When
+he was in Rome he bore me in mind and plucked this sprig at the grave of
+the poet. It is consoling to remember Keats is buried so far away from
+where he was born, when we cannot forget that the abominable infamy of
+publishing his love-letters was committed in his own country--here in
+England. His spirit was lent to earth only for a little while, and he
+gave all of it to us. But we were not satisfied. We must have his
+heart’s blood and his heart too. The gentlemen who attacked his poetry
+when he was alive really knew no better, and tried, perhaps, to be as
+honest as would suit their private ends. But the publication of the dead
+man’s love-letters, fifty years after he had passed away, cannot be
+attributed even to ignorance. If any money was made out of the book it
+would be a graceful act to give it to some church where the burial
+ground is scant, and the parish is in need of a Potter’s Field.
+
+When I take down my copy of Keats, and look through it and beyond it, I
+feel that while it is left to me I cannot be wholly shorn of my friends.
+It is the only album of photographs I possess. The faces I see in it
+are not for any eye but mine. It is my private portrait gallery, in
+which hang the portraits of my dearest friends. The marks and blots are
+intelligible to no eye but mine; they are the cherished hieroglyphics of
+the heart. I close the book; I lock up the hieroglyphics; I feel certain
+the book will last my time. Should it survive me and pass into new
+hands--into the hands of some boy now unborn, who may pluck out of it
+posies of love-phrases for his fresh-cheeked sweetheart--he will know
+nothing of the import these marginal notes bore to one who has gone
+before him; unless, indeed, out of some cemetery of ephemeral literature
+he digs up this key--this Rosetta stone.
+
+
+
+
+DECAY OF THE SUBLIME.
+
+
+The sublime is dying. It has been pining a long time. At last
+dissolution has set in. Nothing can save it but another incursion of
+Goths and Huns; and as there are no Goths and Huns handy just now, the
+sublime must die out, and die out soon. You can know what a man is by
+the company he keeps. You can judge a people by the ideas they retain
+more than by the ideas they acquire. The philology of a tongue, from its
+cradle to its grave, is the social history of the people who spoke it.
+To-day you may mark the progress of civilisation by the decay bf the
+sublime. Glance at a few of the nations of earth as they stand. Italy
+and Spain still hold with the sublime in literature and art, although,
+being exhausted stocks, they cannot produce it any longer. France is
+cynical, smart, artistic, but never was and never can be sublime, so
+long as vanity rules her; and yet, by the irony of selection, sublime is
+one of her favourite words. Central Europe has had her sublime phases,
+but cannot be even thought of now in connection with the quality; and
+Russia and Turkey are barbarous still. If we come to the active pair of
+nationalities in the progress of current civilisation, the United States
+and England, we find the sublime in very poor case.
+
+Young England across the water is the most progressive nation of our
+age, because it is the most practical. If ever there was a man who put
+his foot on the neck of the sublime, that man is Uncle Sam. His
+contribution to the arts is almost nothing. His outrages against
+established artistic canons have been innumerable. He owns a new land
+without traditions. He laughs at all traditions. He has never raised a
+saint or a mummy or a religion (Mormonism he stole from the East), a
+crusader, a tyrant, a painter, a sculptor, a musician, a dramatist, an
+inquisition, a star chamber, a council of ten. All his efforts have
+been in a strictly practical direction, and most of his efforts have
+been crowned with success. He has devoted his leisure time, the hours
+not spent in cutting down forests or drugging Indians with whisky, to
+laughing at the foolish old notions which the foolish old countries
+cherish. He had a wonderfully fertile estate of two thousand million
+acres, about only one fourth of which is even to this day under direct
+human management. In getting these five hundred million acres of land
+under him he had met all kinds of ground--valley, forest, mountain,
+plain. But in none of these did he find anything but axes and whisky of
+the least use. No mountain had been sanctified to him by first earthly
+contact with the two Tables of the Law. No plain had been rendered
+sacred as that upon which the miraculous manna fell to feed the chosen
+people. No inland sea had been the scene of a miraculous draught of
+fishes. All the land acquired and cultivated by Uncle Sam came to him by
+the right of whisky and the axe. The mountain was nothing more than so
+much land placed at a certain angle that made it of little use for
+tillage. The plains, the rivers, and inland seas had a simply commercial
+value in his eyes. He had no experience of a miracle of any kind, and he
+did not see why he should bow down and respect a mountain, that, to him,
+was no more than so many thousand acres on an incline unfavourable to
+cultivation. Such a condition of the ground was a bore, and he would
+have cut down the mountain as he had cut down the Indian and the forest,
+if he had known how to accomplish the feat. He saw nothing mystic in the
+waters or the moon. Were the rivers and lakes wholesome to drink and
+useful for carriage, and well stocked with fish? These were the
+questions he asked about the waters. Would there be moonlight enough for
+riding and working? was the only question he asked about that “orbèd
+maiden with white fire laden whom mortals call the moon.” His notions,
+his plains, his rivers, his lakes, were all “big,” but he never thought
+of calling them sublime. On his own farm he failed to find any present
+trace of the supernatural; and he discovered no trace of the
+supernatural in tradition, for there was no tradition once the red man
+had been washed into his grave with whisky. Hence Uncle Sam began
+treating the supernatural with familiarity, and matters built on the
+supernatural with levity. Now without the supernatural the sublime
+cannot exist any length of time, if at all.
+
+It may be urged it is unreasonable to hold that the Americans have done
+away with the sublime, since in the history of all nations the earlier
+centuries were, as in America, devoted to material affairs. There is one
+fact bearing on this which should not be left out of count, namely, that
+America did not start from barbarism, or was not raised on a site where
+barbarism had overrun a high state of civilisation. The barbarous hordes
+of the north effaced the civilisation of old Rome, and raised upon its
+ashes a new people, the Italians, who in time led the way in art, as the
+old Romans had before them. The Renaissance was a second crop raised off
+the same ground by new men. The arts Rome had borrowed from Greece had
+been trampled down by Goths, who, when they found themselves in the land
+of milk and honey, sat down to enjoy the milk and honey, until suddenly
+the germs of old art struck root, and once more all eyes turned to Italy
+for principles of beauty. But America started with the civilisation of a
+highly civilised age. She did not rear her own civilisation on her own
+soil. She did not borrow her arts from any one country. She simply
+peopled her virgin plains with the sons of all the earth, who brought
+with them the culture of their respective nationalities. She has not
+followed the ordinary course of nations, from conflict to power, from
+power to prosperity, from prosperity to the arts, luxury, and decay. She
+started with prosperity, and the first use she made of her prosperity
+was, not to cultivate the fine arts in her own people, but to laugh at
+them in others. In the individual man the sense of humour grows with
+years. In nations the sense of humour develops with centuries. The
+literature of nations begins with battle-songs and hymns, and ends with
+burlesques and blasphemies.
+
+Now although America has begun with burlesques and blasphemies, no one
+can for a moment imagine that America is not going to create a noble
+literature of her own. She is destined not only to found and build up a
+noble literature, but one which will be unique. When she has time, when
+she has let most of those idle one thousand five hundred million acres,
+she will begin writing her books. By that time she will have running in
+her veins choice blood from every race on earth, and it is a matter of
+certainty she will give the world many delights now undreamed of. No
+other nation on earth will have, or ever has had, such an opportunity of
+devoting attention to man in his purely domestic and social relations.
+The United States of to-day has, for practical purposes, no foreign
+policy. She has no foreign rivals, she is not likely to have foreign
+wars, while in her own country she has large bodies of men from every
+people on the world. She owns the largest assorted lot of mankind on the
+globe, and as years go by we may safely conclude she will add to the
+variety and number of her sons. In all this appears no hope for the
+sublime. There is no instance in literature of a nation going back from
+laughter to heroics. The two may exist side by side. But that is not the
+case in America. Up to this hour only one class of transatlantic writers
+has challenged the attention of Europe, and that class is humorous and
+profane. Emerson, Bryant, Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Lowell, Holmes, and
+Irving are merely Europeans born in America. But Ward, Harte, Twain, and
+Breitmann are original and American.
+
+America is undoubtedly the literary promise-land of the future. It has
+done nothing up to this. Its condition has forbidden it to achieve
+anything, but great triumphs may be anticipated from it. Crossing the
+Atlantic, what do we find in the other great branch of the
+English-speaking race? Religious publications head the list by a long
+way. They have nothing to do with this subject save in so far as they
+are in the line of the sublime. All forms of the Christian and Jewish
+creeds are sublime. Looking at the other walks of literature, we find
+the death sentence of the sublime written everywhere. With the
+exception of Mr. Browning, here or there we have no poet or dramatist
+who attempts it. We have elegant trifles and beautiful form in many
+volumes of second-rate contemporary verse. There never was a time when
+the science of poetry was understood until now. Our critics can tell you
+with mathematical certainty the number of poems as distinguished from
+pieces of verse every well-known man has written. But we are not
+producing any great poetry, and none of the sublime kind. This is the
+age of elegant poetic incentive, of exquisite culture, but it is too
+dainty. We do not rise much above a poem to a shoe, or an ode to a
+ringlet, perfumed with one of Mr. Rimmel’s best admired distillations.
+We have a few poets who are continually trying to find out who or what
+the deuce they are, and what they meant by being born, and so on; but
+then these men are for the eclectic, and not the herd of sensible
+people. We have two men who have done noble work, Browning and Tennyson;
+but, speaking broadly, we find the sublime nowhere. It is true you
+cannot force genius as you force asparagus; and these remarks are not
+intended to indict the age with having no poetic faculty or aspiration.
+Abundance of poetry of a new and beautiful kind does exist, but it is
+not of the lofty kind born to the men of old.
+
+Turning eyes away from literature, take a few more of the arts. Before
+we go farther, let us admit that one art at least never reached sublimer
+recorded heights than to-day. The music of the generation just past is,
+I believe, in the front rank of the art. It is an art now in the throes
+of an enormous transformation. Not using the phrase in its slangy
+meaning, the music of the future is sure to touch splendours never
+dreamed of by that Raphael of the lyre, Mozart. The only art-Titans now
+wrestling are the musicians; not those paltry souls that pad the poor
+words of inane burlesques, but the great spirits that sit apart, and
+have audiences of the angels. These men, out of their own mouths, assure
+us that they catch the far-off murmurs of such imperial tones as never
+filled the ear of man yet. They cannot gather up the broken chords they
+hear. They admit they have heard no more than a few bars of the great
+masters who are close upon us; but, they say, if they only reproduce the
+effect these preluding passages have upon them, “Such harmonious madness
+from their lips would flow, the world should listen then as they are
+listening now.”
+
+Go to the Royal Academy and look round you. How pretty! How nice! How
+pathetic! But would you like to lend your arm to Michael Angelo, and go
+round those walls with him? He would prefer the rack, the gridiron of
+St. Laurence. It is true there is no necessity for the sublime; but
+those men who have been in the awful presence of such dreams as _Night_
+and _Morning_, by that sculptor, must be pardoned if they prefer it to
+the art you find in Burlington House. One of our great English poets
+said, speaking of the trivial nature of conversation at the beginning of
+this century, that if Lord Bacon were alive now, and made a remark in an
+ordinary assembly, conversation would stop. If casts of _Night_ and
+_Morning_ were placed at the head of the staircase of Burlington House,
+no one with appreciation of art would enter the rooms; the strong would
+linger for ever round those stupendous groups, and the feeble would be
+frighted away. Of course, the vast crowd of art-patrons would pass the
+group with only a casual glance, and a protest against having plaster
+casts occupying ground which ought to be allotted to original work.
+
+Read any speech Burke or Grattan ever spoke, and then your _Times_ and
+the debate last night. How plain it becomes that from no art has the
+sublime so completely vanished as the orator’s. Take those two speakers
+above, and run your eye over Cicero and Demosthenes, the four are of the
+one school, in the great style. Theirs is the large and universal
+eloquence. It is as fresh and beautiful, as pathetic, as sublime now as
+when uttered, although the occasions and circumstances are no longer of
+interest to man. The statistician and the poltroon and the verbatim
+reporter have killed the orator. If any man were to rise in the House
+and make a speech in the manner of the ancients, the honourable members
+would hurry in from all sides to laugh. A few sessions ago a member rose
+in his place, and delivered an oration on a subject not popular with the
+House, but in a manner which echoed the grand old style. At once every
+seat for which there was a member present at the time was occupied; and
+the next morning the daily papers had articles which, while disposing of
+the speaker’s cause in a few lines, devoted columns to the manner in
+which he had pleaded it.
+
+To discover what has led to the decay of the sublime is not difficult,
+and even in an ignorant essay like this, it may be briefly indicated.
+Roughly speaking, it is attributable to the accumulation of certainties.
+Any handbook that cribs from Longinus or Burke will tell you the vague
+is essential to the sublime. To attain it there must be something half
+understood--not fully known, only partly revealed. To attain it detail
+must be lost, and only a totality presented to the mind. For instance,
+if a great lover of Roman history were suddenly to find himself on the
+top of the Coliseum, the most sublime result to be obtained from the
+situation would be produced by repeating to himself the simple words,
+“This is Rome.” By these words the totality of the city’s grandeur,
+influence, power, and enterprises would be vaguely presented to a
+scholar’s mind dim in the glow of a multitude of half-revealing
+side-lights. If a companion whispered in the scholar’s ears, “This place
+would at one time seat a hundred thousand people,” then the particular
+is reached, and the sublime vanishes like sunshine against a cloud. Most
+of North America has been explored. Africa and Australia have been
+traversed. The source of the Nile has been found. We can read the
+hieroglyphics. We know the elements now flaming in the sun. Many of the
+phenomena in all branches of physiology which were mysteries to our
+fathers are familiar commonplaces of knowledge now. We have learned to
+foretell the weather. We travel a thousand miles for the hundred
+travelled by our fathers. We have daily newspapers to discuss all
+matters, clear away mysteries. We have opened the grave for the sublime
+with the plough of progress. Though the words stick in my throat, I
+must, I daresay, cry, “God speed the plough!”
+
+
+
+
+A BORROWED POET.
+
+
+Twenty years ago I borrowed, and read for the first time, the poems of
+James Clarence Mangan. I then lived in a city containing not one-third
+as many people as yearly swell the population of London. The friend of
+whom I borrowed the volume in 1866 is still living in his old home, in
+the house from which I carried away the book then. I saw him last winter
+and he is almost as little aged as the hills he has fronted all that
+time. I have had in those years as many homes as an Arab nomad. He still
+stays in the old place, and in the gray twilight of dark summer mornings
+wakes to hear as of yore the twitter of sparrows and the cawing of rooks
+from the other side of the river, and the hoarse hooting of the
+steamboat hard by.
+
+The volume of Mangan now by me I borrowed of another old friend, who
+passes most of his day within sight of that familiar river not quite a
+hundred yards from the house of the lender of twenty years back. In the
+meantime I have seen no other copy of Mangan.
+
+This latest fact is not much to be wondered at, for I am not
+enterprising in the matter of books--rarely buy and rarely borrow, and
+have never been in the reading room of the British Museum in my life.
+The book may be common to those who know much about books; but I have
+seen only the two copies I speak of, and these are of the same edition
+and of American origin. I believe a selection from the poems was issued
+a few years ago in Dublin, but a copy has not drifted my way. The
+title-page of the volume before me is missing, but in a list of
+publications at the back I find “_The Poems of James Clarence Mangan_.
+Containing German Anthology, Irish Anthology, Apocrypha, and
+Miscellaneous Poems. With a Biographical and Critical Introduction, by
+John Mitchel. 1 vol. 12mo. Printed on tinted and calendered paper.
+Nearly 500 pages. $1.” Beyond all doubt this is the book, and it was
+published by Mr. P. M. Haverty, of New York.
+
+As far as I know, this is the only edition of Mangan which pretends to
+be even comprehensive. It does not lay claim to completeness. At the
+time the late John Mitchel wrote his introduction he was aware of but
+one other edition of Mangan’s poems--the German Anthology, published in
+Dublin many years ago. I am nearly sure that since the appearance of
+Mitchel’s edition there have been no verses of Mangan’s published in
+book form on this side of the Atlantic, except the selections I have
+already mentioned, and I do not think any edition whatever has been
+published in this country.
+
+During the twenty years which have elapsed since first I made the
+acquaintance of the poems of James Clarence Mangan, I have read much
+verse and many criticisms of verse, and yet I don’t remember to have
+seen one line about Mangan in any publication issued in England. I
+believe two magazine articles have appeared, but I never saw them.
+Almost during these years, or within a period which does not extend
+back far beyond them, criticism of verse has ceased to be a matter of
+personal opinion, and has been elevated or degraded, as you will, into
+an exact science. The opinions of old reviewers--the Jeffreys and
+Broughams--are now looked on as curiosities of literature. There is as
+wide a gulf between the mode of treating poetry now and eighty years ago
+as there is between the mode of travelling, or the guess-work that makes
+up the physician’s art; and if in a gathering of literary experts any
+one were now to apply to a new bard the dogmas of criticism quoted for
+or against Byron, Shelley, Keats, and the Lakers in their time, a
+silence the reverse of respectful would certainly follow.
+
+This is not the age of great poetry, but it is the age of “poetical
+poetry,” to quote the phrase of one of the finest critics using the
+English language--one who has, unfortunately for the culture of that
+tongue and those who use it, written lamentably little. The great danger
+by which we stand menaced at present is, that our perceptions may become
+too exquisite and our poetry too intellectual. This, anyway, is true of
+poetry which may at all claim to be an expression of thought. There are
+in our time supreme formists in small things, carvers of cameos and
+walnut shells, and musical conjurors who make sweet melodies with richly
+vowelled syllables. But unfortunately the tendency of the poetic men of
+to-day is towards intellectuality, and this is a humiliating decay. In
+the times of Queen Elizabeth, when all the poets were Shakespeares, they
+cared nothing for their intellects. The intellectual side of a poet’s
+mind is an impertinence in his art.
+
+I do not presume to say what place exactly James Clarence Mangan ought
+to occupy on the greater roll of verse-writers, and I am not sure that
+he is, in the finest sense of the phrase, a “poetical poet;” but he is,
+at all events, the most poetical poet Ireland has produced, when we take
+into account the volume and quality of his song. I shall purposely avoid
+any reference to him as a translator, except in acting on John Mitchel’s
+opinion, and treating one of his “translations” from the Arabic as an
+original poem; for during his lifetime he confessed that he had passed
+off original poems of his own as translations; and Mitchel assures us
+that Mangan did not know Arabic. As this essay does not profess to be
+orderly or dignified, or anything more than rambling gossip, put into
+writing for no other reason than to introduce to the reader a few pieces
+of verse he may not have met before, I cannot do better than insert here
+the lines of which I am now speaking:
+
+
+THE TIME OF THE BARMECIDES.
+
+
+I.
+
+    “My eyes are filmed, my beard is grey,
+       I am bowed with the weight of years;
+     I would I were stretched in my bed of clay
+       With my long-lost youth’s compeers!
+     For back to the past, though the thought brings woe,
+       My memory ever glides--
+     To the old, old time, long, long ago,
+       The time of the Barmecides!
+     To the old, old time, long, long ago,
+       The time of the Barmecides.
+
+
+II.
+
+    “Then youth was mine, and a fierce wild will,
+       And an iron arm in war,
+     And a fleet foot high upon Ishkar’s hill,
+       When the watch-lights glimmered afar,
+     And a barb as fiery as any I know
+       That Khoord or Beddaween rides,
+     Ere my friends lay low--long, long ago,
+       In the time of the Barmecides;
+     Ere my friends lay low--long, long ago,
+       In the time of the Barmecides.
+
+
+III.
+
+    “One golden goblet illumed my board,
+       One silver dish was there;
+     At hand my tried Karamanian sword
+       Lay always bright and bare;
+     For those were the days when the angry blow
+       Supplanted the word that chides--
+     When hearts could glow--long, long ago,
+       In the time of the Barmecides;
+     When hearts could glow--long, long ago,
+       In the time of the Barmecides.
+
+
+IV.
+
+    “Through city and desert my mates and I
+       Were free to rove and roam,
+     Our diapered canopy the deep of the sky,
+       Or the roof of the palace dome.
+     Oh, ours was the vivid life to and fro,
+       Which only sloth derides:
+     Men spent Life so--long, long ago,
+       In the time of the Barmecides;
+     Men spent Life so--long, long ago,
+       In the time of the Barmecides.
+
+
+V.
+
+    “I see rich Bagdad once again,
+       With its turrets of Moorish mould,
+     And the Kalif’s twice five hundred men
+       Whose binishes flamed with gold.
+     I call up many a gorgeous show
+       Which the Pall of Oblivion hides--
+     All passed like snow, long, long ago,
+       With the time of the Barmecides;
+     All passed like snow, long, long ago,
+       With the time of the Barmecides.
+
+
+VI.
+
+    “But mine eye is dim, and my beard is grey,
+       And I bend with the weight of years--
+     May I soon go down to the House of Clay,
+       Where slumber my Youth’s compeers!
+     For with them and the Past, though the thought wakes woe,
+       My memory ever abides,
+     And I mourn for the Times gone long ago,
+       For the Times of the Barmecides!
+     I mourn for the Times gone long ago,
+       For the Times of the Barmecides!”
+
+This is the poem claimed by Mangan to be from the Arabic. I have no
+means of knowing whether it is or not. There is one translation from the
+Persian, one from the Ottoman, and according to Mitchel, one from the
+Coptic. But seeing that he turned into verse a great number of Irish
+poems from prose translations done by another, and that he did not know
+a word of that language, I think it may be safely assumed that _The Last
+of the Barmecides_ is original. This poem is so old a favourite of mine
+that I cannot pretend to be an impartial judge of it. When I hear it (I
+can never see a poem I know well and love much) I listen as to the
+unchanged voice of an old friend; I wander in a maze of memories; “I see
+rich Bagdad once again;” I am once more owner of the magic carpet, and
+am floating irresponsibly and at will on the intoxicating atmosphere of
+the poets over the enchanted groves, and streams, and hills, and seas of
+fairyland, or harkening to voices that years ago ceased to stir in my
+ears, gazing at the faces that have long since moulded the face cloth
+into blunted memories of the face for the grave.
+
+On the 20th of June, 1849, Mangan died in the Meath Hospital, Dublin.
+Having been born in 1803, he was, in 1849, eight years older than Poe,
+who died destitute and forlorn at Baltimore in the same year. Both poets
+had been in abject poverty, both had been unfortunate in love, both had
+been consummate artists, both had been piteously unlucky in a thousand
+ways, and both had died the same year, and in common hospitals. Two more
+miserable stories it is impossible to find anywhere. I would recommend
+those of sensitive natures to confine their reading to the work these
+men did, and not to the misfortunes they laboured under, and the follies
+they committed. I think, of the two, Mangan suffered more acutely; for
+he never rose up in anger against the world, or those around him, but
+glided like an uncomplaining ghost into the grave, where, long before
+his death, all his hopes lay buried. He had only a half-hearted pity for
+himself. Poe, in his _Raven_, is, all the time of his most pathetic and
+terrible complaining, conscious that he complains as becomes a fine
+artist. But the raven’s croak does not touch the heart. It appeals to
+the intellect; it affects the fancy, the imagination, the ear, the eye.
+When Mangan opens his bosom and shows you the ravens that prey upon him,
+he cannot repress something like a laugh at the thought that any one
+could be interested in him and his woes. See:
+
+
+THE NAMELESS ONE.
+
+
+BALLAD.
+
+
+I.
+
+    “Roll forth, my song, like the rushing river,
+       That sweeps along to the mighty sea;
+     God will inspire me while I deliver
+                     My soul of thee!
+
+
+II.
+
+    “Tell thou the world, when my bones lie whitening
+       Amid the last homes of youth and eld,
+     That there was once one whose veins ran lightning
+                     No eye beheld.
+
+
+III.
+
+    “Tell how his boyhood was one drear night-hour,
+       How shone for _him_, through his griefs and gloom,
+     No star of all heaven sends to light our
+                     Path to the tomb.
+
+
+IV.
+
+    “Roll on, my song, and to after ages
+     Tell how, disdaining all earth can give,
+     He would have taught men from wisdom’s pages
+                     The way to live.
+
+
+V.
+
+    “And tell how, trampled, derided, hated,
+       And worn by weakness, disease, and wrong,
+     He fled for shelter to God, who mated
+                     His soul with song--
+
+
+VI.
+
+    “With song which alway, sublime or vapid,
+       Flowed like a rill in the morning beam,
+     Perchance not deep, but intense and rapid--
+                     A mountain stream.
+
+
+VII.
+
+    “Tell how the Nameless, condemned for years long
+       To herd with demons from hell beneath,
+     Saw things that made him, with groans and tears, long
+                     For even death.
+
+
+VIII.
+
+    “Go on to tell how, with genius wasted,
+       Betrayed in friendship, befooled in love,
+     With spirit shipwrecked and young hopes blasted,
+                     He still, still strove.
+
+
+IX.
+
+    “Till, spent with toil, dreeing death for others,
+       And some whose hands should have wrought for _him_
+     (If children live not for sires and mothers),
+                     His mind grew dim.
+
+
+X.
+
+    “And he fell far through the pit abysmal,
+       The gulf and grave of Maginn and Burns,
+     And pawned his soul for the devil’s dismal
+                     Stock of returns.
+
+
+XI.
+
+    “But yet redeemed it in days of darkness,
+       And shapes and signs of the final wrath,
+     Where death in hideous and ghastly starkness
+                     Stood in his path.
+
+
+XII.
+
+    “And tell how now, amid wreck and sorrow,
+       And want and sickness and houseless nights,
+     He bides in calmness the silent morrow
+                     That no ray lights.
+
+
+XIII.
+
+    “And lives he still, then? Yes! old and hoary
+       At thirty-nine, from despair and woe,
+     He lives enduring what future story
+                     Will never know.
+
+
+XIV.
+
+    “Him grant a grave to, ye pitying noble,
+       Deep in your bosoms! There let him dwell!
+     He, too, had tears for all souls in trouble,
+                     Here and in hell.”
+
+The burden of all his song is sad, and in his translations he has chosen
+chiefly themes which echoed the harpings of his own soul. He began life
+as a copying clerk in an attorney’s office, and had for some time to
+support wholly, or in the main, a mother and sister. In Mitchel’s
+preface there are many passages almost as fine as the verse of the poet.
+Here is one, long as it is, that must find a place. Mitchel is speaking
+of the days when Mangan was in the attorney’s office:--
+
+     “At what age he devoted himself to this drudgery, at what age he
+     left it, or was discharged from it, does not appear; for his whole
+     biography documents are wanting, the man having never, for one
+     moment, imagined that his poor life could interest any surviving
+     human being, and having never, accordingly, collected his
+     biographical assets, and appointed a literary executor to take care
+     of his posthumous fame. Neither did he ever acquire the habit,
+     common enough among literary men, of dwelling upon his own early
+     trials, struggles, and triumphs. But those who knew him in after
+     years can remember with what a shuddering and loathing horror he
+     spoke--when at rare intervals he could be induced to speak at
+     all--of his labours with the scrivener and attorney. He was shy and
+     sensitive, with exquisite sensibilities and fine impulses; eye,
+     ear, and soul open to all the beauty, music, and glory of heaven
+     and earth; humble, gentle, and unexacting; modestly craving nothing
+     in the world but celestial, glorified life, seraphic love, and a
+     throne among the immortal gods (that’s all); and he was eight or
+     ten years scribbling deeds, pleadings, and bills in Chancery.”
+
+There is, I believe, but one portrait of him in existence, and a copy of
+it hangs on the wall of the room in which I am writing, a few feet in
+front of my eyes. It is not a face easy to describe. Beauty is the chief
+characteristic of it. But it is not the beauty that men admire or that
+inspires love in women. It is not the face of a poet or a visionary or a
+thinker. There is no passion in it; not even the passionate sadness of
+his own verse. It is not the face of a man who has suffered greatly, or
+rejoiced in ecstasy. It is the face of a fleshless, worn man of forty,
+with hair pressed back from the forehead and ear. I have been looking at
+it for a long time, trying to find out something positive about it, and
+I have failed. It is not interesting. It is the face of a man who is
+done with the world and humanity. It is the face of a dead man whose
+spirit has passed away, while the body remains alive. The eyes are open,
+and have light in them; the face would be more complete if the light
+were out, and the lids drawn down and composed for the blind tomb.
+
+He gives a picture of his mental attitude at about the time this
+portrait was taken:--
+
+
+TWENTY GOLDEN YEARS AGO.
+
+
+I.
+
+    “Oh, the rain, the weary, dreary rain,
+       How it plashes on the window-sill!
+     Night, I guess too, must be on the wane,
+       Strass and Gass around are grown so still.
+     Here I sit with coffee in my cup--
+       Ah, ’twas rarely I beheld it flow
+     In the tavern where I loved to sup
+       Twenty golden years ago!
+
+
+II.
+
+    “Twenty years ago, alas!--but stay--
+       On my life, ’tis half-past twelve o’clock!
+     After all, the hours _do_ slip away--
+       Come, here goes to burn another block!
+     For the night, or morn, is wet and cold;
+       And my fire is dwindling rather low:
+     I had fire enough, when young and bold
+       Twenty golden years ago.
+
+
+III.
+
+    “Dear! I don’t feel well at all, somehow:
+       Few in Weimar dream how bad I am;
+     Floods of tears grow common with me now,
+       High-Dutch floods that Reason cannot dam.
+     Doctors think I’ll neither live nor thrive
+       If I mope at home so--I don’t know--
+     _Am_ I living _now_? I _was_ alive
+       Twenty golden years ago.
+
+
+IV.
+
+    “Wifeless, friendless, flagonless, alone,
+       Not quite bookless, though, unless I choose;
+     Left with naught to do, except to groan,
+       Not a soul to woo, except the Muse.
+     Oh, this is hard for _me_ to bear--
+       Me who whilom lived so much _en haut_--
+     Me who broke all hearts like china-ware,
+       Twenty golden years ago.
+
+
+V.
+
+    “Perhaps ’tis better;--time’s defacing waves
+       Long have quenched the radiance of my brow--
+     They who curse me nightly from their graves
+       Scarce could love me were they living now;
+     But my loneliness hath darker ills--
+       Such dun duns as Conscience, Thought, & Co.,
+     Awful Gorgons! Worse than tailors’ bills
+       Twenty golden years ago.
+
+
+VI.
+
+    “Did I paint a fifth of what I feel,
+       Oh, how plaintive you would ween I was!
+     But I won’t, albeit I have a deal
+       More to wail about than Kerner has!
+     Kerner’s tears are wept for withered flowers;
+       Mine for withered hopes; my scroll of woe
+     Dates, alas! from youth’s deserted bowers,
+       Twenty golden years ago.
+
+
+VII.
+
+    “Yet, may Deutschland’s bardlings flourish long!
+       Me, I tweak no beak among them;--hawks
+     Must not pounce on hawks: besides, in song
+       I could once beat all of them by chalks.
+     Though you find me, as I near my goal,
+       Sentimentalising like Rousseau,
+     Oh, I had a great Byronian soul
+       Twenty golden years ago!
+
+
+VIII.
+
+    “Tick-tick, tick-tick!--not a sound save Time’s,
+       And the wind gust as it drives the rain--
+     Tortured torturer of reluctant rhymes,
+       Go to bed and rest thine aching brain!
+     Sleep!--no more the dupe of hopes or schemes;
+       Soon thou sleepest where the thistles blow;
+     Curious anti-climax to thy dreams
+       Twenty golden years ago!”
+
+I find myself now in a great puzzle. I want, first of all, to say I
+think it most melancholy that Mangan, when of full age and judgment,
+should have thought Byron had “a great Byronian soul.” Observe, he does
+not mean that he had a soul greatly like Byron’s, but that he had a soul
+like the great soul of Byron. I do not believe Byron had a great soul at
+all. I believe he was simply a fine stage-manager of melodrama, the
+finest that ever lived, and that as a property-master he was unrivalled;
+but that to please no one, himself included, could he have written the
+play. I am not descending to so defiling a depth as to talk about
+plagiarism. What I wish to say is, that whether Byron stole or not made
+not the least difference in the world, for he never by the aid of his
+gifts or his thefts wrote a poem. I wanted further to say of Byron that
+there was nothing great about him except his vanity. Suddenly I
+remembered some words of the critic of whom I spoke a while back, in
+dealing with the question of poetical poetry and poems. I took down the
+printed page, where I found these lines:--
+
+     “Mr. Swinburne’s poetry is almost altogether poetical. Not all the
+     poetry of even the Poets is so, and to one who loves this dear and
+     intimate quality of which we speak, Coleridge, for instance, is a
+     poet of some four poems, Wordsworth of some sixteen, Keats of five,
+     Byron of none, though Byron is _great and eloquent_, but the thing
+     we prize so much is far away from eloquence. Poetical poetry is the
+     inner garden; there grows the ‘flower of the mind.’”
+
+Now, my difficulty is plain. My critic, who is also a poet, says Byron
+is great, and I find fault with Mangan for saying Byron had a great
+Byronian soul. Here are two of my select authors against me. Plainly,
+the best thing I can do is say nothing at all about the matter!
+
+_Twenty Golden Years Ago_ is by no means a poetical poem, but there is
+poetry in it. There is no poetical poem by Mangan. But he has written no
+serious verses in which there is not poetry.
+
+After giving Mangan’s own verse account of what he was like in his own
+regard at about forty years of age, I copy what Mitchel saw when the
+poet was first pointed out to him:--
+
+     “Being in the College Library [Trinity, Dublin], and having
+     occasion for a book in that gloomy apartment of the institution
+     called the ‘Fagal Library,’ which is the innermost recess of the
+     stately building, an acquaintance pointed out to me a man perched
+     on the top of a ladder, with the whispered information that the
+     figure was Clarence Mangan. It was an unearthly and ghostly figure,
+     in a brown garment; the same garment (to all appearance), which
+     lasted till the day of his death. The blanched hair was totally
+     unkempt; the corpse-like features still as marble; a large book was
+     in his arms, and all his soul was in the book. I had never heard of
+     Clarence Mangan before, and knew not for what he was celebrated,
+     whether as a magician, a poet, or a murderer; yet took a volume and
+     spread it on a table, not to read, but with the pretence of reading
+     to gaze on the spectral creature on the ladder.”
+
+I never met any one who had known Mangan. Mitchel did not know the name
+of the woman who lured him on with smiles that seemed to promise love.
+He always addressed her in his poems as Frances. Some time ago the name
+of the woman was divulged. It is ungallant of me to have forgotten it,
+but such is the case. The address at which Mangan visited her was in
+Mountpleasant Square, Dublin. At the time I saw the name of the lady I
+looked into a directory of 1848 which I happened to have by me, and
+found a different name at the address given in the Square. I know the
+love affair of the poet took place years before his death in 1849, but
+people in quiet and unpretentious houses in Dublin, or correctly
+Ranelagh, often live a whole generation in the same house.
+
+Here I find myself in a second puzzle. So long as I thought merely of
+writing this rambling account of “My Borrowed Poet,” I decided upon
+trying to say something about the stupidity of women and poets in
+general. But I don’t feel in case to do so when I glance up at the face
+of Mangan hanging on the wall, and bring myself to realise the fact
+that this face now looking so dead and unburied was young and bright and
+perhaps cheerful when he went wooing in Ranelagh.
+
+Instead of saying anything wise and stupid and commonplace about either
+poets or women, let me quote here stanzas which must have been written
+some day when he saw sunshine among the clouds:--
+
+
+THE MARINER’S BRIDE.
+
+    “Look, mother! the mariner’s rowing
+         His galley adown the tide;
+     I’ll go where the mariner’s going,
+         And be the mariner’s bride!
+
+    “I saw him one day through the wicket,
+         I opened the gate and we met--
+         As a bird in the fowler’s net,
+     Was I caught in my own green thicket.
+     O mother, my tears are flowing,
+         I’ve lost my maidenly pride--
+     I’ll go if the mariner’s going,
+         And be the mariner’s bride!
+
+    “This Love the tyrant winces,
+         Alas! an omnipotent might,
+     He darkens the mind like night,
+         He treads on the necks of Princes!
+     O mother, my bosom is glowing,
+         I’ll go whatever betide,
+     I’ll go where the mariners going,
+         And be the mariner’s bride!
+
+    “Yes, mother! the spoiler has reft me
+         Of reason and self-control;
+         Gone, gone is my wretched soul,
+     And only my body is left me!
+     The winds, O mother, are blowing,
+         The ocean is bright and wide;
+     I’ll go where the mariner’s going,
+         And be the mariner’s bride.”
+
+This appears among the Apocrypha, and is credited by Mangan to the
+“Spanish;” but it is safe to assume when he is so vague that the poem is
+original. It is one of the most bright and cheerful he has given us. The
+only touch of sorrow we feel is for the poor mother who is about to lose
+so impulsive and vivacious a daughter. The time of this delightful
+ballad is not clearly defined, but we may be absolutely certain that we
+of this moribund nineteenth century will never meet except at a function
+of a recondite spiritual medium even the great grandchild of the
+Mariner’s Bride. How much more is our devout gratitude due to a good and
+pious spiritualist than to any riotous and licentious poet! The former
+can give us intercourse with the illustrious defunct of history; the
+latter can give us no more than the image of a figment, the phantom of a
+shade, the echo of sounds that never vibrated in the ear of man. All
+persons who believe the evidence adduced by poets are the victims of
+subornation.
+
+A saw-mill does not seem a good subject for a “copy of verses.” Mangan
+died single and in poverty, and was buried by his friends. Listen:--
+
+
+THE SAW-MILL.
+
+    “My path lay towards the Mourne again,
+       But I stopped to rest by the hill-side
+     That glanced adown o’er the sunken glen
+       Which the Saw-and Water-mills hide,
+               Which now, as then,
+       The Saw-and Water-mills hide.
+
+    “And there, as I lay reclined on the hill,
+       Like a man made by sudden _qualm_ ill,
+     I heard the water in the Water-mill,
+       And I saw the saw in the Saw-mill!
+               As I thus lay still
+       I saw the saw in the Saw-mill!
+
+    “The saw, the breeze, and the humming bees,
+       Lulled me into a dreamy reverie,
+     Till the objects round me--hills, mills, trees,
+       Seemed grown alive all and every--
+               By slow degrees
+       Took life as it were, all and every!
+
+    “Anon the sound of the waters grew
+       To a Mourne-ful ditty,
+     And the song of the tree that the saw sawed through
+       Disturbed my spirit with pity,
+               Began to subdue
+       My spirit with tenderest pity!
+
+    “‘Oh, wanderer, the hour that brings thee back
+       Is of all meet hours the meetest.
+     Thou now, in sooth art on the Track,
+       And nigher to Home than thou weetest;
+               Thou hast thought Time slack,
+       But his flight has been of the fleetest!
+
+    “‘For this it is that I dree such pain
+       As, when wounded, even a plank will;
+     My bosom is pierced, is rent in twain,
+       That thine may ever bide tranquil.
+               May ever remain
+       Henceforward untroubled and tranquil.
+
+    “‘In a few days more, most Lonely One!
+       Shall I, as a narrow ark, veil
+     Thine eyes from the glare of the world and sun
+       ’Mong the urns of yonder dark vale--
+               In the cold and dun
+       Recesses of yonder dark vale!
+
+    “‘For this grieve not! Thou knowest what thanks
+       The Weary-souled and Meek owe
+     To Death!’ I awoke, and heard four planks
+       Fall down with a saddening echo.
+               _I heard four planks_
+       _Fall down with a hollow echo._”
+
+This was the epithalamium of James Clarence Mangan sung by himself.
+
+
+
+
+THE ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER.
+
+
+I bought my copy new for fourpence-halfpenny, in Holywell Street. It was
+published by George Routledge and Sons, of the Broadway, London. The
+little volume is made up of a “Preface,” by Thomas de Quincey;
+“Confessions of an English Opium-eater;” and “Notes from the Pocket-book
+of a late Opium-eater;” including “Walking Stewart,” “On the Knocking at
+the Gates in _Macbeth_,” and “On Suicide.” When it last left my hands it
+boasted a paper cover, on which appeared the head of the illustrious
+Laker. At my elbow now it lies, divested of its shield; and I sit face
+to face with the title-page, as though my author had taken off his hat
+and overcoat, and I were asking him which he preferred, clear or thick
+soup, while the servant stood behind filling his glass with
+Amontillado. How that cover came to be removed I do not know. The last
+borrower was of the less destructive sex, and I am at a great loss to
+account for the injury.
+
+I object to the presence of “Walking Stewart,” and “On Suicide,”
+otherwise I count my copy perfect. With the exception of _Robinson
+Crusoe_ and Poe’s _Tales_ I have read nothing so often as the
+_Opium-eater_. Only twice in my life up to five-and-twenty years of age
+did I sit up all night to read a book: once when about midnight I came
+into possession of _Enoch Arden_, and a second time when, at the same
+witching hour I drew a red cloth-bound edition of the _Opium-eater_ out
+of my pocket, in my lonely, dreary bedroom, five hundred miles from
+where I am now writing. The household were all asleep, and I by no means
+strong of nerve. The room was large, the dwelling ghostly. I sat in an
+embrasure of one of the windows, with a little table supporting the
+candles on one side, and on the other a small movable bookcase. Thus I
+was in a kind of dock, only open on one side, that fronting the room. It
+was in the beginning of autumn, and a low, warm wind blew the
+complaining rain against the pane on a level with my ear. At that time I
+had not seen London, and I remember being overpowered and broken before
+the spectacle of that sensitive and imaginative boy in the text, hungry
+and forlorn, in the unsympathetic mass of innumerable houses, every door
+of which was shut against him.
+
+As I read on and the hour grew late, the succession of splendours and
+terrors wrought on my imagination, until I felt cold and exhausted, and
+had scarcely strength to sit upright in my chair. My hand trembled, and
+my mind became tremulously apprehensive of something vague and awful; I
+could not tell what. Sounds of the night which I had heard a thousand
+times before, which were as familiar to me as the bell of my parish
+church, now assumed dire, uncertain imports. The rattling of the sash
+was not the work of the wind, not the work of ghostly hands, but worse
+still, of human hands belonging to men in some more dire extremity than
+the approach of death. The beating of the rain against the glass was
+made to cover voices trying to tell me secrets I could not hear and
+live, and which yet I would have given my life to know.
+
+I cannot tell why I was so exhilarated by terror. The _Confessions_
+alone are not calculated to produce inexplicable disturbance of the
+mind. It may be I had eaten little or nothing that day; it may be I had
+steeped myself too deeply in nicotine. All I know for certain is that I
+was in such a state of abject panic I had not courage to cross the room
+to my bed. It was in the dreary, pitiless, raw hour before the dawn I
+finished the book. Then I found I durst not rise. I put down the book
+and looked at the candles. They would last till daylight.
+
+I would have given all the world to lie on that bed over there, with my
+back secure against it, warmed by it, comforted by it. But that open
+space was more terrible to me than if it were filled with flame. I
+should have been much more at my ease in the dark, yet I could not bring
+myself to blow out the lights; not because I dreaded the darkness, but
+because I shrank from encountering the possibilities of that awful
+moment of twilight between the full light of the candles and the blank
+gloom.
+
+When I thought of blowing out the lights and imagined the dread of
+catching a glimpse of some spectacle of supreme horror, I imprudently
+gave my imagination rein, and set myself to find out what would terrify
+me most. All at once, and before I had made more than the inquiry of my
+mind, I saw in fancy between me and the bed, a thing of unapproachable
+terror; I had not been recently reading _Christabel_, and yet it must
+have been remotely from that poem I conjured the spectre which so awed
+me. I placed out in the open of the room on the floor, between me and
+the door, and close to a straight line drawn between me and the bed, a
+figure shrouded in a black cloak, from hidden shoulder to invisible
+feet. Over the head of this figure was cast a cowl, which completely
+concealed the head and face. At any moment the cloak might open and
+disclose the body of that figure. I knew the body of that figure was a
+“thing to dream of, not to see.” I felt sure I should lose my reason if
+the cloak opened and discovered the loathsome body. I had no idea what I
+should see, but I knew I should go mad.
+
+In my dock by the window, and with the light behind my eyes I felt
+secure. But at that moment no earthly consideration, no consideration
+whatever, would have induced me to face that ghostly form in the flicker
+of expiring light. I was not under any delusion. I knew then as well as
+I know now that there was no object on which the normal human eye could
+exercise itself between me and the bed. I deliberately willed the figure
+to appear, and although once I had summoned it I could not dismiss it, I
+had complete and self-possessed knowledge that I saw nothing with my
+physical eye. Moreover, full of potentiality for terror as that figure
+was in its present shape and attitude, it had no dread for me. I was
+fascinated by considering possibilities which I knew could not arise so
+long as the present circumstances remained unchanged. In other words, I
+knew I could trust my reason to keep my imagination in subjection, so
+long as my senses were not confused or my attention scared. If I
+attempted to extinguish the candles that figure might waver! if I moved
+across the floor it might get behind my back, and as I caught sight of
+it over my shoulder, the cloak might fall aside! Then I should go mad.
+Thus I sat and waited until daylight came. Then I fell asleep in my
+chair.
+
+As I have said, the copy of the _Opium-eater_ I then had was bound in
+red cloth. It was a much handsomer book than the humble one published by
+Routledge. Since that memorable night many years ago in my high, dreary,
+lonely bedroom, I cannot tell you all the copies of the _Opium-eater_
+which have been mine. I remember another, bound in dark blue cloth, with
+copious notes. There was a third, the outside seeming of which I forget,
+but which I think formed part of two volumes of selections from De
+Quincey. I love my little sixpenny volume for one reason chiefly. I can
+lend it without fear, and lose it without a pang. Why, the beggarliest
+miser alive can’t think much of fourpence-halfpenny! I have already
+dispensed a few copies of the _Opium-eater_, price fourpence-halfpenny.
+As it lies on my table now, I take no more care of it than one does of
+yesterday’s morning paper. When I read it I double it back, to show to
+myself how little I value the gross material of the book. Any one coming
+in likely to appreciate the book, and who has not read it is welcome to
+carry it off as a gift. Yet if I am free with the volume, I am jealous
+of the author. I do not mention his name to people I believe unwilling
+or unable to worship him becomingly.
+
+But when I meet a true disciple what prodigal joy environs and suffuses
+me! What talks of him I have had, and speechless raptures in hearing of
+him! How thick with gold the air of evenings has been, spent with him
+and one who loved him! I recall one glorious summer’s day, when an old
+friend and I (we were then, alas! years and years younger than we are
+to-day), had toiled on through mountain heather for hours, until we were
+half-baked by the sun and famished with thirst. Suddenly we came upon
+the topmost peak of all the hills, and saw, many miles away, the
+unexpected sea. As we stood, shading our eyes with our hands, my
+companion chanted out, “Obliquely to the right lay the many-languaged
+town of Liverpool; obliquely to the left ‘the multitudinous sea.’”
+“Whose is that?” I asked eagerly, notwithstanding my drought. “What
+isn’t Shakespeare’s is De Quincey’s.” “Where did you find it?” “In the
+_Opium-eater_.” I remember cursing my memory because I had forgotten
+that passage. When I got home I looked through the copy I then had, and
+could not find the sentence. I wrote to my friend, saying I could not
+come upon his quotation. He answered that he now believed it did not
+occur in the body of the _Confessions_, but in a note in some edition,
+he could not remember which. What a sense of miserable desolation I had
+that this edition had never come my way!
+
+There are only three marks of any kind in my present copy of the
+_Confessions_, one dealing with the semi-voluntary power children have
+over the coming and going of phantoms painted on the darkness. This mark
+is very indistinct, and, as I remember nothing about it, I think it must
+have been made by accident. The part indicated by it is only
+introductory to an unmarked passage immediately following which has
+always fascinated my imagination. It is in the “Pains of Opium,” and
+runs:--
+
+     “In the middle of 1817, I think it was, that this faculty became
+     positively distressing to me: at night, when I lay awake in bed,
+     vast processions passed along in mournful pomp, friezes of
+     never-ending stories, that to my feelings were as sad and solemn as
+     if they were stories drawn from times before Œdipus and
+     Priam--before Tyre--before Memphis. And at the same time a
+     corresponding change took place in my dreams: a theatre seemed
+     suddenly opened and lighted up within my brain, which presented
+     nightly spectacles of more than earthly splendour.”
+
+How thankful we ought to be that it has never been our fate to sit in
+that awful theatre of prehistoric woes! There is surely nothing more
+appalling in the past than the interminably vain activities of that
+mysterious atomie, Egyptian man. Who could bear to look upon the three
+hundred thousand ant-like slaves swarming among the colossal monoliths
+piled up in thousands for the pyramid of Cheops! The bare thought makes
+one start back aghast and shudder.
+
+I find the next mark opposite another awful passage dealing with
+infinity, on this occasion infinity of numbers, not of time:--
+
+     “The waters now changed their character,--from translucent lakes,
+     shining like mirrors, they now became seas and oceans. And now came
+     a tremendous change, which, unfolding itself slowly like a scroll,
+     through many months, promised an abiding torment; and, in fact, it
+     never left me until the winding-up of my case. Hitherto the human
+     face had mixed often in my dreams, but not despotically, not with
+     any special power of tormenting. But now, that which I have called
+     the tyranny of the human face began to unfold itself. Perhaps some
+     part of my London life might be answerable for this. Be that as it
+     may, now it was that upon the rocking waters of the ocean the human
+     face began to appear: the sea appeared paved with innumerable
+     faces, upturned to the heavens--faces imploring, wrathful,
+     despairing, surged upwards by thousands, by myriads, by
+     generations, by centuries.”
+
+Upon closer looking, I see an attempt has been made to erase the mark
+opposite this passage. Joining the fact with the faintness of the line
+opposite the former quotation I am driven to the conclusion that there
+is only one “stetted” note of admiration in the book. It is a whole page
+of the little volume. It begins on page 91, and ends on page 92. To show
+you how little I care for my copy of the _Confessions_, I shall cut it
+out. Even a lawyer would pay me more than fourpence-halfpenny for
+copying a page of the book, and, as I have said before, the volume has
+no extrinsic value for me. Excepting the Bible, I am not familiar with
+any finer passage of so great length in prose in the English language:--
+
+     “The dream commenced with a music which now I often heard in
+     dreams; a music of preparation and awakening suspense; a music like
+     the opening of the Coronation Anthem, and which, like _that_, gave
+     the feeling of a vast march--of infinite cavalcades filing off--and
+     the tread of innumerable armies. The morning was come of a mighty
+     day--a day of crisis and of final hope for human nature, then
+     suffering some mysterious eclipse, and labouring in some dread
+     extremity. Somewhere, I knew not where--somehow, I knew not
+     how--by some beings, I knew not whom--a battle, a strife, an agony
+     was conducting, was evolving like a great drama, or piece of music;
+     with which my sympathy was the more insupportable from my confusion
+     as to its place, its cause, its nature, and its possible issue. I,
+     as is usual in dreams (where, of necessity, we make ourselves
+     central to every movement), had the power and yet had not the
+     power, to decide it. I had the power, if I could raise myself, to
+     will it; and yet again had not the power, for the weight of twenty
+     Atlantics was upon me, or the oppression of inexpiable guilt.
+     ‘Deeper than ever plummet sounded,’ I lay inactive. Then, like a
+     chorus, the passion deepened. Some greater interest was at stake;
+     some mightier cause than ever yet the sword had pleaded or trumpet
+     had proclaimed. Then came sudden alarms; hurryings to and fro;
+     trepidations of innumerable fugitives, I knew not whether from the
+     good cause or the bad; darkness and lights; tempest and human
+     faces; and at last, with the sense that all was lost, female forms,
+     and the features that were all the world to me, and but a moment
+     allowed, and clasped hands, and heart-breaking partings, and
+     then--everlasting farewells! and with a sigh such as the caves of
+     hell sighed when the incestuous mother uttered the abhorred name of
+     death, the sound was reverberated--everlasting farewells! and again
+     and yet again reverberated--everlasting farewells! And I awoke in
+     struggles, and cried aloud, ‘I will sleep no more!’”
+
+Upon reading this passage over I am glad I am not familiar with any
+finer one in English prose--it would be impossible to endure it. In
+these sentences it is not the consummate style alone that overwhelms
+one, the matter is nearly as fine as the manner. How tremendously the
+numbers and sentences are marshalled! How inevitable, overbearing,
+breathless is the onward movement! What awful expectations are aroused,
+and shadowy fears vaguely realized! As the spectral pageant moves on
+other cohorts of trembling shades join the ghostly legion on the blind
+march! All is vaporous, spectral, spiritual, until when we are wound up
+to the highest pitch of physical awe and apprehension, we stop suddenly,
+arrested by failure of the ground, insufficiency of the road, and are
+recalled to life and light and truth and fellowship with the kindly race
+of man by the despairing human shriek of incommunicable, inarticulable
+agony in the words, “I will sleep no more!” In that despairing cry the
+tortured soul abjectly confesses that it has been vanquished and driven
+wild by the spirit-world. It is when you contrast the finest passages
+in Macaulay with such a passage as this, that you recognise the
+difference between a clever writer and a great stylist.
+
+
+
+
+A GUIDE TO IGNORANCE.
+
+
+For a long time I have had it in my mind to write a guide to ignorance.
+I have been withheld partly by a feeling of diffidence and partly by a
+want of encouragement from those to whom I mentioned the scheme. I have
+submitted a plan of my book to a couple of publishers, but each of these
+assured me that such a work would not be popular. In their
+straightforward commercial way they told me they could see “no money in
+the idea.” I differ from them; I think the book would be greeted with
+acclaim and bought with avidity.
+
+Novelties are, I know, always dangerous speculations except in the form
+of clothes, when they are certain of instant and immense adoption. The
+mind of man cannot conceive the pattern for trousers’ cloth or the
+design for a bonnet that will not be worn. There is nothing too high or
+too low to set the fashion to men and women in dress. Conquerors were
+crowned with mural wreaths, of which the chimney-pot hat is the lineal
+descendant; pigs started the notion of wearing rings in their noses, and
+man in the southern seas followed the example; kangaroos were the
+earliest pouch-makers and ladies took to carrying reticules.
+
+But an innovation in the domain of education or thought is a widely
+different thing from a frolic in gear. It is easy to set going any craze
+which depends merely or mostly on the way of wearing the hair or the
+height of the cincture. Hence æstheticism gained many followers in a
+little time. But remember it took ages and ages to reconcile people to
+wearing any clothes at all. Once you break the ice the immersion in a
+new custom may become as rapid as the descent of a round shot into the
+sea. The great step was, so to speak, from woad to wampum, with just an
+Atlantic of time between the two. If you went to Poole any day this
+week and asked him to make you a suit of wampum he would plead no
+insuperable difficulty. If you asked him to make you a suit of woad he
+would certainly detain you while he inquired as to your sanity and sent
+for your friends. Yet it is only one step, one film, from woad to
+wampum.
+
+Up to this time in the history of man there has, with few exceptions,
+been an infatuated pursuit of this will-o’-the-wisp, knowledge. Why
+should not man now turn his glance to ignorance, if it were only for a
+little while and for the sake of fair play? The idea is of course
+revolutionary, so also is every other new idea revolutionary, and (I am
+not now referring to politics) it is only from revolutionary ideas we
+derive what we regard as advantages. The earth and heavens themselves
+are revolutionary. Why then should we not fairly examine the chance of a
+revolution in the aim of man?
+
+The disinclination to face new attitudes of thought comes from the
+inherent laziness of man, and hence at the outset of my career towards
+that guide I should find nearly the whole race against me. Humboldt, who
+met people of all climes and races and colours, declares laziness to be
+the most common vice of human nature. Hence the initial obstacle is
+almost insuperable. But it is only almost, not quite insuperable. Men
+can be stirred from indolence only by a prospect of profit in some form.
+Even in the Civil Service they are incited to make the effort to
+continue living by the hope of greater leisure later in life, for with
+years comes promotion and promotion means less labour.
+
+By a little industry in the pursuit of ignorance greater repose would be
+attained in the immediate future. It would be very difficult to prove
+that up to this hour progress has been of the slightest use or pleasure
+to man. Higher pleasures, higher pains. Complexities of consciousness
+are merely a source of distraction from centralisation. The jelly fish
+may, after all, be the highest ideal of living things, and we may, if
+the phrase be admitted, have been developing backward from him. Of all
+the creatures on earth man is the most stuck up. He arrogates
+everything to himself and because he can split a flint or make a bow or
+gun-barrel he thinks he centres the universe, and insists that the
+illimitable deeps of space are focused upon him. Astronomers, a highly
+respectable class of people, assert there are now visible to us one
+hundred million fixed stars, one hundred million suns like our own. Each
+may have its system of planets, such as earth, and each planet again its
+attendant satellites. With that splendid magnanimity characteristic of
+our race, man would rather pitch the hundred million suns into chaos
+than for a moment entertain the idea that he is a humbug and of no use
+whatever. And yet after all the jelly-fish may be a worthier fellow than
+the best of us.
+
+I do not of course insist on reversion to the jelly-fish. In this
+climate his habits of life are too suggestive of ague and rheumatism. In
+fact I do not know that I am urging reversion to anything, even to the
+flocks of pastoral man. But I am saying that as myriads of facilities
+are given for acquiring knowledge, one humble means ought to be devised
+for acquiring ignorance. If I had anywhere met with the encouragement
+which I think I merited, I should have undertaken to write the book
+myself.
+
+I should open by saying it was not until I had concluded a long and
+painful investigation that I considered myself in any way qualified to
+undertake so grave and important a task as writing a guide to ignorance:
+that I had not only inquired curiously into my own fitness, but had also
+looked about carefully among my friends in the hope of finding some one
+better qualified to carry out this important undertaking. But upon
+gauging the depth of my own knowledge and considering conscientiously
+the capacity of my acquaintances, I came to the conclusion that no man I
+knew personally had so close a personal intimacy with ignorance as
+myself. There are few branches, I may say no branch, of knowledge except
+that of ignorance in which any one of my friends was not more learned
+than myself. I was born in such profound ignorance that I had no
+personal knowledge of the fact at the time. I had existed for a long
+time before I could distinguish between myself and things which were
+not.
+
+As a boy I was averse from study; and since I have grown to manhood I
+have acquired so little substantive information that I could write down
+in a bold hand on one page of this book every single fact, outside facts
+of personal experience, of which I am possessed.
+
+I know that the Norman invasion occurred in 1066, and the Great Fire in
+1666. I know that gunpowder is composed of saltpetre, sulphur, and
+charcoal, and sausages of minced meat and bread under the name of Tommy.
+I am aware Milton and Shakespeare were poets, and that needle-grinders
+are short lived. I know that the primest brands of three-shilling
+champagnes are made in London. I can give the Latin for seven words, and
+the French for four. I can repeat the multiplication table (with the
+pence) up to six times. I know the mere names of a number of people and
+things; but, as far as clear and definite information goes, I don’t
+believe I could double the above brief list. I am, I think, therefore,
+warranted in concluding that few men can have a more close or exhaustive
+personal acquaintance with ignorance. If you want learning at secondhand
+you must go to the learned: if you want ignorance at first hand you
+cannot possibly do better than come to me.
+
+In the first place let us consider the “Injury of Knowledge.” How much
+better off the king would be if he had no knowledge! Suppose his mental
+ken had never been directed to any period before the dawn of his own
+memory, he would have no disquieting thoughts of the trouble into which
+Charles I. or Richard II. drifted. He would be filled with no envy of
+the good old King John, who, from four or five ounces of iron in the
+form of thumb-screws, and a few hundredweight of rich Jew, filled up the
+royal pockets as often as they showed any signs of growing empty. And,
+above all, he would be spared the misery of committing dates to memory.
+How it must limit the happiness of a constitutional sovereign to know
+anything about the constitution! Why should he be burdened with the
+consciousness of rights and prerogatives? Would he not be much happier
+if he might smoke his cigar in his garden without the fear of the
+Speaker or the Lord Chancellor before his eyes? The Commons want their
+Speaker, the Lords want their Lord Chancellor--let them have them. The
+king wants neither. Why should he be troubled with any knowledge of
+either? Although he is a king is he not a man and a brother also? Why
+should he be worried out of his life with reasons for all he does? The
+king feels he can do no wrong. That ought to be enough for him. Most men
+believe the same thing of themselves, but few others share the faith.
+The king can do no wrong, then in mercy’s name let the man alone.
+Suppose it is a part of my duty to look out of the oriel window at dawn,
+noon, and sunset, why should I be bored with cause, reason, and
+precedent for this? Let me look out of window if it is my duty to do so;
+but, before and after looking out of the window, let me enjoy my life.
+
+Take the statesman. How knowledge must hamper him! He is absolutely
+precluded from acting with decision by the consciousness of the
+difficulties which lay in the path of his predecessors. He has to make
+up his subject, to get facts and figures from his subordinates and
+others. He has to arrange the party manœuvres before he launches his
+scheme, by which time all the energy is gone out of him, and he has not
+half as much faith in his bill as if he had never looked at the _pros_
+and _cons_. “Never mind manœuvring, but go at them,” said Nelson. The
+moment you begin to manœuvre you confess your doubtfulness of
+success, unless you can take your adversary at a disadvantage; but if
+you fly headlong at his throat, you terrify him by the display of your
+confidence and valour.
+
+The words of Nelson apply still more closely to the general. His
+knowledge that fifty years ago the British army was worsted on this
+field, unnerves, paralyses him. If he did not know that shells are
+explosive and bullets deadly, he would make his dispositions with twice
+the confidence, and his temerity would fill the foe with panic. His
+simple duty is to defeat the enemy, and knowing anything beyond this
+only tends to distract his mind and weaken his arm. In the middle of one
+of his Indian battles, and when he thought the conflict had been decided
+in favour of British arms, a messenger rode hastily up to the general in
+command, who was wiping his reeking forehead on his coat-sleeve: “A
+large fresh force of the enemy has appeared in such a place; what is to
+be done?” Gough rubbed his forehead with the other sleeve, and shouted
+out, “Beat ’em!” Obviously no better command could have been given. What
+the English nation wanted the English army to do with the enemy was to
+“beat ’em.” In the pictures of the Victoria Cross there is one of a
+young dandy officer with an eyeglass in his eye and a sword in his hand,
+among the thick of the foe. He knows he is in that place to kill some
+one. He is quite ignorant of the fact that the enemy is there to kill
+him, and he is taking his time and looking through his eyeglass to try
+to find some enticing man through whom to run his sword. One of
+Wellington’s most fervent prayers was, “Oh, spare me my dandy officers!”
+Now dandies are never very full of knowledge, and yet the greatest Duke
+thought more of them than of your learning-begrimed sappers or your
+science-bespattered gunners.
+
+If an advocate at the bar knew one quarter of the law of the land, he
+could never get on. In the first place, he would know more than the
+judges, and this would prejudice the bench against him. With regard to a
+barrister, the best position for him to assume, if he is addressing a
+jury, is, “Gentlemen, the indisputable facts of the case, as stated to
+you by the witnesses, are so-and-so. In presence of so distinguished a
+lawyer as occupies the bench in this court, I do not feel myself
+qualified to tell you what the law is; that will be the easy duty of his
+lordship.” Even in Chancery cases, the barrister would best insure
+success by merely citing the precedent cases, in an off-hand way, “Does
+not your lordship think the case of Burke _v._ Hare meets the exact
+conditions of the one under consideration?” The indices are all the
+pleader need look at. The judge will surely strain a point for one who
+does not bore him with extracts and arguments, but leaves all to
+himself, and lets the work of the court run smoothly and just as the
+president wishes.
+
+Knowledge is an absolute hindrance to the doctor of medicine. Supposing
+he is a man of average intelligence (some doctors are), he is able to
+diagnose, let me say, fever. You or I could diagnose fever pretty
+well--quick pulse, dry skin, thirst, and so on. But as the doctor leans
+over the patient, he is paralysed by the complication of his knowledge.
+Such a theory is against feeding up, such a theory against slops, such a
+theory against bleeding, such a theory in favour of phlebotomy; there
+are the wet and the dry, the hot and the cold methods; and while the
+doctor is deliberating, vacillating, or speculating, the patient has
+ample opportunity of dying, or nature of stepping in and curing the man,
+and thus foiling the doctor. Is there not much more sense and candour in
+the method adopted by the Irish hunting dispensary doctor, who, before
+starting with the hounds, locked up all drugs, except the Glauber’s
+salts, a stone or two of which he left in charge of his servant, with
+instructions it was to be meted out impartially to all comers, each
+patient receiving an honest fistful as a dose? It is a remarkable fact
+that within this century homœopathy has gained a firm hold on an
+important section of the community, and yet, notwithstanding the growth
+of what the allopathists or regular profession regard as ignorant
+quackery, the span of human life has had six years added to it in eighty
+years. Still homœopathy is a practical confession of ignorance; for
+it says, in effect, “We don’t know exactly what Nature is trying to do,
+but let us give her a little help, and trust in luck.” Whereas allopathy
+pretended to know everything and to fight Nature. Here, in the result of
+years added to man’s life by the development of the ignorant system, we
+see once more the superiority of ignorance over knowledge.
+
+How full of danger to the unwedded men is knowledge owned by the widow!
+She has knowledge of the married state, in which she was far removed
+from all the troubles and responsibilities of life. She had her
+pin-money, her bills paid, stalls taken for her at the opera, agreeable
+company around her board, no occasion to face money difficulties. Now
+all that is changed. There is no elasticity in her revenue, no margin
+for the gratification of her whims; she has to pay her own bills, secure
+her own stalls; she cannot very well entertain company often, and all
+the unpleasantnesses of business matters press her sorely. Her knowledge
+tells her that, if she could secure a second husband, all would be
+pleasant again. It may be said that here knowledge is in favour of the
+widow. Yes; but it is against the “Community.” Remember, the “Community”
+is always a male.
+
+There is hardly any class or member of the community that does not
+suffer drawback or injury from knowledge. As I am giving only a crude
+outline of a design, I leave a great deal to the imagination of the
+reader. He will easily perceive how much happier and more free would be
+the man of business, the girl, the boy, the scientist, the
+controversialist, and, above all, the literary man, if each knew little
+or nothing, instead of having pressed upon the attention from youth
+accumulated experiences, traditions, discoveries, and reasonings of many
+centuries.
+
+To the “Delights of Ignorance,” I should devote the consideration of man
+devoid of knowledge under various circumstances and in various
+positions.
+
+By the sea who does not love to lie “propt on beds of amaranth and moly,
+how sweet (while warm airs lull, blowing lowly), with half-dropt eyelids
+still, beneath a heaven dark and holy, to watch the long bright river
+drawing slowly his waters from the purple hill--to hear the dewy echoes
+calling from cave to cave through the thick-twined vine--to watch the
+emerald-coloured waters falling through many a woven acanthus wreath
+divine! Only to see and hear the far-off sparkling brine, only to hear
+were sweet, stretched out beneath the pine.” Just so! Is not that much
+better than bothering about gravitation and that wretched old clinker
+the moon, and the tides, and how sea-water is made up of oxygen and
+hydrogen and chloride of sodium and bromide of something else, and fifty
+other things, not one of which has a tolerable smell when you meet it in
+a laboratory? Isn’t it better than thinking of the number of lighthouses
+built on the coast of Albion, and the tonnage which yearly is reported
+and cleared at the custom-houses of London, Liverpool, and that
+prosperous seaport of Bohemia! Isn’t it much better than improving the
+occasion by reading a hand-book on hydraulics or hydrostatics? Who on
+the seashore wants to know anything? There will always, down to the last
+syllable of recorded time, be finer things unknown about the sea than
+can be said about all other matters in the world. Trying to know
+anything about the sea is like shooting into the air an arrow attached
+to a pennyworth of string with a view to sounding space. If we threw all
+the knowledge we have into the ocean the Admiralty standards of
+high-water mark would not have to be altered one-millionth part of a
+line.
+
+What a blessing ignorance would be in an inn! Who would not dispense
+with a knowledge of all the miseries that follow in the wake of the vat
+when one is thirsty, and has before him amber sunset-coloured ale, and
+in his hand a capacious, long, cool-meaning churchwarden? Who would at
+such a moment cumber his mind with the unit of specific gravity used by
+excisemen in testing beer? Who would at such a moment care to calculate
+the toll exacted by the Chancellor of the Exchequer before each cool
+gulp may thrill with amazing joy the parched gullet?
+
+Who, when upon a journey, would care to know the precise pressure
+required to blow the boiler of the engine to pieces, or the number of
+people killed in collisions during the corresponding quarter of last
+year? Should we not be better in sickness for not knowing the exact
+percentage of deaths in cases of our class? In adversity should we not
+be infinitely happier were we in ignorance of the chance we ran of
+gaining a good position or of cutting our throats? Should we not enjoy
+our prosperity all the more if we were not, morning and evening,
+exercised by the fluctuations of the share-list, fluctuations in all
+likelihood destined never to increase or diminish our fortunes one
+penny? And oh, for ignorance in sleep! For sleep without dream, or
+nightmare, or memory! For sleep such as falls upon the body when the
+soul is done with it and away!
+
+But all this is only rambling talk and likely to come to nothing. I fear
+I shall never find a publisher for my great work. Upon reading over what
+I have written I am impressed by the faintness of the outline it
+displays of the book. In fact there is hardly any outline at all. It is
+no more clear than the figures thrown by a magic-lantern upon a fog. I
+have done nothing more than wave the sacred lamp of ignorance before
+your eyes. I daresay my friend the jelly-fish would shake his fat sides
+with laughter if he became aware of this futile effort to show how far
+we are removed from his state of blissful calm. I feel infinitely
+depressed and discouraged. I feel that not only will I not be hailed as
+a prophet in my own country, but that the age will have nothing to do
+with my scheme. It may be thought by many that there is something like
+treason in thus enrolling oneself under the banner of the jelly-fish.
+Egypt, Assyria, Greece, Carthage, and Rome have gone back from
+knowledge, and even the jelly-fish does not flourish on their sites. But
+is the condition of their sites the worse for lacking the jelly-fish?
+Perhaps the “silence, and desolation, and dim night” are better in those
+places than the blare of trumpets and the tramp of man. So far as we
+know man is the only being capable of doing evil or offending heaven.
+His absence may by nature be considered very good company. Whatever part
+of earth he can handle and move he has turned topsy-turvy. One day earth
+will turn on him and wipe him out altogether.
+
+For me and my great scheme for the book there is no hope. Man has always
+been accounted a poor creature when judged by a fellow man whom he does
+not appreciate. How can I be expected to go on taking an interest in
+man when not the most credulous or the most crafty publisher in London
+will as much as look at my _Guide to Ignorance_? I feel that my life is
+wasted and that my functions have been usurped by the School Board. I
+cool the air with sighs for the days when a philosopher might teach his
+disciples in the porch or the grove. I feel as if I could anticipate
+earth and turn on man. But some of the genial good nature of the
+jelly-fish still lingers in my veins. I will not finally desert man
+until man has finally deserted me. I had by me a few scattered essays in
+the style of the book I projected in vain. If in them the reader has not
+found ample proof of my fitness to inculcate the philosophy of Ignorance
+I shall abandon Man to his fate. I have relieved my mind of some of its
+teeming store of vacuity. I can scarcely hope I have added to the
+reader’s hoard. But it would be consoling to fancy that upon laying down
+this book the reader’s mind will if possible be still more empty than
+when he took it up.
+
+                        RICHARD CLAY AND SONS,
+                          LONDON AND BUNGAY.
+
+
+Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
+
+the face of a charletan=> the face of a charlatan {pg 13}
+
+acccording to Mitchel=> acccording to Mitchel {pg 140}
+
+are focussed upon him.=> are focused upon him. {pg 179}
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Ignorant Essays, by Richard Dowling
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Ignorant Essays, by Richard Dowling
+
+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/license
+
+
+Title: Ignorant Essays
+
+Author: Richard Dowling
+
+Release Date: September 29, 2016 [EBook #53169]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IGNORANT ESSAYS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Chuck Greif, MFR and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+<hr class="full" />
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/cover.jpg" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="c">IGNORANT ESSAYS.</p>
+
+<h1>IGNORANT<br /><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;">ESSAYS.</span></h1>
+
+<p class="cb"><img src="images/colophon.jpg"
+width="200"
+alt="text decoration unavailable." /><br />
+<br /><br />
+LONDON:<br />
+<br />
+WARD AND DOWNEY,<br />
+<br />
+12, YORK STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C.<br />
+<br />
+1887.<br />
+<br />
+[<i>All Rights Reserved.</i>]<br />
+<br /><br />
+<small><span class="smcap">Richard Clay and Sons</span>,<br />
+
+LONDON AND BUNGAY.</small></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS"></a>CONTENTS.</h2>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td><td class="rt"><small>PAGE</small></td></tr>
+<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#THE_ONLY_REAL_GHOST_IN_FICTION">THE ONLY REAL GHOST IN FICTION</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_1">1</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#THE_BEST_TWO_BOOKS">THE BEST TWO BOOKS</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_30">30</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#LIES_OF_FABLE_AND_ALLEGORY">LIES OF FABLE AND ALLEGORY</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_55">55</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#MY_COPY_OF_KEATS">MY COPY OF KEATS</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_83">83</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#DECAY_OF_THE_SUBLIME">DECAY OF THE SUBLIME</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_117">117</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#A_BORROWED_POET">A BORROWED POET</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_132">132</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#THE_ENGLISH_OPIUM-EATER">THE ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_160">160</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#A_GUIDE_TO_IGNORANCE">A GUIDE TO IGNORANCE</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_175">175</a></td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_1" id="page_1"></a>{1}</span>&nbsp; </p>
+
+<p class="cb"><big><big>IGNORANT ESSAYS.</big></big></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_ONLY_REAL_GHOST_IN_FICTION" id="THE_ONLY_REAL_GHOST_IN_FICTION"></a>THE ONLY REAL GHOST IN FICTION.</h2>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">My</span> most ingenious friend met me one day, and asked me whether I
+considered I should be richer if I had the ghost of sixpence or if I had
+not the ghost of sixpence.</p>
+
+<p>“What side do you take?” I inquired, for I knew his disputatious turn.</p>
+
+<p>“I am ready to take either,” he answered; “but I give preference to the
+ghost.”</p>
+
+<p>“What!” I said. “Give preference to the ghost!”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes. You see, if I haven’t the ghost of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_2" id="page_2"></a>{2}</span> sixpence I have nothing at
+all; but if I have the ghost of a sixpence&mdash;&mdash;”</p>
+
+<p>“Well?”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, I am the richer by having the ghost of a sixpence.”</p>
+
+<p>“And do you think when you add one more delusion to those under which
+you already labour”&mdash;he and I could never agree about the difference
+between infinity and zero&mdash;“that you will be the better off?”</p>
+
+<p>“I have not admitted a ghost is a delusion; and even if I had I am not
+prepared to grant that a delusion may not be a source of wealth. Look at
+the South Sea Bubble.”</p>
+
+<p>I was willing, so there and then we fell to and were at the question&mdash;or
+rather, the questions to which it led&mdash;for hours, until we finally
+emerged upon the crystallization of cast-iron, the possibility of a
+Napoleonic restoration, or some other kindred matter. How we wandered
+about and writhed in that talk I can no more remember than I can recall
+the first articulate words that fell into my life. I know we handled
+ghosts (it was broad day and in a public street)<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_3" id="page_3"></a>{3}</span> with a freedom and
+familiarity that must have been painful to spirits of refinement and
+reserve. I know we said much about dreams, and compared the phantoms of
+the open lids with the phantoms of the closed eyes, and pitted them one
+against another like cocks in a main, and I remember that the case of
+the dreamer in Boswell’s Johnson came up between us. The case in Boswell
+submitted to Johnson as an argument in favour of a man’s reason being
+more acute in sleep than in waking, showed the phantom antagonistic able
+to floor the dreamer in his proper person. Johnson laughed at such a
+delusion, for, he pointed out, only the dreamer was besotted with sleep
+he would have perceived that he himself had furnished the confounding
+arguments to the shadowy disputant. That is very good, and seems quite
+conclusive as far as it goes; but is there nothing beyond what Johnson
+saw? Was there no ghostly prompter in the scene? No <i>suggeritore</i>
+invisible and inaudible to the dreamer, who put words and notes into the
+mouth of the opponent? No thinner shade than the spectral being visible
+in the dream? If in our waking<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_4" id="page_4"></a>{4}</span> hours we are subject to phantoms which
+sometimes can be seen and sometimes cannot, why not in our sleeping
+hours also? Are all ghosts of like grossness, or do some exist so fine
+as to be beyond our carnal apprehension, and within the ken only of the
+people of our sleep? If we ponderable mortals are haunted, who can say
+that our insubstantial midnight visitors may not know wraiths finer and
+subtler than we, may not be haunted as we are? In physical life
+parasites have parasites. Why in phantom life should not ghosts have
+ghosts?</p>
+
+<p>The firm, familiar earth&mdash;our earth of this time, the earth upon which
+we each of us stand at this moment&mdash;is thickly peopled with living
+tangible folk who can eat, and drink, and talk, and sing, and walk, and
+draw cheques, and perform a number of other useful, and hateful, and
+amusing actions. In the course of a day a man meets, let us say, forty
+people, with whom he exchanges speech. If a man is a busy dreamer, with
+how many people in the course of one night does he exchange speech? Ten,
+a hundred, a thousand? In the dreaming of one<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_5" id="page_5"></a>{5}</span> minute by the clock a man
+may converse with half the children of Adam since the Fall! The command
+of the greatest general alive would not furnish sentries and vedettes
+for the army of spirits that might visit one man in the interval between
+one beat of the pendulum of Big Ben and another!</p>
+
+<p>Shortly after that talk with my friend about the ghost of the sixpence,
+I was walking alone through one of the narrow lanes in the tangle of
+ways between Holborn and Fleet Street, when my eye was caught by the
+staring white word “Dreams” on a black ground. The word is, so to speak,
+printed in white on the black cover of a paper-bound book, and under the
+word “Dreams” are three faces, also printed in white on a black ground.
+Two of the faces are those of women: one of a young woman, purporting to
+be beautiful, with a star close to her forehead, and the other of a
+witch with the long hair and disordered eyes becoming to a person of her
+occupation. I dare say these two women are capable not only of
+justification, but of the simplest explanation. For all I know<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_6" id="page_6"></a>{6}</span> to the
+contrary, the composition may be taken wholly, or in part, from a
+well-known picture, or perhaps some canon of ghostly lore would be
+violated if any other design appeared on the cover. About such matters I
+know absolutely nothing. The word “Dreams” and the two female faces are
+now much less prominent than when I saw the book first, for, Goth that I
+am, long ago I dipped a brush in ink and ran a thin wash over the
+letters and the two faces; as they were, to use artist’s phrases, in
+front of the third face, and killing it.</p>
+
+<p>The third face is that of a man, a young man clean shaven and handsome,
+with no ghastliness or look of austerity. His arms are resting on a
+ledge, and extend from one side of the picture to the other. The left
+arm lies partly under the right, and the left hand is clenched softly
+and retired in half shadow. The right arm rises slightly as it crosses
+the picture, and the right wrist and hand ride on the left. The fore and
+middle fingers are apart, and point forward and a little downward,
+following the sleeve of the other arm. The third finger droops<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_7" id="page_7"></a>{7}</span> still
+more downward, and the little finger, with a ring on it, lies directly
+perpendicular along the cuff of the sleeve beneath. The hand is not well
+drawn, and yet there is some weird suggestiveness in the purposeless
+dispersion of the fingers.</p>
+
+<p>Fortunately upon my coming across the book, the original cost of which
+was one shilling, I had more than the ghost of a sixpence, and for
+two-thirds of that sum the book became mine. It is the only art purchase
+I ever made on the spur of the moment; I knew nothing of the book then,
+and know little of it now. It says it is the cut-down edition of a much
+larger work, and what I have read of it is foolish. The worst of the
+book is that it does not afford subject for a laugh. Thomas Carlyle is
+reported to have said in conversation respecting one of George Eliot’s
+latest stories that “it was not amusing, and it was not instructive; it
+was only dull&mdash;dull.” This book of dreams is only dull. However, there
+are some points in it that may be referred to, as this is an idle time.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_8" id="page_8"></a>{8}</span></p>
+
+<p>“To dream you see an angel or angels is very good, and to dream that you
+yourself are one is much better.” The noteworthy thing in connection
+with this passage being that nothing is said of the complexion of the
+angel or angels! Black or white it is all the same. You have only to
+dream of them and be happy. “To dream that you play upon bagpipes,
+signifies trouble, contention, and being overthrown at law.” Doubtless
+from the certainty, in civilised parts, of being prosecuted by your
+neighbours as a public nuisance. I would give a trifle to know a man who
+did dream that he played upon the bagpipes. Of course, it is quite
+possible he might be an amiable man in other ways.</p>
+
+<p>“To dream you have a beard long, thick, and unhandsome is of a good
+signification to an orator, or an ambassador, lawyer, philosopher or any
+who desires to speak well or to learn arts and sciences.” That
+“ambassador” gleams like a jewel among the other homely folk. I remember
+once seeing a newspaper contents-bill after a dreadful accident with the
+words<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_9" id="page_9"></a>{9}</span> “Death of fifty-seven people and a peer.” “To dream that you have
+a brow of brass, copper, marble, or iron signifies irreconcilable hatred
+against your enemies.” The man capable of such a dream I should like to
+see&mdash;but through bars of metal made from his own sleep-zoned forehead.
+“If any one dreams that he hath encountered a cat or killed one, he will
+commit a thief to prison and prosecute him to the death; for the cat
+signifies a common thief.” Mercy on us! Does the magistrate who commits
+usually prosecute, and is thieving a hanging matter now? This is
+necromancy or nothing; prophecy, inspiration, or something out of the
+common indeed.</p>
+
+<p>“To dream one plays or sees another play on a clavicord, shows the death
+of relations, or funeral obsequies.” I now say with feelings of the most
+profound gratitude that I never to my knowledge even saw a clavicord. I
+do not know what the beastly, ill-omened contrivance is like. The most
+recondite musical instrument I ever remember to have performed on is the
+Jew’s harp; and although there seems to be something<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_10" id="page_10"></a>{10}</span> weak, uncandid and
+treacherous in the spelling of “clavicord,” I presume the two are not
+identical. In any case I am safe, for I have never dreamed of playing
+even on the Jew’s harp. Here however is a cheerful promise from a
+painful experience&mdash;one wants something encouraging after that
+terrifying “clavicord.” “For a man to dream that his flesh is full of
+corns, shows that a man will grow rich proportionately to his corns.” I
+can breathe freely once more, having got away from outlandish musical
+instruments and within the influence of the familiar horn.</p>
+
+<p>As might be expected, it is not useful to dream about the devil. Let
+sleeping dogs lie. “To dream of eating human flesh” is also a bad way of
+spending the hours of darkness. It is lucky to dream you are a fool. You
+see, even in sleep, the virtue of candour brings reward. “To dream that
+you lose your keys signifies anger.” And very naturally too. “To dream
+you kill your father is a bad sign.” I had made up my mind not to go
+beyond the parricide, but I am lured on to quote this, “To dream of
+eating<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_11" id="page_11"></a>{11}</span> mallows, signifies exemption from trouble and dispatch of
+business, because this herb renders the body soluble.” I will not say
+that Nebuchadnezzar may not at one time have eaten mallows among other
+unusual herbs, but I never did. That however is not where the wonder
+creeps in. It is at the reason. If you eat mallows you will have no
+trouble <i>because</i> this herb renders the body <i>soluble</i>. Why is it good
+to render the body soluble, and what is the body soluble in? One more
+and I am done. “To dream one plays, or sees another play, upon the
+virginals, signifies the death of relations, or funeral obsequies.” From
+bagpipes, clavicords, and virginals, we hope we may be protected. And
+yet if these are the only instruments banned, a person having an
+extensive acquaintance with wind and string instruments of the orchestra
+may be musical in slumber without harm to himself or threat to his
+friends.</p>
+
+<p>In the interpretation of dreams Artemidorus was the most learned man
+that ever lived. He gave the best part of his life to collecting matter
+about dreams, and this he afterwards<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_12" id="page_12"></a>{12}</span> put together in five books. He
+might better have spent his time in bottling shadows of the moon.</p>
+
+<p>It was however for the face of the man on the cover that I bought and
+have kept the book. The face is that of a man between thirty and
+thirty-five years of age. It is regular and handsome. The forehead leans
+slightly forward, and the lower part of the face is therefore a little
+foreshortened. It is looking straight out of the picture; the shadows
+fall on the left of the face, on the right as it fronts you. The nose is
+as long and broad-backed as the nose of the Antinous. The mouth is large
+and firm and well-shaping with lips neither thick nor thin. The interval
+between the nostrils and verge of the upper lip is short. The chin is
+gently pointed and prominent. The outline of the jaws square. The
+modelling of the left cheek is defectively emphasised at the line from
+above the hollow of the nostrils downward and backward. The brows are
+straight, the left one being slightly more arched than the right. The
+forehead is low, broad, compact, hard, with<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_13" id="page_13"></a>{13}</span> clear lines. The lower line
+of the temples projects beyond the perpendicular. The hair is thick and
+wavy and divided at the left side, depressed rather than divided, for
+the parting is visible no further up the head than a splay letter V.</p>
+
+<p>The eyes are wide open, and notwithstanding the obtuse angle made by the
+facial line in the forward pose of the head, they are looking out level
+with their own height upon the horizon. There is no curiosity or
+speculation in the eyes. There is no wonder or doubt; no fear or joy.
+The gaze is heavy. There is a faint smile, the faintest smile the human
+face is capable of displaying, about the mouth. There is no light in the
+eyes. The expression of the whole face is infinitely removed from
+sinister. In it there is kindliness with a touch of wisdom and pity. It
+asks no question; desires to say no word. It is the face of one who
+beyond all doubt knows things we do not know, things which can scarcely
+be shaped into words, things we are in ignorance of. It is not the face
+of a charlatan, a seer, or a prophet.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_14" id="page_14"></a>{14}</span></p>
+
+<p>It is the face of a man once ardent and hopeful, to whom everything that
+is to be known has lately been revealed, and who has come away from the
+revelation with feelings of unassuageable regret and sorrow for Man. It
+says with terrible calmness, “I have seen all, and there is nothing in
+it. For your own sakes let me be mute. Live you your lives. <i>Miserere
+nobis!</i>”</p>
+
+<p>My belief is that the extraordinary expression of that face is an
+accident, a happy chance, a result that the artist never foresaw. Who
+drew the cover I cannot tell. No initials appear on it and I have never
+made inquiries. Remember that in pictures and poems (I know nothing of
+music), what is a miracle to you, has in most cases been a miracle to
+the painter or poet also. Any poet can explain how he makes a poem, but
+no poet can explain how he makes poetry. He is simply writing a poem and
+the poetry glides or rushes in. When it comes he is as much astonished
+by it as you are. The poem may cost him infinite trouble, the poetry he
+gets as a free gift. He begins a poem to prepare himself<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_15" id="page_15"></a>{15}</span> for the
+reception of poetry or to induce its flow. His poem is only a
+lightning-rod to attract a fluid over which he has no control before it
+comes to him. There may be a poetic art, such as verse-making, but to
+talk about the art of poetry is to talk nonsense. It is men of genteel
+intellects who speak of the art of poetry. The man who wrote the <i>Art of
+Poetry</i> knew better than to credit the possible existence of any such
+art. He himself says the poet is born, not made.</p>
+
+<p>I am very bad at dates, but I think Le Fanu wrote <i>Green Tea</i> before a
+whole community of Canadian nuns were thrown into the most horrible
+state of nervous misery by excessive indulgence in that drug. Of all the
+horrible tales that are not revolting, <i>Green Tea</i> is I think the most
+horrible. The bare statement that an estimable and pious man is haunted
+by the ghost of a monkey is at the first blush funny. But if you have
+not read the story read it, and see how little of fun is in it. The
+horror of the tale lies in the fact that this apparition of a monkey is
+the only <i>probable</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_16" id="page_16"></a>{16}</span> ghost in fiction. I have not the book by me as I
+write, and I cannot recall the victim’s name, but he is a clergyman,
+and, as far as we know to the contrary, a saint. There is no reason <i>on
+earth</i> why he should be pursued by this malignant spectre. He has
+committed no crime, no sin even. He labours with all the sincerity of a
+holy man to regain his health and exorcise his foe. He is as crimeless
+as you or I and infinitely more faultless. He has not deserved his fate,
+yet he is driven in the end to cut his throat, and you excuse <i>that</i>
+crime by saying he is mad.</p>
+
+<p>I do not think any additional force is gained in the course of this
+unique story by the importation of malignant irreverence to Christianity
+in the latter manifestations of the ape. I think the apparition is at
+its best and most terrible when it is simply an indifferent pagan,
+before it assumes the <i>rôle</i> of antichrist. This ape is at his best as a
+mind-destroyer when the clergyman, going down the avenue in the
+twilight, raised his eyes and finds the awful presence preceding him
+along the top of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_17" id="page_17"></a>{17}</span> wall. There the clergyman reaches the acme of
+piteous, unsupportable horror. In the pulpit with the brute, the priest
+is fighting against the devil. In the avenue he has not the
+strengthening or consoling reflection that he is defending a cause,
+struggling against hell. The instant motive enters into the story the
+situation ceases to be dramatic and becomes merely theatrical. Every
+“converted” tinker will tell you stirring stories of his wrestling with
+Satan, forgetting that it takes two to fight, and what a loathsome
+creature he himself is. But the conflict between a good man and the
+unnecessary apparition of this ape is pathetic, horribly pathetic, and
+full of the dramatic despair of the finest tragedy.</p>
+
+<p>It is desirable at this point to focus some scattered words that have
+been set down above. The reason this apparition of the ape appears
+probable is <i>because</i> it is unnecessary. Any one can understand why
+Macbeth should see that awful vision at the banquet. The apparition of
+the murdered dead is little more than was to be expected, and can be
+explained<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_18" id="page_18"></a>{18}</span> in an easy fashion. You or I never committed murder,
+therefore we are not liable to be troubled by the ghost of Banquo. In
+your life or mine Nemesis is not likely to take heroic dimensions. The
+spectres of books, as a rule, only excite our imaginative fears, not our
+personal terrors. The spectres of books have and can have nothing to do
+with us any more than the sufferings of the Israelites in the desert.
+When a person of our acquaintance dies, we inquire the particulars of
+his disease, and then discover the predisposing causes, so that we may
+prove to ourselves we are not in the same category with him. We do not
+deny our liability to contract the disease, we deny our likelihood to
+supply the predisposing causes. He died of aneurysm of the aorta: Ah, we
+say, induced by the violent exercise he took&mdash;we never take violent
+exercise. If not of aneurysm of the aorta, but fatty degeneration of the
+heart: Ah, induced by the sedentary habits of his latter years&mdash;we take
+care to secure plenty of exercise. If a man has been careful of his
+health and dies, we allege that he took all the robustness out of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_19" id="page_19"></a>{19}</span> his
+constitution by over-heedfulness; if he has been careless, we say he
+took no precautions at all; and from either of these extremes we are
+exempt, and therefore we shall live for ever.</p>
+
+<p>Now here in this story of <i>Green Tea</i> is a ghost which is possible,
+probable, almost familiar. It is a ghost without genesis or
+justification. The gods have nothing to do with it. Something, an
+accident due partly to excessive tea-drinking, has happened to the
+clergyman’s nerves, and the ghost of this ape glides into his life and
+sits down and abides with him. There is no reason why the ghost should
+be an ape. When the victim sees the apparition first he does not know it
+to be an ape. He is coming home in an omnibus one night and descries two
+gleaming spots of fire in the dark, and from that moment the life of the
+poor gentleman becomes a ruin. It is a thing that may happen to you or
+me any day, any hour. That is why Le Fanu’s ghost is so horrible. You
+and I might drink green tea to the end of our days and suffer from
+nothing more than ordinary impaired digestion. But you or I may get a
+fall, or a sunstroke, and ever afterwards<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_20" id="page_20"></a>{20}</span> have some hideous familiar.
+To say there can be no such things as ghosts is a paltry blasphemy. It
+is a theory of the smug, comfortable kind. A ghost need not wear a white
+sheet and have intelligible designs on personal property. A ghost need
+not be the spirit of a dead person. A ghost need have no moral mission
+whatever.</p>
+
+<p>I once met a haunted man, a man who had seen a real ghost; a ghost that
+had, as the ape, no ascertainable moral mission but to drive his victim
+mad. In this case too the victim was a clergyman. He is, I believe,
+alive and well now. He has shaken off the incubus and walks a free man.
+I was travelling at the time, and accidentally got into chat with him on
+the deck of a steamboat by night. We were quite alone in the darkness
+and far from land when he told me his extraordinary story. I do not of
+course intend retailing it here. I look on it as a private
+communication. I asked him what brought him to the mental plight in
+which he had found himself, and he answered briefly, “Overwork.” He was
+then convalescent, and had been assured by his physicians that with
+care<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_21" id="page_21"></a>{21}</span> the ghost which had been laid would appear no more. The spectre he
+saw threatened physical harm, and while he was haunted by it he went in
+constant dread of death by violence. It had nothing good or bad to do
+with his ordinary life or his sacred calling. It had no foundation on
+fact, no basis on justice. He had been for months pursued by the figure
+of a man threatening to take away his life. He did not believe this man
+had any corporeal existence. He did not know whether the creature had
+the power to kill him or not. The figure was there in the attitude of
+menace and would not be banished. He knew that no one but himself could
+see the murderous being. That ghost was there for him, and there for him
+alone.</p>
+
+<p>Respecting the Canadian nuns whose convent was beleaguered and infested
+by ghostly enemies that came not by ones or twos but in battalions, I
+had a fancy at the time. I do not intend using the terminologies or
+theories of the dissecting room, or the language of physiology found in
+books. I am not sure the fancy is wholly my own, but some of it is
+original.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_22" id="page_22"></a>{22}</span> I shall suppose that the nerves are not only capable of
+various conditions of health and disease, but of large structural
+alteration in life; structural alteration not yet recorded or observed
+in fact; structural alteration which, if you will, exists in life but
+disappears instantly at death. In fine, I mean rather to illustrate my
+fancy than to describe anything that exists or could exist. Before
+letting go the last strand of sense, let me say that talking of nerves
+being highly strung is sheer nonsense, and not good nonsense either. The
+muscles it is that are highly strung. The poor nerves are merely
+insulated wires from the battery in the head. Their tension is no more
+affected by the messages that go over them, than an Atlantic cable is
+tightened or loosened by the signals indicating fluctuations in the
+Stock Exchanges of London and New York.</p>
+
+<p>The nerves, let us suppose, in their normal condition of health have
+three skins over the absolute sentient tissue. In the ideal man in
+perfect health, let us say Hodge, the man whose privilege it is to “draw
+nutrition, propagate, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_23" id="page_23"></a>{23}</span> rot,” the three skins are always at their
+thickest and toughest. Now genius is a disease, and it falls, as ladies
+of Mrs. Gamp’s degree say, “on the nerves.” That is, the first of these
+skins having been worn away or never supplied by nature, the patient
+“sees visions and dreams dreams.” The man of genius is not exactly under
+delusions. He does not think he is in China because he is writing of
+Canton in London, but his optic nerve, wanting the outer coating, can
+build up images out of statistics until the images are as full of line
+and colour and as incapable of change at will as the image of a barrel
+of cider which occupies Hodge’s retina when it is imminent to his
+desires, present to his touch. The sensibility of the nerves of genius
+is greater than the sensibility of the nerves of Hodge. Not all the
+eloquence of an unabridged dictionary could create an image in Hodge’s
+mind of a thing he had never seen. From a brief description a painter of
+genius could make a picture&mdash;not a likeness of course&mdash;of Canton,
+although he had never been outside the four corners of these kingdoms.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_24" id="page_24"></a>{24}</span>
+The painting would not, in all likelihood, be in the least like Canton,
+but it would be very like the image formed in the painter’s mind of that
+city. In the painter such an image comes and goes at will. He can either
+see it or not see it as he pleases. It is the result of the brain
+reacting on the nerve. It relies on data and combination. It is his
+slave, not his master. Before it can be formed there must be great
+increase of sensibility. Hodge is crude silver, the painter is the
+polished mirror. The painter can see things which are not, things which
+he himself makes in his mind. His invention is at least as vivid as his
+memory.</p>
+
+<p>I suppose then that the man of genius, the painter or poet, is one who,
+having lost the first skin, or portion of the first skin of his nerves,
+can create and see in his mind’s eye things never seen by the eye of any
+other man, and see them as vividly as men of no genius can see objects
+of memory.</p>
+
+<p>Now peel off the second skin. The more exquisitely sensitive or the
+innermost skin of the nerve is exposed. Things which the eye of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_25" id="page_25"></a>{25}</span> genius
+could not invent or even dream of are revealed. A drop of putrid water
+under the microscope becomes a lake full of terrifying monsters large
+enough to destroy man. Heard through the microphone the sap ascending a
+tree becomes loud as a torrent. Seen through a telescope nebulous spots
+in the sky become clusters of constellations. Divested of its second
+skin the nerve becomes sensitive to influences too rare and fine for the
+perception of the optic nerve in a more protected state. Beings that
+bear no relation whatever to weight or the law of impenetrability, float
+about and flash hither and thither swifter than lightning. The air and
+other ponderable matter are nothing to them. They are no more than the
+shadows or reflections of action, the imperishable progeny of thought.
+Here lies disclosed to the partly emancipated nerve the Canton of the
+painter’s vision. Here the city he made to himself is as firm and sturdy
+and solid and full of life as the Canton of this day on the southern
+coast of China. Here throng the unrecorded visions of all the poets.
+Here are the counterfeits of all<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_26" id="page_26"></a>{26}</span> the dead in all their phases. Here
+float the dreams of men, the unbroken scrolls of life and action and
+thought complete of all beings, man and beast, that have lived since
+time began. In the world of matter nothing is lost; in the world of
+spirit nothing is lost either.</p>
+
+<p>If instead of taking the whole of this imaginary skin off the optic
+nerve, we simply injure it ever so slightly, the nerve may become alive
+to some of these spirits; and this premature perception of what is
+around all of us, but perceived by few, we call seeing ghosts. It may be
+objected that all space is not vast enough to afford room for such a
+stupendous panorama. When we begin to talk of limits of space to
+anything beyond our knowledge and the touch of our inch-tape, we talk
+like fools. There is no good in allotting space with a two-foot rule. It
+is all the same whether we divide zero into infinity or infinity into
+zero. The answer is the same; “I don’t know how many times it goes.”
+Take a cubic inch of air outside your window and see the things packed
+into it. Here interblent we find all together resistance and light and
+sound and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_27" id="page_27"></a>{27}</span> odour and flavour. We must stop there, for we have got to the
+end, not of what <i>is</i> packed into that cubic inch of air, but to the end
+of the things in it revealed to our senses. If we had five more senses
+we should find five more qualities; if we had five thousand senses, five
+thousand qualities. But even if we had only our own senses in higher
+form we should see ghosts.</p>
+
+<p>If the third skin were removed from the optic nerve all things we now
+call opaque would become transparent, owing to the naked nerve being
+sensitive to the latent light in every body. The whole round world would
+become a crystal ball, the different degrees of what we now call opacity
+being indicated merely by a faint chromatic modification. What we now
+regard as brilliant sunlight would then be dense shadow. Apocalyptic
+ranges of colour would be disclosed, beginning with what is in our
+present condition the least faint trace of tint and ascending through a
+thousand grades to white, white brighter far than the sun our present
+eyes blink upon. Burnished<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_28" id="page_28"></a>{28}</span> brass flaming in our present sun would then
+be the beginning of the chromatic scale descending in the shadow of
+yellow, burnished copper of red, burnished tin of black, burnished steel
+of blue. So intense then would the sensibility of the optic nerve become
+that the satellites attendant on the planets in the system of the suns,
+called fixed stars, would blaze brighter than our own moon reflected in
+the sea. To the eye matter would cease to be matter in its present,
+gross obstructive sense. It would be no more than a delicate transparent
+pigment in the wash of a water-colour artist. The gross rotundity of the
+earth would be, in the field of the human eye, a variegated transparent
+globe of reduced luminousness and enormous scales and chords of colour.
+The Milky Way would then be a concave measureless ocean of prismatic
+light with pendulous opaline spheres.</p>
+
+<p>The figures of dreams and ghosts may be as real as we are pleased to
+consider ourselves. What arrogance of us to say they are our own
+creation! They may look upon themselves as superior to us, as we look
+upon ourselves as<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_29" id="page_29"></a>{29}</span> superior to the jelly-fish. No doubt we are to ghosts
+the baser order, the spirits stained with the woad of earth, low
+creatures who give much heed to heat and cold, and food and motion. They
+are the sky-children, the chosen people. They are nothing but
+circumscribed will wedded to incorporeal reasons of the nobler kind, and
+with scopes the contemplation of which would split our tenement of clay.
+They are the arch-angelic hierarchs of man, the ultimate condition of
+the race, the spirit of this planet distilled by the sun.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_30" id="page_30"></a>{30}</span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_BEST_TWO_BOOKS" id="THE_BEST_TWO_BOOKS"></a>THE BEST TWO BOOKS.</h2>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">In</span> no list I met of the best hundred books, when that craze took the
+place of spelling-bees and the fifteen puzzle, do I recollect seeing
+mention made of my two favourite works. These two books stand completely
+apart in my esteem, and if I were asked to name the volume that comes
+third, I should have to make a speech of explanation. The first of them
+is not in prose or verse, it is not a work of theology or philosophy or
+science or art or history or fiction or general literature. It is at
+once the most comprehensive and impartial book I know. This paragraph is
+assuming the aspect of a riddle. Being in a mild and passionless way a
+lover of my species, I am a loather of riddles. So I will go<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_31" id="page_31"></a>{31}</span> no further
+on the downward way, but declare the name, title, and style of my book
+to be Nuttall’s <i>Standard Dictionary</i>.</p>
+
+<p>I am well aware there is a great deal to be said against Nuttall’s
+<i>Dictionary</i> as a dictionary, but I am not speaking of it in that sense.
+I am treating it as a dear companion, a true friend, a <i>vade mecum</i>. Let
+those who have a liking for discovering spots in the sun glare at the
+orb until they have a taste for nothing else but spots in the sun. I
+find Nuttall so close to my affections that I can perceive no defects in
+him. I cannot bear to hold him at arm’s length, for critical
+examination. I hug him close to me, and feel that while I have him I am
+almost independent of all other books printed in the English language.</p>
+
+<p>Cast your eyes along your own bookshelves of English authors; every
+word, liberally speaking, that is in each and every volume on your
+shelves is in my Nuttall! Here is the juice of the language, from
+Shakespeare to Huxley, in a concentrated solution. Here is a book that
+starts by telling you that A is a vowel, and does not<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_32" id="page_32"></a>{32}</span> desert you until
+it informs you that zythum is a beverage, a liquor made from malt and
+wheat; a fact, I will wager, you never dreamed of before! And between A
+and zythum, what a boundless store of learning is disclosed! This is the
+only single-volume book I know of which no man living is or ever can be
+the master. Charles Lamb would not allow that dictionaries are books at
+all. In his days they were white-livered charlatans compared with the
+full-blooded enthusiast, Nuttall.</p>
+
+<p>If such an unkind thing were desirable as to diminish the conceit of a
+man of average reading and intelligence, there is no book could be used
+with such paralysing effect upon him as this one. It is almost
+impossible for any student to realise the infinite capacity for
+ignorance with which man is gifted until he is brought face to face with
+such a book as Nuttall. The list of words whose meanings are given
+occupies 771 very closely printed pages of small type in double column.
+The letter A takes up from 1 to 52. How many words unfamiliar to the
+ordinary man are to be found in this fifteenth part of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_33" id="page_33"></a>{33}</span> the dictionary!
+On the top of every folio there occur four words, one at the head of
+each column. Barring the right of the candidates in ignorance to guess
+from the roots how many well-informed people know or would use any of
+the following words&mdash;absciss, acidimeter, acroteleutic, adminicular,
+adminiculator, adustion, aerie, agrestic, allignment, allision,
+ambreine, ampulla, ampullaceous, android, antiphonary, antiphony,
+apanthropy, aponeurosis, appellor, aramaic, aretology, armilla,
+armillary, asiarch, assentation, asymptote, asymptotical, aurate,
+averruncator, aversant, axotomous, or axunge? And yet all these are at
+the heads of columns under A alone! Take, now, one column haphazard
+perpendicularly, and with the same reservation as before, who would use
+antimaniac, antimask, antimasonic, antimeter, antimonite, antinephritic,
+antinomian, antinomy, antipathous, antipedobaptist, antiperistaltic,
+antiperistasis, or antiphlogistic? The letter A taken along the top of
+the pages or down one column is not a good letter for the confusion of
+the conceited; because viewed across the top of the page it is pitifully
+the prey of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_34" id="page_34"></a>{34}</span> prefixes which lead to large families of words, and viewed
+down the column (honestly selected at haphazard), it is the bondslave of
+one prefix. When, however, one starts a theory, it is not fair to pick
+and choose. I have, of course, eschewed derivatives in coming down the
+column; across the column I did not do so, as the chance of a prime word
+being at the bottom of one column and its derivate at the top of the
+next ought to count two in my favour. I am aware this claim may be
+disputed; I have disputed it with myself at much too great length to
+record here, and I have decided in my own favour.</p>
+
+<p>Of course the mere reading of the dictionary in a mechanical way would
+produce no more effect than the repetition of numerals abstracted from
+things. There is no greater suggestiveness in saying a million than in
+saying one. But what an enlargement of the human capacity takes place
+when a person passes from the idea of one man to the idea of a million
+men. Take the first word quoted from the head of the column. I had
+wholly forgotten the meaning of absciss. I cannot even now remember<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_35" id="page_35"></a>{35}</span>
+that I ever knew the meaning of it, though of course I must, for I was
+supposed to have learned conic sections once. Why any one should be
+expected to learn conic sections I cannot guess. As far as I can now
+recall, they are the study of certain possible systems and schemes of
+lines in a wholly unnecessary figure. I believe the cone was invented by
+some one who had conic sections up his sleeve, and devised the miserable
+spinning of the triangle merely to gratify his lust of cruelty to the
+young. The only one use to which cones are put, as far as I am aware, is
+for a weather signal on the sea coast. The only section of a cone put to
+any pleasant use is a frustum when it appears in the bark of the cork
+tree; and even this conic section is not of much use to pleasure until
+it is removed from the bottle. Conic sections are reprehensible in
+another way. They are, in the matter of difficulty, nothing better than
+impostors. They are really “childlike and bland,” and will, when you
+have conquered your schoolboy terror of them, be found agreeable
+after-dinner reading.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_36" id="page_36"></a>{36}</span></p>
+
+<p>But I must return to Nuttall. The systematic study of the book is to be
+deplored. It is, like the Essays of Elia, not to be read through at a
+sitting, but to be dipped into curiously when one is in the vein. The
+charm of Lamb is in the flavour; and one cannot reach the more remote
+and finer joys of taste if one eats quickly. There is no cohesion, and
+but little thought in Nuttall. It is as a spur, an incentive, to thought
+I worship the book, and as a storehouse for elemental lore. You have
+known a thing all your life, let us say, and have called it by a
+makeshift name. You feel in your heart and soul there must be a more
+close-fitting appellation than you employ for it, and you endure a sense
+of feebleness and dispersion of mind. One day you are idly glancing
+through your Nuttall, and suddenly the clouds, the nebulous mists of a
+generalized term, roll away, and out shines, clear and sharply defined,
+the particular definition of the thing. From childhood I have, for
+example, known a pile-driver, and called it a pile-driver for years and
+years. All along something told me pile-driver<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_37" id="page_37"></a>{37}</span> was no better than a
+loose and off-hand way of describing the machine. It partook of the
+barbarous nature of a hieroglyphic. You drew, as it were, the figure of
+a post, and of a weight descending upon it. The device was much too
+pictorial and crude. Moreover, it was, so described, a thing without a
+history. To call a pile-driver a pile-driver is no more than to describe
+a barn-door cock onomatopoetically as cock-a-doodle-doo&mdash;a thing
+repellent to a pensive mind. But in looking over Nuttall I accidentally
+alighted on this: “Fistuca, fis’&mdash;tu-ka, <i>s.</i> A machine which is raised
+to a given height by pulleys, and then allowed suddenly to fall on the
+head of a pile; a monkey (L. a rammer).” Henceforth there is, in my
+mind, no need of a picture for the machine. So to speak, the abstract
+has become concrete. I would not, of course, dream of using the word
+fistuca, but it is a great source of internal consolation to me.
+Besides, I attain with it to other eminences of curiosity, which show me
+fields of inquiry I never dreamed of before.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_38" id="page_38"></a>{38}</span></p>
+
+<p>I have not met the word monkey in this sense until now. I look out
+monkey in my book, and find one of the meanings “a pile-driver,” and
+that the word is derived from the Italian “<i>monna</i>, contraction for
+<i>madonna</i>.” Up to this moment I did not know from what monkey was
+derived, although I had heard that from monkey man was derived. All this
+sets one off into a delicious doze of thought and keeps one carefully
+apart from his work. For “who would fardels bear to groan and sweat
+under a weary” load of even pens, when he might lie back and close his
+eyes, and drift off to the Rome of Augustus or the Venice of to-day?
+Philology as mere philology is colourless, but if one uses the records
+of verbal changes as glasses to the past and present, what panchromatic
+hues sweep into the pale field of the dictionary! What myriads of dead
+men stand up out of their graves, and move once more through scenes of
+their former activities! What reimpositions of old times on old earth
+take place! What bravery of arms and beauty of women are renewed; what
+glowing argosies, long mouldered,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_39" id="page_39"></a>{39}</span> sparkle once more in the sun! What
+brazen trumpets blare of conquest, and dust of battle roll along the
+plain! What plenitude of life, of movement, of man is revealed! A
+dictionary is to me the key-note in the orchestra where mankind sit
+tuning their reeds for the overture to the final cataclysm of the world.</p>
+
+<p>My second book would be Whitaker’s <i>Almanack</i>. Owing to miserable
+ill-luck I have not been able to get a copy of the almanac for this
+year. I offered fair round coin of the realm for it before the Jubilee
+plague of ugliness fell upon the broad pieces of her most gracious
+Majesty. But, alas! no copy was to be had. I was too late in the race.
+All the issue had been sold. The last edition of which I have a copy is
+that for 1886. I have one for each year of the ten preceding, and I
+cannot tell how crippled and humiliated I feel in being without one for
+1887.</p>
+
+<p>This is another of the books that Charles Lamb classes among the
+no-books. As in the case of Nuttall, there was no Whitaker in his<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_40" id="page_40"></a>{40}</span> day,
+and certainly no almanac at all as good. At first glance this book may
+seem dry and sapless as the elm ready sawn for conversion into parish
+coffins. But how can anything be considered dry or dead when two hundred
+thousand of its own brothers are at this moment dwelling in useful amity
+among our fellowmen? It in one way contrasts unfavourably with almanacs
+which can claim a longer life, there are no vaticinations in it. But if
+the gift of prophecy were possessed by other almanacs, why did they not
+foretell that they would be in the end known as humbugs, and cut their
+conceited throats? I freely own I am a bigot in this matter; I have
+never given any other almanac a fair chance, and, what is worse, I have
+firmly made up my mind not to give any other one any chance at all. What
+is the good of being loyal to one’s friends if one’s loyalty is at the
+beck of every upstart acquaintance, no matter how great his merits or
+how long his purse? I place my faith in Whitaker, and am ready to go to
+the stake (provided it is understood that nothing unpleasant takes place
+there)<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_41" id="page_41"></a>{41}</span> chaunting my belief and glorying in my doom.</p>
+
+<p>If you took away Whitaker’s <i>Almanack</i> from me I do not know how I
+should get on. It is a book for diurnal use and permanent reference. One
+edition of it ought to be printed on bank note paper for the pocket, and
+another on bronze for friezes for the temple of history. It is worth all
+the Livys and Tacituses that ever breathed and lied. It is more truthful
+than the sun, for that luminary is always eight minutes in advance of
+where it seems to be. It is as impartial and veracious as fossilising
+mud. It contains infinitely more figures than Madame Tussaud’s, and
+teaches of everything above and under the sun, from stellar influences
+to sewage.</p>
+
+<p>How is the daily paper to be understood lacking the aid of Whitaker? Who
+is the honourable member for Berborough, of whom the Chanceller of the
+Exchequer spoke in such sarcastic terms last night? For what place sits
+Mr. Snivel, who made that most edifying speech yesterday? How old is
+the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_42" id="page_42"></a>{42}</span> Earl of Champagne, who has been appointed Governor of Labuan? Where
+is Labuan? What is the value in English money of £T97,000, and 2,784,000
+roubles? What are the chances of a man of forty (yourself) living to be
+a hundred? and what is the chance of a woman of sixty-four (your
+mother-in-law) dying next year? How much may one deduct from one’s
+income with a view to income tax before one needs begin to lie? What
+annuity ought a man of your age be able to get for the five thousand
+pounds you expect on the death of your mother-in-law? How much will you
+have to pay to the state if you article your son to a solicitor or give
+him a little capital and start him in an honest business as a
+pawnbroker? How old is the judge that charged dead against the prisoner
+whom the jury acquitted without leaving the box? What railway company
+spends the most money in coal? legal charges? palm oil? Is there
+anything now worth a gentleman’s while to smuggle on his return from the
+Continent? What is the tonnage of the ironclad rammed yesterday morning
+by another ironclad<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_43" id="page_43"></a>{43}</span> of the Channel squadron? When may one begin to eat
+oysters? What was the most remarkable event last year? How much longer
+is it likely to pay to breed farmers in England?</p>
+
+<p>These are only a few, very few, of the queries Whitaker will answer
+cheerfully for you. Indeed, you can scarcely frame any questions to
+which it will not make a reply of some kind or other. It contains,
+moreover, either direct or indirect reference to every man in the United
+Kingdoms of Great Britain and Ireland. If you occupy a prominent
+official position in any walk in life, you will find yourself herein
+mentioned by name. If you are a simple and prudent trader, you will have
+your name and your goods described elaborately among the advertisements.
+If you come under neither of these heads you are sure to be included,
+not distinguished perhaps personally, under the statistics of the Insane
+or Criminal classes.</p>
+
+<p>All the information on the points indicated may be said to lie within
+the parochial domain of the book. But it has a larger, a universal
+scope, and takes into view all the civilized and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_44" id="page_44"></a>{44}</span> half civilized nations
+of all the earth. It contains multitudinous facts and figures about
+Abyssinia, Afghanistan, Annam, Argentine Republic, Austro-Hungary,
+Baluchistan, Belgium, Bokhara, Bolivia, Borneo, Brazil, Bulgaria,
+Eastern Roumelia, Burmah, Corea, Central America, Chili, China, Cochin
+China, Colombia, Congo State, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador,
+Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Hawaiian Islands, Hayti, Italy, Japan,
+Liberia, Madagascar, Mexico, Montenegro, Morocco, Nepal, Netherlands,
+Oman, Orange Free State, Paraguay, Persia, Peru, Portugal, Roumania,
+Russia, Sarawak, Servia, Siam, Sokoto, Spain, Sweden and Norway,
+Switzerland, Tibet, Transvaal, Tripoli, Tunis, Turkey, United States,
+Uruguay, Venezuela, and Zanzibar!</p>
+
+<p>The list takes away one’s breath. The mere recital of it leaves one
+faint and exhausted. Passing the most elementary knowledge of these
+nations and countries through the mind is like looking at a varying
+rainbow while the ears are solicited by a thousand tunes. The names, the
+mere names, of Mexico and Brazil stop my heart<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_45" id="page_45"></a>{45}</span> with amazement. The
+Aztecs and the Amazon call up such visions of man in decay and nature in
+naked strength that I pause like one in a gorgeous wood held in fear by
+its unfamiliarity. What has the Amazon done in the ages of its
+unlettered history? What did the Aztecs know before they began to revert
+to birds? Then Morocco and Tripoli, what memories and mysteries of man!
+And Sokoto&mdash;of which little is known but the name; and that man was here
+before England was dissevered from the mainland of Europe. Turkey, as it
+even now lies crippled and shorn, embraces within its stupendous arms
+the tombs of the greatest empire of antiquity. Only to think of China is
+to grow old beyond the reach of chroniclers. Compared with China,
+Turkey, India, and Russia, even Greece and Rome are mushroom states, and
+Germany and France virgin soil.</p>
+
+<p>But when I am in no humour for contemplation and alarms of eld I take up
+my Whitaker for 1886, and open it at page 285. There begins the most
+incredible romance<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_46" id="page_46"></a>{46}</span> ever written by man, and what increases its
+incredibility is that it happens to be all true.</p>
+
+<p>At page 285 opens an account of the British Empire. The first article is
+on India, and as one reads, taking in history and statistics with
+alternate breaths, the heart grows afraid to beat in the breast lest its
+motion and sound might dispel the enchantment and bring this “miracle of
+rare device” down about one’s head. The opening statement forbids
+further progress for a time. When one hears that “the British Empire in
+India extends over a territory as large as the continent of Europe
+without Russia,” it is necessary to pause and let the capacity of the
+mind enlarge in order to take in this stupendous fact with its
+stupendous significances.</p>
+
+<p>Here are 254 millions of people living under the flag of Britain! Here
+is a vast country of the East whose history goes back for a thousand
+years from this era, which knew Alexander the Great and was the scene of
+Tamerlane’s exploits, subject to the little island on the western verge
+of modern Europe. Here,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_47" id="page_47"></a>{47}</span> paraded in the directest and most prosaic
+fashion, are facts and figures that swell out the fancy almost
+intolerably. Here is one feudatory state, one dependent province, almost
+as populous as the whole empire over which Don Pedro II. reigns in South
+America. Here is a public revenue of eighty millions sterling a year,
+and Calcutta, including suburbs, with a population close upon a million.
+Here are no fewer than fifty-three towns and cities of more than fifty
+thousand people each. Here is a gross number of seven hundred and
+fourteen thousand towns and villages! Is not this one item incredible?
+Just three quarters of a million, not of people or even houses, but of
+“towns and villages!” The population of Madras alone is five-sixths of
+that of the United Kingdom, that of the North-West Provinces and Oudh
+considerably more, and that of Bengal nearly twice as much as England,
+Ireland, Scotland, and Wales together. The Native States have many more
+inhabitants than any country in Europe, except Russia. Bombay equals
+Spain. The Punjaub exceeds Turkey in Asia. Assam exceeds Turkey in<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_48" id="page_48"></a>{48}</span>
+Europe. The Central Provinces about equal Belgium and Holland together;
+British Burmah, Switzerland. Berar exceeds Denmark, and all taken
+together contain more than the combined populations of the United States
+of America, Austria, Germany, France, Turkey, Italy, Spain, Portugal,
+Holland, and Belgium! All ours absolutely, or in the feudatory leash;
+with more Mohammedans than are to be found in the Sultan’s dominions,
+and a larger revenue than is enjoyed by any country on earth except
+England, France, United States of America, Austria, and Russia!</p>
+
+<p>These are facts and figures enough to set one dreaming for a month. This
+is not an age for epic poetry. It is exceedingly unlikely any poet in
+the present age will seek the framework for his great work in the past.
+The past was all very well in its own day until it was found out.
+Certitudes in bygone centuries have been shaken. The present time is
+wildly volcanic. Now the hidden, throbbing, mad, fierce, upheaving fires
+bulge out the crust of earth under fabrics whilom regarded as
+indestructible, and split their<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_49" id="page_49"></a>{49}</span> walls, and warp their pillars, and
+choke their domes. It was a good thing for Milton and Dante they lived
+and wrote long ago, for the iconoclasts of to-day are trying to build a
+great wall across heaven and tear up the sacred pavement of hell. They
+tell us the Greek armies were a mob of disorderly and timid cits, and
+that speculations as to the reported dealings of Dr. Faustus with any
+folk but respectable druggists are too childish for the nursery or
+Kaffirs. The golden age is no longer the time that will never come
+again. The past is a fire that has burnt out, a flame that has vanished.
+To kneel before what has been is to worship impotent shadows. Up to this
+man has been wandering in the desert, and until now there have not been
+even trustworthy rumours of the land of promise. But to us has come a
+voice prophesying good things. The Canaan of the ages is in the future
+of time. Taking this age at its own estimate I have long thought the
+subject for the finest epic lying within possibility in our era is the
+building of the railway to India. Into a history of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_50" id="page_50"></a>{50}</span> that undertaking
+would flow all the affluents of the ancient world. The stories of
+Baalbec and Nineveh that are finished, and of Aleppo and Damascus that
+survive, would fall into this prodigious tale of peaceful conquest. The
+line would have for marge Assyria on one hand, Egypt on the other; it
+would reach from the land of the Buddhist through the land of the
+Mohammedan to the land of the Christian. It would be a work undertaken
+in honour of the modern god, Progress, through the graves of the oldest
+peoples, to link the three great forms of faith. All the action of the
+epic would take place on earth, and all the actors would be men. There
+would be no need for evolving the god from the machine, for the machine
+itself would be the god. It would be the history of man from his birth
+till this hour. It would be most fitly written in English, for English
+is the most capacious and virile language yet invented by man.</p>
+
+<p>But a mere mortal, such as I, cannot stay in India always, or even abide
+for ever by the way. Although I have <i>Whitaker’s Almanack</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_51" id="page_51"></a>{51}</span> before me
+all the time, I have strayed a little from it. In thinking of the lands
+through which that heroic line of railway would pass, I have almost
+forgotten the modest volume at my elbow. Yet fragile as it looks, one
+volume similar to it will last as long as the Pyramids, will come in
+time to be as old as the oldest memory is now; that is, if the ruins of
+England endure as long as those of Egypt, for a copy of it lies built up
+under Cleopatra’s Needle.</p>
+
+<p>I turn over the last page of “British India” in my <i>Almanack</i>. We are
+not yet done with orient lands and seas. The article over-leaf is headed
+“Other British Possessions in the East.” Here, if one wants incitement
+towards prose or verse, dreaming or doing, commerce or pillage, is
+matter to his hand. The places one may read of are&mdash;Aden, Socotra,
+Ceylon, Hong-Kong, Labuan, British North Borneo, and Cyprus. Then in my
+book comes “The Dominion of Canada,” with its territory “about as large
+as Europe”! and a revenue equal to Portugal, which discovered<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_52" id="page_52"></a>{52}</span> and once
+held India. After Canada come “Other American Possessions,” including
+British Guiana, which, except for the sugar of Demerara, is little heard
+of; it occupies a space of earth as large as all Great Britain. So
+little do people of inferior education know of this dependency, that
+once, when a speaker in the House of Commons spoke of the “island of
+Demerara,” there was not a single member present who knew that Demerara
+was not an island, but part of the mainland of South America. Last in
+the list comes British Honduras, about as big as Wales.</p>
+
+<p>After America, we have our enormous outlying farm in the southern
+hemisphere, “British Possessions in Australasia.” There the land owned
+by England is again about the size of Europe! Then follow “British
+Possessions in the West Indies,” small in mileage, great in fertility
+and richness of produce, and with a population twice that of Eastern
+Roumelia. The “British Possessions in Africa” are considerably larger
+than France, with about half as many inhabitants as Denmark. The
+territories owned in<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_53" id="page_53"></a>{53}</span> the Southern Atlantic are Ascension, the Falkland
+Islands, South Georgia, and St. Helena. This prodigious list ends with
+the European Possessions, namely, Malta, Gibraltar, Heligoland, the
+Channel Islands, and Isle of Man.</p>
+
+<p>By this time the hand is tired writing down the mere names of the riches
+belonging to Great Britain. Towards the close of my list from Whitaker
+my energy drooped, and a feeling of enervating satiety came upon me. I
+am surfeited with splendours, and, like a tiger filled with flesh, I
+must sleep. But in that sleep what dreams may come! How the imagination
+expands and aspires under the stimulus of a page of tabulated figures!
+How the fancy is excited, provoked, by the spectacle of an endless sea
+in which every quarter of the globe affords a bower for Britannia when
+it pleases her aquatic highness to adventure abroad upon the deep, into
+the farthest realms of the morning, into the regions of the dropping
+sun. Here, in my best two books, are the words of the most copious
+language that man ever spoke, and the facts and figures of the greatest
+realm over<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_54" id="page_54"></a>{54}</span> which man ever ruled. <i>Civis Romanus sum!</i> I will sleep. I
+will dream that I am alone with my two books. I will speak in this
+imperial, this dominant dialect, as I move by sea and land among the
+peoples who live under the flag flying above me now. Who would encumber
+himself with finite poetry or romance when he may take with him the
+uncombined vocabulary, with its infinite possibilities of affinities,
+and the history of the countries and the peoples that lie beneath this
+flag, and bear in his heart the astounding and exalting
+consciousness&mdash;<i>Civis Romanus sum!</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_55" id="page_55"></a>{55}</span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="LIES_OF_FABLE_AND_ALLEGORY" id="LIES_OF_FABLE_AND_ALLEGORY"></a>LIES OF FABLE AND ALLEGORY.</h2>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Some</span> little while ago the battered and shattered remains of an old
+bookcase with the sedimentary deposit of my own books, reached me after
+a journey of many hundred miles from its former resting place. The front
+of the bookcase is twisted wirework, which, when I remember it first,
+was lined with pink silk. Not a vestige, not a shred of the silk remains
+and the half dozen shelves now depend for preservation in position on a
+frame as crazy as Her Majesty’s ship <i>Victory</i>, and certainly older. The
+bookcase had belonged to my grandfather before Trafalgar, and some of
+the books I found in it among the sediment were printed before the Great
+Fire of London. In all there were about a couple or three hundred books,
+none<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_56" id="page_56"></a>{56}</span> of which would be highly valued by a bibliophile. Owing to my
+being in a very modest way a wanderer on the face of the realm, these
+books had been out of my possession for nearly twenty years, and dusty
+and dilapidated as they were when they reached me I took them in my arms
+as long-lost friends. I had finished the last sentence with the word
+children, but that would not do for two reasons. These books were not
+mine as this one I am now writing is, and long-lost children change more
+than they have changed, or more than friends change. Children grow and
+outpace us and leave us behind and are not so full of companionable
+memories as friends. There is hardly time to make friends of our adult
+children before we are beckoned away. The friends we make and keep when
+we are young have always twenty years’ start of our children in
+friendship. A man may be friendly with his son of five but a father and
+son cannot be full friends until the son is twenty years older.</p>
+
+<p>Again, as to the impropriety of speaking of the books as long-lost
+children I have<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_57" id="page_57"></a>{57}</span> another scruple. I am in great doubt as to whether the
+recovery of a long-lost child is at all desirable. A long-lost child
+means a young girl or boy of our own who is lost when under ten years of
+age and recovered years afterwards. I do not know that the recovery of
+the missing one is a cause of gratitude. Remember it is not at all the
+child we lost. It is a child alleged or alleging itself to be the child
+we lost. It is more correctly not a child at all, but a lad or lass whom
+we knew when young, and whose acquaintance we have to make over again.
+Our personality has become dim to it, and we have to occupy ourselves
+seriously in trying to identify the unwieldy bulk of the stranger with
+our memory of the wanderer. When the boy went from us we mourned for him
+as dead, and now he comes back to us from the tomb altered all out of
+memory. He is not wholly our child. There is an interregnum in our reign
+over him and we do not know what manner of king has held sway in our
+stead, or, if knowing the usurper, we cannot measure the extent or force
+of his<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_58" id="page_58"></a>{58}</span> influence. How much of this young person is really our very own?
+how much the development of untoward fate? Is the memory of our lost one
+dearer than the presence of this lad who is half stranger? What we lost
+and mourned was ours surely; how much of what we have regained belongs
+to us?</p>
+
+<p>With books no such question arises. They are our very own. They have
+suffered no increment, but rather loss. What we remember of them and
+find again in them fills us with joy; what we have forgotten and recall
+excites a surprise which makes us feel rich. We reproach ourselves with
+not having loved them sufficiently well, and swear upon them to endow
+them with warmer affection henceforth. In turning over the books in the
+old case I lighted upon one which I believe to be the volume that came
+earliest into my possession. It is Cobbett’s <i>Spelling-Book</i>, and by the
+writing on the title page I see it was given to me by my father on the
+second of February, 1854. It is in a very battered and tattered
+condition. I find a youthful autograph of my own on the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_59" id="page_59"></a>{59}</span> fly-leaf, the
+Christian name occupying one line, the surname the second; on a third
+line is the name of the town, and on a fourth the number of the street
+and part of the name of the street, the last being, I blush to say,
+ill-spelt. Surely there never was a book hated as I hated this one! At
+that time I had declared my unalterable determination of never learning
+to read. I possessed, until recently, a copy of Valpy’s Latin Grammar of
+about the same date, and I remember I worshipped the Latin Grammar
+compared with the Spelling-Book. I knew <i>rosa</i> before I could read words
+of two syllables, and at this moment I do not know much more Latin than
+I did then. The Spelling-Book was published by Anne Cobbett, at 137,
+Strand, in 1849. It is almost incredible that so short a time ago the
+atrocious woodcuts could be got in England for love or money. There is
+no attempt whatever at overlaying in the printing; the cut pages are all
+what are called “flat pulls.” Here and there through the pages of
+chilling columns of words of one, two, three or more syllables are
+pencil marks<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_60" id="page_60"></a>{60}</span> indicating the limits of a day’s lesson. What a ruthless
+way they had with us children in those days! When I look at those
+appalling columns of arid words I applaud my childish determination of
+never learning to read if the art were to be acquired only by traversing
+those fearful deserts of unintelligible verbiage. Fancy a child of
+tender years confronted with antitrinitarian, consubstantiality,
+discontinuation, excommunication, extraordinarily, immateriality,
+impenetrability, indivisibility, naturalization, plenipotentiary,
+recapitulation, supererogation, transubstantiation, valetudinarian, and
+volatilization, not one of which is as difficult to spell as one quarter
+the words of one syllable, and not one of which could be understood by a
+child or would be used by a single man out of a thousand in all his
+life. The country had penal settlements then, why in the name of mercy
+did they not send children to the settlements and give them a chance to
+keep their reason and become useful citizens when their time of
+punishment had expired? I am happy to say I find no pencil marks among<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_61" id="page_61"></a>{61}</span>
+those leviathan words above. I suppose I never got into the deep waters
+where they “wallowing unwieldy in their gait tempest the ocean.”</p>
+
+<p>I wonder was the foundation of a lifelong dislike to Cobbett’s writings
+laid in me at that early time of my existence? Anyway I do not remember
+the day when I did not dislike everything I read of Cobbett’s, and I
+dislike everything of his I read now. I wonder, also, was it at that
+early date the seed of my hatred of fable or allegory was sown? To me
+the fables in the back of that Spelling-Book were always odious, now
+they are loathsome. With the cold-blooded “morals” attendant upon them
+they are the worst form of literary torture I know. I am aware that the
+bulk of them are not original, but Cobbett inserted them in his book,
+and I give him full credit for evil intention. Yet in later years it was
+not his taste for fable that repelled me but his intense combativeness.
+He is never comfortable unless he is mangling some one. It was a pity he
+ever left the army. He would have been a credit to his corps at close
+quarters with a clubbed musket. Even in<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_62" id="page_62"></a>{62}</span> the Spelling-Book, intended for
+young children, his “Stepping-Stone to Cobbett’s English Grammar” takes
+the form of a dialogue, in which he, the “Teacher,” smashes the
+unfortunate Scholar and Mr. William. Cobbett sprang from the people and
+was a Saxon pure and simple, and the Saxon is the element in the English
+people which has been most undistinguished when unmingled with other
+blood. The Saxon of fifteen hundred years ago is the yokel of to-day,
+and he never was more than a yokel intellectually. The enormous
+intellectual fertility of England is owing to successive invasions, and
+chiefly to the Norman Conquest. All the great and noble and sweet faces
+in English history are Norman, or largely Norman. The awful faces of the
+Gibbon type make periods of English history like a night spectral with
+evil dreams.</p>
+
+<p>Does any one past the condition of childhood really like fables? Mind, I
+do not say past the years of childhood. But does any one of fully mature
+intellect like fables or pleasantly endure allegories? I think not. In
+the vigour of all lives there must be <i>lacunæ</i> of intense indolence,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_63" id="page_63"></a>{63}</span>
+backwaters of the mind, where one is willing to float effortless and
+take the things that come as though they were good things rather than
+work at the oars in pursuit of novelties. At such times it is easier to
+persuade ourselves we are amused by books that we admired when we lacked
+experience and discernment than to break new ground and encounter fresh
+obstacles. I am leaving out of account the dull worthy people who say
+they like a book because other people say they like it. These good
+people live in a continual state of self-justification. They are much
+more serenely secure in what they imagine to be their opinions than
+those travailing souls that really have opinions of their own. Their
+life is easy, and in lazy moments one sighs for the repose they enjoy.
+But do not the people with active minds often adhere to childish likings
+merely from indolence? A certain question they settled in their own
+minds when they were ten; it is too much trouble to treat it as an open
+matter at thirty. Consistency in a politician is invariably a sign of
+stupidity, because no man (outside fundamental questions<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_64" id="page_64"></a>{64}</span> of morals) can
+with credit to his sense remain stationary in opinion for thirty years
+where all is change. The very data on which he based an opinion in the
+year one are vapourized in the year thirty. The foundation of all
+political theories is first principles of some kind, and the only
+support a philosophic mind rejects with disdain is a first principle of
+any kind. Now, the fables we tolerate, nay, admire as children, are in
+imaginative literature what first principles are in that branch of
+imaginary philanthropy called politics. It is much easier to say every
+man has a right to eight shillings a day than to find out what each
+particular man has a right to, or if man has a right to anything at all.
+It is much easier to say one does like Fontaine than at thirty years of
+age to acquire a disgust of him and his fables.</p>
+
+<p>The lying insincerity of fables and their morals always shocks me, and
+the gross blindness of the fabulist to any view of transactions but that
+adopted by him to point his precept, fills me with contempt for him as
+an artist.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_65" id="page_65"></a>{65}</span> In the Spelling-Book I do not feel myself at liberty to
+select the fables as I choose. I will take only one, the first that
+comes. It is about the swallow and the sparrow. It is a very bad
+specimen for my contention, but as I am the challenger I have not the
+choice of weapons, and I accept the first presented by Cobbett.</p>
+
+<p>A swallow coming back to her old nest in the spring finds it occupied by
+a sparrow and his brood of young ones. The swallow demands possession on
+the grounds of having built the nest and brought up three broods in it.
+The sparrow will not budge. The swallow summons a number of swallows,
+and they wall up the sparrow and he and his brood die of hunger.</p>
+
+<p>The first notice of bias the reader gets is that the swallow is called
+she, and the sparrow he. Why? For the dishonest purpose of enlisting
+sympathy with the swallow. There is no evidence or statement the sparrow
+was aware when taking possession of the nest that it would be reclaimed
+by the swallow. How was the sparrow to know that the swallow was not
+dead and buried by the mole? The nest was<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_66" id="page_66"></a>{66}</span> derelict. Again, when the
+swallow returned the sparrow had young ones, which it would be dangerous
+to remove from the nest. How was the sparrow to know the swallow was
+telling the truth, and that the nest was hers? Then, even supposing the
+sparrow to be all in the wrong, the punishment was out of all proportion
+to the offence. The sparrow had done no harm beyond intruding. He had
+not injured the furniture, or burned any of the swallow’s gas, or broken
+into the wine-cellar. Justice would have been vindicated by the
+expulsion of the intruder and his brood. But what takes place instead?
+The door is built up, and the sparrow with his innocent young is
+murdered! Surely if this is a fruitful fable, the moral is immoral. This
+is the old Mosaic theory of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,
+and a little, or rather a great deal more. It is hideously un-Christian.
+I believe Cobbett professed Christianity. Why did he put this odious
+vengeful story in the forefront of his exemplars of righteous doing?<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_67" id="page_67"></a>{67}</span></p>
+
+<p>But the worst part of the story is in the Moral. “Thus it always is with
+the unjust,” says the Chorus of the fabulist. He means that the unjust
+are always nailed up in their houses with their blameless children and
+starved to death. Now neither Cobbett nor any other sane preacher
+believes anything of the kind. This is a lie, pure and simple; a lie no
+doubt told with a good object, but a lie all the same. Cobbett had too
+much common-sense not to know that it is not always “thus” with the
+“unjust.” As a rule, the unjust go scot free when they stop short of
+crime. The people who say otherwise are yielding to a feminine,
+sentimental weakness. Poetic justice no doubt does exist&mdash;in poetry.
+Most men are as unjust as they dare be, and most men get on comfortably
+from their cradles to their graves. It is only the fools, the men of
+ungovernable passions and impulses and the blunderers who suffer. Man is
+at heart a rapacious brute. All his centuries of civilization have not
+quelled the predatory spirit in him. Any man will become a thief if he
+only be sufficiently tempted when he is sufficiently<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_68" id="page_68"></a>{68}</span> desperate. The
+crime of the sparrow in appropriating the swallow’s nest is
+intelligible, the crime of the swallow in murdering the sparrow and his
+brood is intelligible, the crime of lying committed by the moralist is
+abominable. When the child to whom Cobbett lied grows up, he will know
+the lie, despise the liar, and have nothing left of the precious fable
+but a shaken faith in the words of all men, whether they be liars like
+Cobbett and the other moralists, or truth-tellers like the ordinary
+everyday folk, who do not pose as teachers and latter-day prophets. It
+is very improving to reflect on the freedom these teachers give
+themselves in act when enforcing their theories in writing. In order
+that Cobbett might exemplify his principles against the credit system,
+he signed his name across the face of acceptances for seventy thousand
+pounds!</p>
+
+<p>Cobbett’s Grammar was written for sailors and soldiers and such men. I
+gave the only copy of it I ever had to a sailor who had abandoned living
+on the sea to live by the sea, who had<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_69" id="page_69"></a>{69}</span> eschewed the paint-pot and the
+stage aboard the merchant service for the palette and stool of the
+studio. It is years since I have seen the book, but I remember the
+contemptuous way in which the ex-soldier disposes of prosody. He says to
+his pupil in effect: You need pay no attention to this branch of
+grammar, as it deals only with the <i>noise</i> made by words. Cobbett’s
+treatment of prosody does not occupy more than one line or one line and
+a half of print. It is briefer than Dr. Johnson’s Syntax:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>“The established practice of grammarians requires that I should
+here treat of the Syntax; but our language has so little inflexion,
+or variety of terminations, that its construction neither requires
+nor admits many rules. Wallis, therefore, has totally neglected it;
+and Jonson, whose desire of following the writers upon the learned
+languages made him think a syntax indispensably necessary, has
+published such petty observations as were better omitted.</p>
+
+<p>“The verb, as in other languages, agrees with the nominative in
+number and person; as <i>Thou fliest from good; He runs to death</i>.</p>
+
+<p>“Our adjectives are invariable.</p>
+
+<p>“Of two substantives the noun possessive is the genitive; as <i>His
+father’s glory; the sun’s heat</i>.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_70" id="page_70"></a>{70}</span></p>
+
+<p>“Verbs transitive require an oblique case; as <i>He loves me; You
+fear him</i>.</p>
+
+<p>“All prepositions require an oblique case: <i>He gave this to me; He
+took this from me; He says this of me; He came with me</i>.”</p></div>
+
+<p>That is all the merciful Dr. Samuel Johnson has to say about syntax. Oh,
+Lindley Murray! Oh, memories of youth! Does it seem possible that
+Johnson could have enjoyed the luxury of speaking in this light and airy
+and debonair way of English grammar in his day, and that Lindley Murray
+could have matured his awful Grammar in so few years afterwards?
+Recollect there were not forty years between the lexicographer and the
+grammarian. Could not Lindley Murray have left the unfortunate English
+language alone? Johnson says no one need bother about syntax, and
+Cobbett says no one need bother about prosody. Thus we have only
+orthography and etymology to look after, when in comes Murray and spoils
+all! It is doubtful if the language will ever recover the interference
+of that Yankee merchant who invented syntax and made the life of dull
+school boys and girls a path of thorns and agony.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_71" id="page_71"></a>{71}</span></p>
+
+<p>An allegory is a fable for fools of larger growth. I am writing in an
+off-hand way, and I will not pause to examine the question nicely; but
+is there any such thing as a successful allegory? I have no experience
+of one. I seem to hear a loud shout of “<i>The Pilgrim’s Progress</i>.” Well,
+I never could read the book through, and I have tried at least twenty
+times. I have put the reading of that book before myself in the most
+solemn manner. I have told myself over and over again that I ought to
+read it as an educational exercise. In vain. How any man with
+imagination can bear the book I do not know. Bunyan had inexhaustible
+invention, but no imagination. He saw a reason for things, not the
+things themselves. No creation of the imagination can lack consequence
+or verisimilitude. On almost every page of the <i>Progress</i> there is
+violation of sequence, outrage against verisimilitude. Christian has a
+great burden on his back and is in rags. He cannot remove the burden.
+(Why?) He is put to bed (with the burden on his back), then he is
+troubled in his mind (the burden is forgotten, and the vision altered
+completely and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_72" id="page_72"></a>{72}</span> fatally); again we are reminded that he has the burden
+on his back when he tells Evangelist of it. Why can he not loose the
+burden on his back? How is it secured so that he cannot remove it? He
+cannot see a wicket gate across a very wide field, but he sees a shining
+light (where?), and then he begins to run (burden and all) away from his
+wife and children (which is immoral and abhorrent to the laws of God and
+man). For the mere selfish ease of his body he deserts his wife and
+children, who must be left miserably poor, for is he not in rags? The
+neighbours come out and mock at him for running across a field. Why? How
+do they know why he runs, and what neighbours are there to come out and
+mock at one when one is running across a large field? The Slough of
+Despond is in this field (for he has not passed through the wicket
+gate), and he does not seem to know of the Slough, or think of avoiding
+it. Fancy any man not knowing of such a filthy hole within a field of
+his home! How is it that Pliable and Obstinate have no burdens on their
+backs? It is not the will of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_73" id="page_73"></a>{73}</span> the King that the Slough should be
+dangerous to wayfarers: this surely is blasphemy. The whole thing is
+grotesquely absurd and impossible to imagine. There is no sobriety in
+it, no sobriety of keeping in it; and no matter how wild the effort or
+vision of imagination may be there must always be sobriety of keeping in
+it or it is delirium not imagination, disease not inspiration. As far as
+I can see there is no trace of imagination, or even fancy, in the
+<i>Pilgrim’s Progress</i>. The story never happened at all. It is a horrible
+attempt to tinkerise the Bible.</p>
+
+<p>One of the things I cannot understand about Macaulay is that he stands
+by Bunyan’s silly book. Macaulay was a man of vast reading and
+acquirements and of common-sense tastes. He was not a poet, but he was
+very nearly one, and ought to have responded in sympathy with poets. In
+politics he belonged to that most melancholy of all sects, the Whigs,
+and it may be that the spirit of political compromise to which he had
+familiarised himself in public life had slipped unknown to him into his
+literary<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_74" id="page_74"></a>{74}</span> briefs. Anyway, he himself says that the <i>Pilgrim’s Progress</i>
+is the only book which was promoted from the kitchen to the
+drawing-room. There is no difficulty in accounting for the fact that the
+book was popular among scullions and cooks, but how it ever gained
+currency among people of moderate education and taste cannot be
+explained. It is the most dull and tedious and monstrous book of any
+note in the English language, and how any man with a gleam of
+imagination can like it is more than I can understand. If one has been
+familiar with it when young, one may tolerate it on the score of
+tenderness&mdash;tenderness for memories and laziness in new enterprises; but
+I never yet knew any one with even fancy who, meeting it for the first
+time after the dawn of adolescence, could even endure it.</p>
+
+<p>It is like celebrating one’s own apotheosis to drop Bunyan and take up
+Spenser. Here we share the air with an immortal god and not a bilious
+enthusiast. When I have laid aside the <i>Spelling-Book</i> and the
+<i>Pilgrim’s Progress</i>, and opened the <i>Faerie Queen</i>, I feel as though
+the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_75" id="page_75"></a>{75}</span> leaden clouds of the north had rolled away, disclosing the blue of
+Ægean skies; as though for squalid porridge and buttermilk had been
+substituted ambrosia and nectar; as though for fallow and stubble had
+drifted under my feet soft meadow-grass dense with flowers; as though
+the moist and clayey crags had changed into purple hills, the
+green-mantled pools to azure lakes, the narrow waters of a stagnant mere
+to the free imperial waves and tides of the ocean. It is better than
+escaping out of an East-end slum into the green lanes and roads of
+Warwickshire.</p>
+
+<p>And yet, melancholy truth! the <i>Faerie Queen</i> is most unpopular and most
+unreadable. It has with justice, I think, been said that of ten thousand
+people who begin the <i>Faerie Queen</i>, not ten read half way through it,
+and only one arrives at the end. I find by a mark in my copy that I have
+got a good deal more than half through it, but that I have not reached
+the last line of this most colossal fragment of a poem. What a mercy the
+rest of it was drowned in the Irish sea! My <i>Faerie Queen</i> occupies<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_76" id="page_76"></a>{76}</span> 792
+pages of five stanzas to the page; that is, between thirty-five and
+thirty-six thousand verses, two hundred and sixty to seventy thousand
+words, or equal in length to a couple of ordinary three-volume novels!
+And still it is <i>unperfite</i>! I find that although I have owned the book
+for twenty years, I have got no further than page 472, so that I have
+read only three-fifths of the fragment of this stupendous poem.</p>
+
+<p>It is not the length alone that defeats the reader. In all the field of
+English verse there is no poem of great length that comes upon the mind
+with more full and easy flow. The stanza after a long while becomes, no
+doubt, monotonous, but it is the monotony of a vast and freightful river
+that moves majestically, bearing interminable argosies of infinite
+beauty and variety and significance. After one hundred pages one might
+put down the book, wearied by the melodious monotony of the imperial
+chords. I have never been able to read anything like a hundred, anything
+like fifty pages at a time. I think I have rarely exceeded as many
+stanzas. Spenser is the poets’ poet, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_77" id="page_77"></a>{77}</span> the <i>Faerie Queen</i> the poets’
+poem, and yet even the poets cannot read it freely and fully, as one
+reads Milton or Shakespeare or Shelley or Keats or the readable parts of
+Coleridge, all of whom are poets’ poets also.</p>
+
+<p>The allegory bars the way. One reads on smoothly and joyously about a
+wood or a nymph, or a knight or a lady, or a castle or a dragon, and is
+half drunk on the wealthy poet’s mead (is not Spenser the wealthiest of
+English poets?), when suddenly Dan Allegory comes along and assures you
+that it is not a wood or a nymph, or a knight or lady, or a castle or
+dragon, but a virtue or a vice posing in property clothes; that in fact
+things are not what they seem, but visions are about. Cobbett intended
+his fables for little children, and Bunyan his allegory for the company
+of the stewpans, but Spenser’s story is for the ears of ladies and of
+knights; why then does he try to spoon-feed them with virtuous
+sentiment? There is not, as far as I know, a trace of dyspepsia in all
+the <i>Faerie Queen</i>, and yet he has sicklied it over “with the pale cast
+of thought.” In this Vale of Tears<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_78" id="page_78"></a>{78}</span> there are quite as many virtuous
+persons as any reasonable man can desire. Why should our poets&mdash;those
+rare and exquisite manifestations of our possibilities&mdash;turn themselves
+into moralists, who are, bless you, as common as grocers, as plentiful
+as mediocrity. In fact, nine-tenths of the civilised race of man are
+moralists. But poets ought not to be theorists. They are not sent to us
+for the purpose of converting us, but for the purpose of delighting us.
+They ought to be catholic and pagan. They are among the settled property
+of joy to which all mankind are heirs. They come in among the flowers
+and colours of the sky and earth, and the vocal rapture of the birds,
+and the perfumes of the breeze, and the love of woman and children and
+friends and kind. They are sent to us for our mere delight. They never
+grow less or fade away or change. They have nothing to do with dynasties
+or creeds or codes of manners. They are apart from all bias and strife.
+The will of Heaven itself is against poets preaching, for no poet has
+ever written hymns that were not a burden upon his reputation as a
+singer,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_79" id="page_79"></a>{79}</span> and did not weigh him to the ground, compared with his flight
+when free and catholic and pagan.</p>
+
+<p>After entertaining the nightmares of dulness born of Cobbett and Bunyan,
+how one’s shoulders swing back, one’s chest opens, and one’s breath
+comes with large and ample coolness and joy as one reads&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“The ioyous day gan early to appeare;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And fayre Aurora from the deawy bed<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Of aged Tithone gan herselfe to reare<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">With rosy cheekes, for shame as blushing red:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Her golden locks, for hast, were loosely shed<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">About her eares, when Una her did marke<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Clymbe to her charet, all with flowers spred,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">From heven high to chace the chearelesse darke;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">With mery note her lowd salutes the mountain larke.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">Or again here&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Then forth he called that his daughter fayre,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The fairest Un’, his onely daughter deare,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">His onely daughter and his onely hayre;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Who forth proceeding with sad sober cheare,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">As bright as doth the morning starre appeare<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Out of the east with flaming lockes bedight,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To tell that dawning day is drawing neare<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And to the world does bring long wished light:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">So fair and fresh that lady shewd herselfe in sight.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_80" id="page_80"></a>{80}</span></p>
+
+<p>Is it not a miserable destiny to be obliged to read stanza after stanza
+redolent of such rich perfumed words about the lady, and then to find
+that Una is not a mortal or a spirit even&mdash;but Truth! An abstraction! A
+whim of degrading reason! A figment of a moralist’s heated and
+disordered brain. Any Lie of a poet is better than any Truth of a
+moralist. Why did Spenser stoop to run on the same intellectual plain as
+the accidental teacher? The teacher would have done admirably for Truth,
+but all the worthy essayists of England in the “spacious days of Queen
+Elizabeth,” put together, could not have written the stanzas about Una
+as Spenser saw her. This poaching of poets on the preserves of moralists
+is one of the most shameful things in the history of art.</p>
+
+<p>There are few poets it is harder to select quotations from than Spenser.
+The fact is, all the <i>Faerie Queen</i> ought to be quoted except the
+blinding allegory. I find that in years of my movement from the opening
+of the poem to page 472, the limit I have reached, I have marked a
+hundred passages at least, some<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_81" id="page_81"></a>{81}</span> of them running through pages. In no
+other poem&mdash;except Shelley’s <i>Alastor</i>&mdash;do I notice such grievous,
+continuous pencil scores. What is one to do? Whither is one to turn? As
+I handle the book I am lost in a deeper forest of delight than ever
+knight of Gloriana’s trod. Here I find a passage of several stanzas
+marked. I am much too lazy to copy them, and the spelling is troublesome
+often. But who can resist this?&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">“&mdash;&mdash; And, when she spake,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sweete wordes, like dropping honny, she did shed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And twixt the perles and rubins softly brake<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A silver sound, that heavenly musicke seemed to make.<br /></span>
+<span style="margin-left: 4em;">. . . . . . . . . .</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Upon her eyelids many graces sate<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Under the shadow of her even browes.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>I have quoted the three lines and a half of the earlier stanza merely
+that they may act as an overture to the last two lines. Surely there are
+no two lovelier lines in the language! In the last line the words seem
+to melt together of their own propinquity.</p>
+
+<p>Here is an alexandrine that haunts me night and day&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Sweete is the love that comes alone with willingnesse.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_82" id="page_82"></a>{82}</span></p>
+
+<p>As a rule, I hate writing with the books I am speaking of near me; they
+fetter one cruelly when they are at hand. There is a tendency to verify
+one’s memory, and read up the context of favourite lines. This is
+checking to the speed and chilling to the spirits. When I was saying
+something about the <i>Spelling-Book</i> and the <i>Pilgrim’s Progress</i>, I had
+the copies within arm’s length, for I did not know either well enough to
+trust to memory. Since I got done with them I have placed them in
+distant safety. But one likes to handle Spenser&mdash;to have it nigh. My
+copy is lying at my left elbow in the blazing sun as I write now. It
+seems to me I shall never again look into the <i>Spelling-Book</i> or the
+<i>Pilgrim’s Progress</i>. Fables and allegories are only foolishnesses fit
+for people of weak intellect and children. Well, when I put down this
+pen, and before this ink is dry, I shall have resumed my interrupted
+reading of the <i>Faerie Queen</i> at page 473. My intellect is too weak and
+my heart too childish to resist the seduction of Spenser’s verse. So
+much for my own theory of allegory and my respect for my own theory.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_83" id="page_83"></a>{83}</span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="MY_COPY_OF_KEATS" id="MY_COPY_OF_KEATS"></a>MY COPY OF KEATS.</h2>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> only copy of Keats I ever owned is a modest volume published by
+Edward Moxon and Co. in the year 1861. By writing on its yellow fly-leaf
+I find it was given to me four years later, in September 1865. At that
+time it was clean and bright, opened with strict impartiality when set
+upon its back, and had not learned to respond with alacrity to hasty
+searches for favourite passages.</p>
+
+<p>The binding is now racked and feeble from use; and if, as in army
+regulations, service under warm suns is to be taken for longer service
+in cooler climes, it may be said that to the exhaustion following
+overwork have been added the prejudices of premature age.</p>
+
+<p>It is not bound as books were bound once upon a time, when they
+outlasted the tables and chairs,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_84" id="page_84"></a>{84}</span> even the walls; ay, the very races and
+names of their owners. The cover is simple plain blue cloth; on the back
+is a little patch of printing in gold, with the words Keats’s <i>Poetical
+Works</i> in the centre of a twined gilt ribbon and twisted gilt flowers.
+The welt at the back is bleached and frayed; the corners of the cover
+are battered and turned in. There is a chink between the cover and the
+arched back; and the once proud Norman line of that arc is flattened and
+degraded, retaining no more of its pristine look of sturdy strength than
+a wheaten straw after the threshing.</p>
+
+<p>In a list of new books preceding the biography of the poet I find the
+volume I speak of under the head “<span class="smcap">Poetry</span>&mdash;<i>Pocket Editions</i>;” described
+as “Keats’s <i>Poetical Works</i>. With a Memoir by R. M. Milnes. Price 3<i>s.</i>
+6<i>d.</i> cloth.” It was from no desire to look my gift-horse in the mouth I
+alighted upon the penultimate fact disclosed in the description. When I
+become owner of any volume my first delight in it is to read the
+catalogue of new books annexed, if there be any, before breaking my fast
+upon the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_85" id="page_85"></a>{85}</span> subject-matter of the writer in my hand&mdash;as a poor gentleman
+in a spacious restaurant, who, having ordered luncheon, consisting of
+bread and cheese, butter, and a half-pint of bitter ale, takes up the
+bill of fare and the list of wines, and designs for his imagination a
+feast his purse denies to his lips.</p>
+
+<p>If any owner of a cart of old books in Farringdon Street asked you a
+shilling for such a copy of Keats as mine, you would smile at him. You
+would think he had acquired the books merely to satisfy his own taste,
+and now displayed them to gratify a vanity that was intelligible; you
+would feel assured no motive towards commerce could underlie ever so
+deeply such a preposterous demand.</p>
+
+<p>My copy will, I think, last my time. Already it has been in my hands
+more than half the years of a generation; and I feel that its severest
+trials are over. In days gone by it made journeys with me by sea and
+land, and paid long visits to some friends, both when I went myself, and
+when I did not go. Change of air and scene have had no beneficial effect
+upon it. Journey after<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_86" id="page_86"></a>{86}</span> journey, and visit after visit, the full cobalt
+of the cloth grew darker and dingier, the boards of the cover became
+limper and limper, and the stitching at the back more apparent between
+the sheets, like the bones and sinews growing outward through the flesh
+of a hand waxing old.</p>
+
+<p>Once, when the book had been on a prolonged excursion away from me, it
+returned sadly out of sorts. Had it been a dear friend come back from
+India on sick-leave, after an absence from temperate skies of twenty
+years, I could not have observed a more disquieting change. The cover
+was darkened so that the original hue had almost wholly disappeared,
+save at the edges, that, like the Indian veteran’s forehead, were of
+startling and unwholesome pallor. Its presence in such guise aroused a
+gnawing solicitude which undermined all peace. I could not endure the
+symptoms of its speedy decline, the prospect of its dissolution; and to
+shield its case from harm and my sensibilities from continual assault, I
+wrapped it with sighs and travail of heart in a gritty cover of
+substantial brown paper.</p>
+
+<p>For a while, the consciousness that my book<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_87" id="page_87"></a>{87}</span> was safe compensated for
+the unfamiliarity of its appearance and my constitutional antipathy to
+contact with brown paper, even a lively image of which makes me cringe.</p>
+
+<p>But as days went on the brown paper entered into my soul and rankled.
+What! was my Keats to be clad in that wretched union garb, that livery
+of poverty acknowledged, that corduroy of the bookshelf? Intolerable!
+Should I, who had, like other men, only my time to live, be denied all
+friendly sight of the natural seeming of my prime friend? My Keats would
+last my time; and why should I hide my friend in an unparticularised
+garb, the uniform of the mean or the needy, merely that those who came
+after me might enjoy a privilege of which senseless timidity sought to
+rob me? No; that should not be. I would cast away the badge of beggary,
+and, like a man, face the daily decay of my old companion. I tore the
+paper off, threw it upon the fire, and set my disenthralled Keats in its
+own proper vesture on the shelf among its comrades and its peers.</p>
+
+<p>There is no man, how poor soever, who has<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_88" id="page_88"></a>{88}</span> not some taste which, for his
+circumstances, must be regarded as expensive; and in that “sweet
+unreasonableness” of human nature, not at all limited to “the Celt,” men
+take a kind of foolish pride in their particular extravagances. You know
+a man that declares he would sooner go without his dinner than a clean
+shirt; another who would prefer one good cigar to a pound of cavendish;
+one who would rather travel to the City of winter mornings by train
+without an overcoat than by vulgar tramcar in fur and pilot cloth; a
+fourth who would more gladly give his right hand than forget his Greek;
+a fifth who pays the hire of a piano and does without the beer which as
+a Briton is his birthright; a sixth who starves himself and stints his
+family for the love of a garden. For my own part, I felt the using of my
+Keats without protection of any kind to be beyond my means, but I
+gloried in this extravagance. It seemed rich to be thus hand and glove
+with the book: to touch it when and where I would, and as much as ever I
+liked: to feel assured that even with free using and free lending it
+would outlast my short stay here, as the blossoms<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_89" id="page_89"></a>{89}</span> of the roses in a
+friend’s hedge outlast your summer visit. Was it not fine, did it not
+strike a chord of kingly generosity, to be able to say to a friend,
+“Here is my copy of Keats. Take it, use it, read it. There is plenty of
+it for you and me”? I would rather have the lending of my Keats than the
+bidding to a banquet.</p>
+
+<p>So it fell out that my favourite went more among my friends than ever,
+and accumulated at a usurious rate all manner of marks and stains, and
+defacements, and dog-ears, and other unworded comments, as well as
+verbal comments expressed in pencil and ink. It is true that a rolling
+stone gathers no moss, but a rolling snowball gathers more snow, and
+moss and snow are of about equal value. Oliver Wendell Holmes says, if I
+may trust my memory, that only three things improve with years: violins,
+wine, and meerschaum pipes. He loves books, and knows books as well as
+any man now living&mdash;almost as well as Charles Lamb did when he was with
+us; and yet Dr. Holmes does not think books worthy of being included in
+the list of things that time ripens. Is this ingratitude<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_90" id="page_90"></a>{90}</span> or
+carelessness, or does it mean that books dwell apart, and are no more to
+be classed with mere tangible things than angels, or mathematical
+points, or the winds of last winter? Is a book to him an ethereal record
+of a divine trance? an insubstantial painting of a splendid dream? the
+music of a yesterday fruitful in heavenly melody? the echo of a syren’s
+song haunting a sea shell?</p>
+
+<p>Does not De Quincey tell us that, having lent some books to Coleridge,
+the poet not only wrote the lender’s name in them, but enriched the
+margins with observations and comments on the texts? Who would not give
+a tithe of the books he has for one volume so gloriously illuminated? I
+remember when I was a lad, among lads, a friend of ours picked up
+secondhand Cary’s Dante, in which was written the name of a poet still
+living, but who is almost unknown. We loved the living poet for his
+work, and when the buyer told us that the Dante bore not only the poet’s
+name, but numerous marginal notes and hints in his handwriting, we all
+looked upon the happy possessor with eyes of envious<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_91" id="page_91"></a>{91}</span> respect. The
+precious volume was shown to us, not in groups, for in gatherings there
+is peril of a profaning laugh, or an unsympathetic sneer. One by one we
+were handed the book, on still country roads, upon the tranquil heights
+of hills, where we were alone with the brown heather and the plover, or
+on some barren cliff above the summer sea. The familiar printed text
+sank into insignificance beside the blurred pencil lines. Any one might
+buy a fair uncut copy for a crown piece. The text was common
+property&mdash;“<span class="leftspc">’</span>twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands.” But
+here before us lay revealed the private workings of a poetic
+imagination, fired by contact with a master of the craft. To us this
+volume disclosed one of our heroes, clad in the homely garb of prose,
+speaking in his own everyday speech, and lifting up his voice in
+admiration, wonder, awe, to the colossal demi-god, in whose presence we
+had stood humiliated and afeard.</p>
+
+<p>My Keats has suffered from many pipes, many thumbs, many pencils, many
+quills, many pockets. Not one stain, one gape, one<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_92" id="page_92"></a>{92}</span> blot of these would
+I forego for a spick and span copy in all the gorgeous pomp of the
+bookbinder’s millinery. These blemishes are aureolæ to me. They are
+nimbi around the brows of the gods and demi-gods, who walk in the
+triumph of their paternal despot on the clouds metropolitan that
+embattle the heights of Parnassus.</p>
+
+<p>What a harvest of happy memories is garnered in its leaves! How well I
+remember the day it got that faint yellow stain on the page where begins
+the <i>Ode on a Grecian Urn</i>. It was a clear, bright, warm, sunshiny
+afternoon late in the month of May. Three of us took a boat and rowed
+down a broad blue river, ran the nose of the boat ashore on the gravel
+beach of a sequestered island and landed. Pulling was warm work, and we
+all climbed a slope, reached the summit, and cast ourselves down on the
+long lush cool grass, in the shade of whispering sycamores, and in a
+stream of air that came fresh with the cheering spices of the hawthorn
+blossom.</p>
+
+<p>One of our company was the best chamber reader I have ever heard. His
+voice was<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_93" id="page_93"></a>{93}</span> neither very melodious nor very full. Perhaps he was all the
+better for this because he made no effort at display. As he read, the
+book vanished from his sight, and he leaned over the poet’s shoulder,
+saw what the poet saw, and in a voice timid with the sense of
+responsibility, and yet elated with a kind of fearing joy, told of what
+he saw in words that never hurried, and that, when uttered, always
+seemed to hang substantially in the air like banners.</p>
+
+<p>He discovered and related the poet’s vision rather than simulated
+passion to suit the scene. I remember well his reading of the passage:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Though winning near the goal&mdash;yet, do not grieve;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">She cannot fade though thou hast not thy bliss,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">For ever wilt thou love and she be fair!”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>He rehearsed the whole of the ode over and over again as we lay on the
+grass watching the vast chestnuts and oaks bending over the river, as
+though they had grown aweary of the sun, and longed to glide into the
+broad full stream.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_94" id="page_94"></a>{94}</span></p>
+
+<p>As he read the lines just quoted, he gave us time to hear the murmur,
+and to breathe the fragrance of those immortal trees. “Nor ever can
+those trees be bare,” in the text has only a semicolon after it. Yet
+here he paused, while three wavelets broke upon the beach, as if he
+could not tear himself away from contemplating the deathless verdure,
+and realising the prodigious edict pronounced upon it. “Bold lover,
+never, never canst thou kiss, though winning near the goal.” At the
+terrible decree he raised his eyes and gazed with heavy-lidded, hopeless
+commiseration at this being, who, still more unhappy than Tithonus, had
+to immortality added perpetual youth, with passion for ever strong, and
+denial for ever final.</p>
+
+<p>“Yet do not grieve.” This he uttered as one who pleads forgiveness of a
+corpse&mdash;merely to try to soothe a conscience sensible of an obligation
+that can never now be discharged. “She cannot fade, though thou hast not
+thy bliss, for ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!” Here the reader,
+with eyes fixed and rayless, seemed by voice and pose to be sunk,
+beyond<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_95" id="page_95"></a>{95}</span> all power of hope, in an abyss of despair. The barren
+immutability of the spectacle appeared to weigh upon him more
+intolerably than the wreck of a people. He spoke the words in a long
+drawn-out whisper, and, after a pause, dropped his head, and did not
+resume.</p>
+
+<p>I recollect that when the illusion he wrought up so fully in my mind had
+passed away in that long pause, and when I remembered that the fancy of
+the poet was expending itself, not on beings whom he conceived
+originally as human, but on the figures of a mere vase, I was seized
+with a fierce desire to get up and seek that vase through all the world
+until I found it, and then smash it into ten thousand atoms.</p>
+
+<p>When I had written the last sentence, I took up the volume to decide
+where I should recommence, and I “turned the page, and turned the page.”
+I lived over again the days not forgotten, but laid aside in memory to
+be borne forth in periods of high festival. I could not bring myself
+back from the comrades of old, and the marvels of the great magician, to
+this poor street, this solitude, and this squalid company of my<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_96" id="page_96"></a>{96}</span> own
+thoughts&mdash;thoughts so trivial and so mean compared with the imperial
+visions into which I had been gazing, that I was glad for the weariness
+which came upon me, and grateful to gray dawn that glimmered against the
+blind and absolved me from further obligation for that sitting.</p>
+
+<p>On turning over the leaves without reading, I find <i>Hyperion</i> opens most
+readily of all, and seems to have fared worst from deliberate and
+unintentional comment. Much of the wear and tear and pencil marks are to
+be set down against myself; for when I take the book with no definite
+purpose I turn to <i>Hyperion</i>, as a blind man to the warmth of the sun.
+Some qualities of the poem I can feel and appreciate; but always in its
+presence I am weighed down by the consciousness that my deficiency in
+some attribute of perception debars me from undreamed-of privileges.</p>
+
+<p>I recall one evening in a pine glen, with one man and <i>Hyperion</i>. It
+would be difficult to match this man or me as readers. I don’t think
+there can be ten worse employing the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_97" id="page_97"></a>{97}</span> English language to-day. I not
+only do not by any inflection of voice expound what I utter, but I am
+often incapable of speaking the words before me. I take in a line at a
+glance, see its import with my own imagination apart from the verbiage,
+which leaves not a shadow of an impression on my mind. When I come to
+the next line I grow suddenly alive to the fact that I have to speak off
+the former one. I am in a hurry to see what line two has to show; so,
+instead of giving the poet’s words for line one, I give my own
+description of the vision it has conjured up in my mind. This is bad
+enough in all conscience; but the friend of whom I speak now, behaves
+even worse. His plan of reading is to stop his voice in the middle of
+line one, and proceed to discuss the merits of line two, which he had
+read with his eye, but not with his lips, and of which the listener is
+ignorant, unless he happen to know the poem by rote.</p>
+
+<p>On that evening in the glen I pulled out Keats, and turned, at my
+friend’s request, to <i>Hyperion</i>, and began to read aloud. He was more
+patient than mercy’s self; but occasionally,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_98" id="page_98"></a>{98}</span> when I did a most
+exceptionally bad murder on the text, he would writhe and cry out, and I
+would go back and correct myself, and start afresh.</p>
+
+<p>He had a big burly frame, and a deep full voice that shouted easily, and
+some of the comments shouted as I read are indicated by pencil marks in
+the margin. The writing was not done then, but much later, when he and I
+had shaken hands, and he had gone sixteen thousand miles away. As he was
+about to set out on that long journey, he said, “In seven years more
+I’ll drop in and have a pipe with you.” It had been seven years since I
+saw him before. The notes on the margin are only keys to what was said;
+for I fear the comment made was more bulky than the text, and the text
+and comment together would far exceed the limits of such an essay as
+this. I therefore curtail greatly, and omit much.</p>
+
+<p>I read down the first page without meeting any interruption; but when I
+came in page two on</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10">“She would have ta’en<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Achilles by the hair and bent his neck,”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_99" id="page_99"></a>{99}</span></p>
+
+<p class="nind">he cried out, “Stop! Don’t read the line following. It is bathos
+compared with that line and a half. It is paltry and weak beside what
+you have read. ‘Ta’en Achilles by the hair and bent his neck.’ By Jove!
+can you not see the white muscles start out in his throat, and the look
+of rage, defeat and agony on the face of the Greek bruiser? But how flat
+falls the next line: ‘Or with a finger stay’d Ixion’s wheel.’ What’s the
+good of stopping Ixion’s wheel? Besides, a crowbar would be much better
+than a finger. It is a line for children, not for grown men. It exhausts
+the subject. It is too literal. There is no question left to ask. But
+the vague ‘Ta’en Achilles by the hair and <i>bent</i> his neck’ is perfect.
+You can see her knee in the hollow of his back, and her fingers twisted
+in his hair. But the image of the goddess dabbling in that river of hell
+after Ixion’s wheel is contemptible.”</p>
+
+<p>He next stopped me at</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Until at length old Saturn lifted up<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">His faded eyes, and saw his kingdom gone.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>“What an immeasurable vision Keats must<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_100" id="page_100"></a>{100}</span> have had of the old bankrupt
+Titan, when he wrote the second line! Taken in the context it is simply
+overwhelming. Keats must have sprung up out of his chair as he saw the
+gigantic head upraised, and the prodigious grief of the grey-haired god.
+But Keats was not happy in the matter of full stops. Here again what
+comes after weakens. We get no additional strength out of</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“<span class="leftspc">‘</span>And all the gloom and sorrow of the place<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And that fair kneeling Goddess.’<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">The ‘gloom and sorrow’ and the ‘goddess’ are abominably
+anticlimacteric.”</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Yes, there must be a golden victory;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">There must be gods thrown down and trumpets blown<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Of triumph calm, and hymns of festival<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Upon the gold clouds metropolitan,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Voices of soft proclaim, and silver stir<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Of strings in hollow shells; and there shall be<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Beautiful things made new, for the surprise<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Of the sky-children; I will give command:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Thea! Thea! Thea! where is Saturn?”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_101" id="page_101"></a>{101}</span></p>
+
+<p>“Read that again!” cried my friend, clinging to the grass and breathing
+hard. “Again!” he cried, when I had finished the second time. And then,
+before I could proceed, he sprang to his feet, carrying out the action
+in the text immediately following:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">“This passion lifted him upon his feet,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And made his hands to struggle in the air.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>“Come on, John Milton,” cried my friend, excitedly sparring at the
+winds,&mdash;“come on, and beat that, and we’ll let you put all your
+adjectives behind your nouns, and your verb last, and your nominative
+nowhere! Why man,”&mdash;this being addressed to the Puritan poet&mdash;“it
+carried Keats himself off his legs; that’s more than anything you ever
+wrote when you were old did for you. There’s the smell of midnight oil
+off your later spontaneous efforts, John Milton.</p>
+
+<p>“When Milton went loafing about and didn’t mind much what he was writing
+he could give any of them points”&mdash;(I deplore the language) “any of
+them, ay, Shakespeare himself<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_102" id="page_102"></a>{102}</span> points in a poem. In a poem, sir” (this
+to me), “Milton could give Shakespeare a hundred and one out of a
+hundred and lick the Bard easily. How the man who was such a fool as to
+write Shakespeare’s poems had the good sense to write Shakespeare’s
+plays I can never understand. The most un-Shakesperian poems in the
+language are Shakespeare’s. I never read Cowley, but it seems to me
+Cowley ought to have written Shakespeare’s poems, and then his obscurity
+would have been complete. If Milton only didn’t take the trouble to be
+great he would have been greater. As far as I know there are no English
+poets who improved when they ceased to be amateurs and became
+professional poets, except Wordsworth and Tennyson. Shelley and Keats
+were never regular race-horses. They were colts that bolted in their
+first race and ran until they dropped. It was a good job Shakespeare
+gave up writing rhymes and posing as a poet. It was not until he
+despaired of becoming one and took to the drama that he began to feel
+his feet and show his pace. If he had suspected he was a great poet he
+would have adopted the airs of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_103" id="page_103"></a>{103}</span> the profession and been ruined. In his
+time no one thought of calling a play a poem&mdash;that was what saved the
+greatest of all our poets to us. The only two things Shakespeare didn’t
+know is that a play may be a poem and that his plays are the finest
+poems finite man as he is now constructed can endure. It is all nonsense
+to say man shall never look on the like of Shakespeare again. It is not
+the poet superior to Shakespeare man now lacks, but the man to apprehend
+him.”</p>
+
+<p>I looked around uneasily, and found, to my great satisfaction, that
+there was no stranger in view. My friend occupied a position of
+responsibility and trust, and it would be most injurious if a rumour got
+abroad that not only did he read and admire verse, but that he held
+converse with the shades of departed poets as well. In old days men who
+spoke to the vacant air were convicted of necromancy and burned; in our
+times men offending in this manner are suspected of poetry and
+ostracized.</p>
+
+<p>As soon as my friend was somewhat calmed, and had cast himself down
+again and lit a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_104" id="page_104"></a>{104}</span> pipe, I resumed my reading. He allowed me to proceed
+without interruption until I came to:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10">“His palace bright,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Bastion’d with pyramids of glowing gold,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And touch’d with shade of bronzed obelisks,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Glared a blood-red through all its thousand courts,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Arches, and domes, and fiery galleries;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And all its curtains of Aurorian clouds<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Flushed angerly: while sometimes eagles’ wings,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Unseen before by Gods or wondering men,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Darken’d the place; and neighing steeds were heard,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Not heard before by Gods or wondering men.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>“Prodigious!” he shouted. “Go over that again. Keep the syllables wide
+apart. It is a good rule of water-colour sketching not to be too nice
+about joining the edges of the tints; this lets the light in. Keep the
+syllables as far apart as ever you can, and let the silentness in
+between to clear up the music. How the gods and the wondering men must
+have wondered! Do you know, I am sure Keats often frightened, terrified
+himself with his own visions. You remember he says somewhere he doesn’t
+think any one could dare to read some one or another aloud at<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_105" id="page_105"></a>{105}</span> midnight.
+I believe that often in the midnight he sat and cowered before the
+gigantic sights and sounds that reigned despotically over his fancy.”</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">“O dreams of day and night!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">O monstrous forms! O effigies of pain!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">O spectres busy in a cold, cold gloom!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">O lank-ear’d Phantoms of black-weeded pools!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Why do I know ye? why have I seen ye? why<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Is my eternal essence thus distraught<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To see and to behold these horrors new?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Saturn is fallen, am I too to fall?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Am I to leave this haven of my rest,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">This cradle of my glory, this soft clime,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">This calm luxuriance of blissful light,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">These crystalline pavilions, and pure fanes,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of all my lucent empire? It is left<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Deserted, void, nor any haunt of mine.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The blaze, the splendour, and the symmetry<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I cannot see&mdash;but darkness, death and darkness.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Even here, into my centre of repose,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The shady visions come to domineer,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Insult, and blind and stifle up my pomp&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Fall!&mdash;No, by Tellus and her briny robes!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Over the fiery frontier of my realms<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I will advance a terrible right arm<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Shall scare that infant thunderer, rebel Jove,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And bid old Saturn take his throne again.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_106" id="page_106"></a>{106}</span></p>
+
+<p>“What more magnificent prelude ever was uttered to oath than the portion
+of this speech preceding ‘No, by Tellus’! What more overpowering,
+leading up to an overwhelming threat, than the whole passage going
+before ‘Over the fiery frontier of my realms I will advance a terrible
+right arm’! What menacing deliberativeness there is in this whole
+speech, and what utter completeness of ruin to come is indicated by
+those words, ‘I will advance a terrible right arm’! You feel no sooner
+shall that arm move than ‘rebel Jove’s’ reign will be at an end, and
+that chaos will be left for Saturn to rule and fashion once more into
+order. Shut up the poem now. That’s plenty of <i>Hyperion</i>, and the other
+books of it are inferior. There is more labour and more likeness to
+<i>Paradise Lost</i>.” And so my friend, who is 16,000 miles away, and I
+turned from the Titanic theme, and spoke of the local board of
+guardians, or some young girl whose beauty was making rich misery in the
+hearts of young men in those old days.</p>
+
+<p>There is no other long poem in the volume<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_107" id="page_107"></a>{107}</span> bearing any marks which
+indicate such close connection with any individual reader as in the case
+of <i>Hyperion</i>. <i>Endymion</i> boasts only one mark, and that expressing
+admiration of the relief afforded from monotony of the heroic couplets
+by the introduction in the opening of the double rhyming verses:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing&mdash;”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>The friend to whom this mark is due never handled the volume, never even
+saw it; but once upon a time when he, another man, and I had got
+together, and were talking of the “gallipot poet,” the first friend said
+he always regarded this couplet as most happily placed where it appears.
+So when I reached home I marked my copy at the lines. Now, when I open
+the volume and find that mark, it is as good to me as, better than, a
+photograph of my friend; for I not only see his face and figure, but
+once more he places his index-finger on the table, as we three sit
+smoking, and whispers out the six opening lines, ending<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_108" id="page_108"></a>{108}</span> with the two I
+have quoted. Suppose I too should some day go 16,000 miles away from
+London, and carry this volume with me, shall I not be able to open it
+when I please, and recall what I then saw and heard, what I now see and
+hear, as distinctly as though no long interval of ocean or of months lay
+between to-night and that hour?</p>
+
+<p>Can I ever forget my burly tenor friend, who sang and composed songs,
+and dinted the line in <i>The Eve of St. Agnes</i>,</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“The silver, snarling trumpets ’gan to chide,”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">and declared a hundred times in my unwearied ears that no more happy
+epithet than snarling could be found for trumpets? He over and over
+again assured me, and over and over again I loved to listen to his fancy
+running riot on the line, how he heard and saw brazen and silver and
+golden griffins quarrelling in the roof and around his ears as the
+trumpets blared through the echoing halls and corridors. He, too, marked</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“The music, yearning like a God in pain.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_109" id="page_109"></a>{109}</span></p>
+
+<p class="nind">“Keats,” he would say, “seems to have got not only at the spirit of the
+music, but at the very flesh and blood of it. He has done one thing for
+me,” my friend continued. “Before I read these lines, and others of the
+same kind, in Keats, my favourite tunes always represented an emotion of
+my own mind. Now they stand for individual characters in scenes, like
+descriptions of people in a book. When I hear music now I am with the
+Falstaffs or the Romolas, with Quasimodo or Julius Cæsar.”</p>
+
+<p>I have been regarding the indentures in the volume chronologically. The
+next marks of importance in the order of the years occur, one in <i>The
+Eve of St. Agnes</i>, the other in the <i>Ode to a Nightingale</i>. These marks,
+more than any others, I regard with grateful memory. They are not the
+work of the hand of him for whom I value them. I have good reason to
+look on him as a valid friend. For months between him and me there had
+existed an acquaintance necessarily somewhat close, but wholly
+uninformed with friendship. We spoke to one another as Mr. So-and-so.
+Neither of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_110" id="page_110"></a>{110}</span> us suspected that the other had any toleration of poets or
+poetry. Our commerce had been in mere prose. One day, in mid-winter,
+when a chilling fog hung over London, I chanced to go into a room where
+he was writing alone. After a formal greeting, I complained of the cold.
+He dropped his pen and looked up. “Yes,” he said, “very cold and dark as
+night. Do you know the coldest night that ever was?” I answered that I
+did not. “It was St. Agnes’s Eve, when</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“<span class="leftspc">‘</span>The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold.’<span class="leftspc">”</span><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">And so we fell to talking about Keats, and talked and talked for hours;
+and before the first hour of our talk had passed we had ceased
+“Mistering” one another for ever. The fire of his enthusiasm rose higher
+and higher as the minutes swept by. He knew one poet personally, for
+whose verse I had profound respect, and this poet, he told me,
+worshipped Keats. Often in our talks I laid plots for bringing him back
+to the simple sentence, “You should hear M. talk about Keats.” The<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_111" id="page_111"></a>{111}</span>
+notion that any one who knew M. could think M. would talk to me about
+Keats intoxicated me. “He would not let me listen to him?” I said half
+fearfully. “M. would talk to any one about Keats&mdash;to even a lawyer.” How
+I wished at that moment I was a Lord Chancellor who might stand in M.’s
+path. I have, in a way, been near to that poet since. I might almost
+have said to him,</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“So near, too! You could hear my sigh,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Or see my case with half an eye;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">But must not&mdash;there are reasons why.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>So this friend I speak of now and I came to be great friends indeed. We
+often met and held carnivals of verse, carnivals among the starry lamps
+of poetry. He had a subtle instinct that saw the jewel, however it might
+be set. He owned himself the faculty of the poet, which gave him ripe
+knowledge of all matters technical in the setting.</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Now more than ever seems it rich to die,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To cease upon the midnight with no pain.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">He would quote these two lines and cry, “Was<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_112" id="page_112"></a>{112}</span> ever death so pangless as
+that spoken of here? ‘To <i>cease</i> upon the midnight!’ Here is no
+struggle, no regret, no fear. This death is softer and lighter and
+smoother than the falling of the shadow of night upon a desert of
+noiseless sand.”</p>
+
+<p>For a long time the name of one man had been almost daily in my ears. I
+had been hearing much through the friend to whom I have last referred
+about his intuitive eye and critical acumen. That friend had informed me
+of the influence which his opinion carried; and of how this man held
+Keats high above poets to whom we have statues of brass, whose names we
+give to our streets. My curiosity was excited, and, while my desire to
+meet this man was largely mingled with timidity, I often felt a jealous
+pang at thinking that many of the people with whom I was acquainted knew
+him. At length I became distantly connected with an undertaking in which
+he was prominently concerned. Through the instrumentality of one
+friendly to us both, we met. It was a sacred night for me, and I sat and
+listened, enchanted. After some hours the talk wheeled<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_113" id="page_113"></a>{113}</span> round upon
+sonnets. “Sonnets!” he cried, starting up; “who can repeat the lines
+about Cortez in Keats? You all know it.” Some one began to read or
+repeat the sonnet. Until coming upon the words, “or like stout Cortez.”
+“That’s it, that’s it! Now go on.”</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">He stared at the Pacific&mdash;and all his men<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Look’d at each other with a wild surmise&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Silent, upon a peak in Darien.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>“<span class="leftspc">‘</span>And all his men looked at each other with a <i>wild</i> surmise,’<span class="leftspc">”</span> he
+repeated, “<span class="leftspc">‘</span><i>silent</i> upon a peak in Darien.’ The most enduring group
+ever designed. They are standing there to this day. They will stand
+there for ever and for ever; they are immutable. When an artist carves
+them you may know that Buonarotti is risen from the dead and is once
+more abroad.”</p>
+
+<p>That portion of a book which is called a preface and put first, is
+always the last written. It may be human, but it is not logical, that
+when a man starts he does not know what he has to say first, until he
+finds out by an elaborate guess<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_114" id="page_114"></a>{114}</span> of several hundred pages what he wants
+to say last. It would be unbecoming of me in a collection of ignorant
+essays to affect to know less than a person of average intelligence; but
+I am quite sincere when I say I am not aware who the author is of the
+great aphorism that “After all, there is a great deal of human nature in
+man.” There is, I would venture to say, more human nature than logic in
+man. My copy of Keats is no exception to the general rule of books. The
+preface ought to precede immediately the colophon. Yet it is in the
+forefront of the volume, before even the very title page itself. It
+forms no integral part of the volume, and is unknown to the printer or
+publisher. It was given to me by a thoughtful and kind-hearted friend at
+whose side I worked for a considerable while. One time, years ago, he
+took a holiday and vanished, going from among us I knew not whither. On
+coming back he presented each of his associates with something out of
+his store of spoil. That which now forms the preface to my copy he gave
+me. It consists of twelve leaves; twelve myrtle leaves on a spray.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_115" id="page_115"></a>{115}</span> When
+he was in Rome he bore me in mind and plucked this sprig at the grave of
+the poet. It is consoling to remember Keats is buried so far away from
+where he was born, when we cannot forget that the abominable infamy of
+publishing his love-letters was committed in his own country&mdash;here in
+England. His spirit was lent to earth only for a little while, and he
+gave all of it to us. But we were not satisfied. We must have his
+heart’s blood and his heart too. The gentlemen who attacked his poetry
+when he was alive really knew no better, and tried, perhaps, to be as
+honest as would suit their private ends. But the publication of the dead
+man’s love-letters, fifty years after he had passed away, cannot be
+attributed even to ignorance. If any money was made out of the book it
+would be a graceful act to give it to some church where the burial
+ground is scant, and the parish is in need of a Potter’s Field.</p>
+
+<p>When I take down my copy of Keats, and look through it and beyond it, I
+feel that while it is left to me I cannot be wholly shorn of my friends.
+It is the only album of photographs I<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_116" id="page_116"></a>{116}</span> possess. The faces I see in it
+are not for any eye but mine. It is my private portrait gallery, in
+which hang the portraits of my dearest friends. The marks and blots are
+intelligible to no eye but mine; they are the cherished hieroglyphics of
+the heart. I close the book; I lock up the hieroglyphics; I feel certain
+the book will last my time. Should it survive me and pass into new
+hands&mdash;into the hands of some boy now unborn, who may pluck out of it
+posies of love-phrases for his fresh-cheeked sweetheart&mdash;he will know
+nothing of the import these marginal notes bore to one who has gone
+before him; unless, indeed, out of some cemetery of ephemeral literature
+he digs up this key&mdash;this Rosetta stone.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_117" id="page_117"></a>{117}</span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="DECAY_OF_THE_SUBLIME" id="DECAY_OF_THE_SUBLIME"></a>DECAY OF THE SUBLIME.</h2>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> sublime is dying. It has been pining a long time. At last
+dissolution has set in. Nothing can save it but another incursion of
+Goths and Huns; and as there are no Goths and Huns handy just now, the
+sublime must die out, and die out soon. You can know what a man is by
+the company he keeps. You can judge a people by the ideas they retain
+more than by the ideas they acquire. The philology of a tongue, from its
+cradle to its grave, is the social history of the people who spoke it.
+To-day you may mark the progress of civilisation by the decay bf the
+sublime. Glance at a few of the nations of earth as they stand. Italy
+and Spain still hold with the sublime in literature and art, although,
+being exhausted stocks, they cannot produce it any longer. France is<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_118" id="page_118"></a>{118}</span>
+cynical, smart, artistic, but never was and never can be sublime, so
+long as vanity rules her; and yet, by the irony of selection, sublime is
+one of her favourite words. Central Europe has had her sublime phases,
+but cannot be even thought of now in connection with the quality; and
+Russia and Turkey are barbarous still. If we come to the active pair of
+nationalities in the progress of current civilisation, the United States
+and England, we find the sublime in very poor case.</p>
+
+<p>Young England across the water is the most progressive nation of our
+age, because it is the most practical. If ever there was a man who put
+his foot on the neck of the sublime, that man is Uncle Sam. His
+contribution to the arts is almost nothing. His outrages against
+established artistic canons have been innumerable. He owns a new land
+without traditions. He laughs at all traditions. He has never raised a
+saint or a mummy or a religion (Mormonism he stole from the East), a
+crusader, a tyrant, a painter, a sculptor, a musician, a dramatist, an
+inquisition, a star chamber, a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_119" id="page_119"></a>{119}</span> council of ten. All his efforts have
+been in a strictly practical direction, and most of his efforts have
+been crowned with success. He has devoted his leisure time, the hours
+not spent in cutting down forests or drugging Indians with whisky, to
+laughing at the foolish old notions which the foolish old countries
+cherish. He had a wonderfully fertile estate of two thousand million
+acres, about only one fourth of which is even to this day under direct
+human management. In getting these five hundred million acres of land
+under him he had met all kinds of ground&mdash;valley, forest, mountain,
+plain. But in none of these did he find anything but axes and whisky of
+the least use. No mountain had been sanctified to him by first earthly
+contact with the two Tables of the Law. No plain had been rendered
+sacred as that upon which the miraculous manna fell to feed the chosen
+people. No inland sea had been the scene of a miraculous draught of
+fishes. All the land acquired and cultivated by Uncle Sam came to him by
+the right of whisky and the axe. The mountain was nothing more than so<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_120" id="page_120"></a>{120}</span>
+much land placed at a certain angle that made it of little use for
+tillage. The plains, the rivers, and inland seas had a simply commercial
+value in his eyes. He had no experience of a miracle of any kind, and he
+did not see why he should bow down and respect a mountain, that, to him,
+was no more than so many thousand acres on an incline unfavourable to
+cultivation. Such a condition of the ground was a bore, and he would
+have cut down the mountain as he had cut down the Indian and the forest,
+if he had known how to accomplish the feat. He saw nothing mystic in the
+waters or the moon. Were the rivers and lakes wholesome to drink and
+useful for carriage, and well stocked with fish? These were the
+questions he asked about the waters. Would there be moonlight enough for
+riding and working? was the only question he asked about that “orbèd
+maiden with white fire laden whom mortals call the moon.” His notions,
+his plains, his rivers, his lakes, were all “big,” but he never thought
+of calling them sublime. On his own farm he failed to find any present
+trace of the supernatural;<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_121" id="page_121"></a>{121}</span> and he discovered no trace of the
+supernatural in tradition, for there was no tradition once the red man
+had been washed into his grave with whisky. Hence Uncle Sam began
+treating the supernatural with familiarity, and matters built on the
+supernatural with levity. Now without the supernatural the sublime
+cannot exist any length of time, if at all.</p>
+
+<p>It may be urged it is unreasonable to hold that the Americans have done
+away with the sublime, since in the history of all nations the earlier
+centuries were, as in America, devoted to material affairs. There is one
+fact bearing on this which should not be left out of count, namely, that
+America did not start from barbarism, or was not raised on a site where
+barbarism had overrun a high state of civilisation. The barbarous hordes
+of the north effaced the civilisation of old Rome, and raised upon its
+ashes a new people, the Italians, who in time led the way in art, as the
+old Romans had before them. The Renaissance was a second crop raised off
+the same ground by new men. The arts Rome had borrowed from<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_122" id="page_122"></a>{122}</span> Greece had
+been trampled down by Goths, who, when they found themselves in the land
+of milk and honey, sat down to enjoy the milk and honey, until suddenly
+the germs of old art struck root, and once more all eyes turned to Italy
+for principles of beauty. But America started with the civilisation of a
+highly civilised age. She did not rear her own civilisation on her own
+soil. She did not borrow her arts from any one country. She simply
+peopled her virgin plains with the sons of all the earth, who brought
+with them the culture of their respective nationalities. She has not
+followed the ordinary course of nations, from conflict to power, from
+power to prosperity, from prosperity to the arts, luxury, and decay. She
+started with prosperity, and the first use she made of her prosperity
+was, not to cultivate the fine arts in her own people, but to laugh at
+them in others. In the individual man the sense of humour grows with
+years. In nations the sense of humour develops with centuries. The
+literature of nations begins with battle-songs and hymns, and ends with
+burlesques and blasphemies.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_123" id="page_123"></a>{123}</span></p>
+
+<p>Now although America has begun with burlesques and blasphemies, no one
+can for a moment imagine that America is not going to create a noble
+literature of her own. She is destined not only to found and build up a
+noble literature, but one which will be unique. When she has time, when
+she has let most of those idle one thousand five hundred million acres,
+she will begin writing her books. By that time she will have running in
+her veins choice blood from every race on earth, and it is a matter of
+certainty she will give the world many delights now undreamed of. No
+other nation on earth will have, or ever has had, such an opportunity of
+devoting attention to man in his purely domestic and social relations.
+The United States of to-day has, for practical purposes, no foreign
+policy. She has no foreign rivals, she is not likely to have foreign
+wars, while in her own country she has large bodies of men from every
+people on the world. She owns the largest assorted lot of mankind on the
+globe, and as years go by we may safely conclude she will add to the
+variety and number<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_124" id="page_124"></a>{124}</span> of her sons. In all this appears no hope for the
+sublime. There is no instance in literature of a nation going back from
+laughter to heroics. The two may exist side by side. But that is not the
+case in America. Up to this hour only one class of transatlantic writers
+has challenged the attention of Europe, and that class is humorous and
+profane. Emerson, Bryant, Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Lowell, Holmes, and
+Irving are merely Europeans born in America. But Ward, Harte, Twain, and
+Breitmann are original and American.</p>
+
+<p>America is undoubtedly the literary promise-land of the future. It has
+done nothing up to this. Its condition has forbidden it to achieve
+anything, but great triumphs may be anticipated from it. Crossing the
+Atlantic, what do we find in the other great branch of the
+English-speaking race? Religious publications head the list by a long
+way. They have nothing to do with this subject save in so far as they
+are in the line of the sublime. All forms of the Christian and Jewish
+creeds are sublime. Looking at the other walks of literature, we find
+the death sentence<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_125" id="page_125"></a>{125}</span> of the sublime written everywhere. With the
+exception of Mr. Browning, here or there we have no poet or dramatist
+who attempts it. We have elegant trifles and beautiful form in many
+volumes of second-rate contemporary verse. There never was a time when
+the science of poetry was understood until now. Our critics can tell you
+with mathematical certainty the number of poems as distinguished from
+pieces of verse every well-known man has written. But we are not
+producing any great poetry, and none of the sublime kind. This is the
+age of elegant poetic incentive, of exquisite culture, but it is too
+dainty. We do not rise much above a poem to a shoe, or an ode to a
+ringlet, perfumed with one of Mr. Rimmel’s best admired distillations.
+We have a few poets who are continually trying to find out who or what
+the deuce they are, and what they meant by being born, and so on; but
+then these men are for the eclectic, and not the herd of sensible
+people. We have two men who have done noble work, Browning and Tennyson;
+but, speaking broadly, we find the sublime nowhere.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_126" id="page_126"></a>{126}</span> It is true you
+cannot force genius as you force asparagus; and these remarks are not
+intended to indict the age with having no poetic faculty or aspiration.
+Abundance of poetry of a new and beautiful kind does exist, but it is
+not of the lofty kind born to the men of old.</p>
+
+<p>Turning eyes away from literature, take a few more of the arts. Before
+we go farther, let us admit that one art at least never reached sublimer
+recorded heights than to-day. The music of the generation just past is,
+I believe, in the front rank of the art. It is an art now in the throes
+of an enormous transformation. Not using the phrase in its slangy
+meaning, the music of the future is sure to touch splendours never
+dreamed of by that Raphael of the lyre, Mozart. The only art-Titans now
+wrestling are the musicians; not those paltry souls that pad the poor
+words of inane burlesques, but the great spirits that sit apart, and
+have audiences of the angels. These men, out of their own mouths, assure
+us that they catch the far-off murmurs of such imperial tones as never
+filled the ear of man yet. They cannot gather up the broken chords they
+hear.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_127" id="page_127"></a>{127}</span> They admit they have heard no more than a few bars of the great
+masters who are close upon us; but, they say, if they only reproduce the
+effect these preluding passages have upon them, “Such harmonious madness
+from their lips would flow, the world should listen then as they are
+listening now.”</p>
+
+<p>Go to the Royal Academy and look round you. How pretty! How nice! How
+pathetic! But would you like to lend your arm to Michael Angelo, and go
+round those walls with him? He would prefer the rack, the gridiron of
+St. Laurence. It is true there is no necessity for the sublime; but
+those men who have been in the awful presence of such dreams as <i>Night</i>
+and <i>Morning</i>, by that sculptor, must be pardoned if they prefer it to
+the art you find in Burlington House. One of our great English poets
+said, speaking of the trivial nature of conversation at the beginning of
+this century, that if Lord Bacon were alive now, and made a remark in an
+ordinary assembly, conversation would stop. If casts of <i>Night</i> and
+<i>Morning</i> were placed at the head of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_128" id="page_128"></a>{128}</span> staircase of Burlington House,
+no one with appreciation of art would enter the rooms; the strong would
+linger for ever round those stupendous groups, and the feeble would be
+frighted away. Of course, the vast crowd of art-patrons would pass the
+group with only a casual glance, and a protest against having plaster
+casts occupying ground which ought to be allotted to original work.</p>
+
+<p>Read any speech Burke or Grattan ever spoke, and then your <i>Times</i> and
+the debate last night. How plain it becomes that from no art has the
+sublime so completely vanished as the orator’s. Take those two speakers
+above, and run your eye over Cicero and Demosthenes, the four are of the
+one school, in the great style. Theirs is the large and universal
+eloquence. It is as fresh and beautiful, as pathetic, as sublime now as
+when uttered, although the occasions and circumstances are no longer of
+interest to man. The statistician and the poltroon and the verbatim
+reporter have killed the orator. If any man were to rise in the House
+and make a speech in the manner of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_129" id="page_129"></a>{129}</span> ancients, the honourable members
+would hurry in from all sides to laugh. A few sessions ago a member rose
+in his place, and delivered an oration on a subject not popular with the
+House, but in a manner which echoed the grand old style. At once every
+seat for which there was a member present at the time was occupied; and
+the next morning the daily papers had articles which, while disposing of
+the speaker’s cause in a few lines, devoted columns to the manner in
+which he had pleaded it.</p>
+
+<p>To discover what has led to the decay of the sublime is not difficult,
+and even in an ignorant essay like this, it may be briefly indicated.
+Roughly speaking, it is attributable to the accumulation of certainties.
+Any handbook that cribs from Longinus or Burke will tell you the vague
+is essential to the sublime. To attain it there must be something half
+understood&mdash;not fully known, only partly revealed. To attain it detail
+must be lost, and only a totality presented to the mind. For instance,
+if a great lover of Roman history were suddenly to find himself on the
+top of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_130" id="page_130"></a>{130}</span> Coliseum, the most sublime result to be obtained from the
+situation would be produced by repeating to himself the simple words,
+“This is Rome.” By these words the totality of the city’s grandeur,
+influence, power, and enterprises would be vaguely presented to a
+scholar’s mind dim in the glow of a multitude of half-revealing
+side-lights. If a companion whispered in the scholar’s ears, “This place
+would at one time seat a hundred thousand people,” then the particular
+is reached, and the sublime vanishes like sunshine against a cloud. Most
+of North America has been explored. Africa and Australia have been
+traversed. The source of the Nile has been found. We can read the
+hieroglyphics. We know the elements now flaming in the sun. Many of the
+phenomena in all branches of physiology which were mysteries to our
+fathers are familiar commonplaces of knowledge now. We have learned to
+foretell the weather. We travel a thousand miles for the hundred
+travelled by our fathers. We have daily newspapers to discuss all
+matters, clear away mysteries. We have opened the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_131" id="page_131"></a>{131}</span> grave for the sublime
+with the plough of progress. Though the words stick in my throat, I
+must, I daresay, cry, “God speed the plough!”<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_132" id="page_132"></a>{132}</span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="A_BORROWED_POET" id="A_BORROWED_POET"></a>A BORROWED POET.</h2>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Twenty</span> years ago I borrowed, and read for the first time, the poems of
+James Clarence Mangan. I then lived in a city containing not one-third
+as many people as yearly swell the population of London. The friend of
+whom I borrowed the volume in 1866 is still living in his old home, in
+the house from which I carried away the book then. I saw him last winter
+and he is almost as little aged as the hills he has fronted all that
+time. I have had in those years as many homes as an Arab nomad. He still
+stays in the old place, and in the gray twilight of dark summer mornings
+wakes to hear as of yore the twitter of sparrows and the cawing of rooks
+from the other side of the river, and the hoarse hooting of the
+steamboat hard by.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_133" id="page_133"></a>{133}</span></p>
+
+<p>The volume of Mangan now by me I borrowed of another old friend, who
+passes most of his day within sight of that familiar river not quite a
+hundred yards from the house of the lender of twenty years back. In the
+meantime I have seen no other copy of Mangan.</p>
+
+<p>This latest fact is not much to be wondered at, for I am not
+enterprising in the matter of books&mdash;rarely buy and rarely borrow, and
+have never been in the reading room of the British Museum in my life.
+The book may be common to those who know much about books; but I have
+seen only the two copies I speak of, and these are of the same edition
+and of American origin. I believe a selection from the poems was issued
+a few years ago in Dublin, but a copy has not drifted my way. The
+title-page of the volume before me is missing, but in a list of
+publications at the back I find “<i>The Poems of James Clarence Mangan</i>.
+Containing German Anthology, Irish Anthology, Apocrypha, and
+Miscellaneous Poems. With a Biographical and Critical Introduction, by
+John Mitchel. 1 vol. 12mo. Printed on tinted and calendered paper.
+Nearly 500 pages. $1.”<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_134" id="page_134"></a>{134}</span> Beyond all doubt this is the book, and it was
+published by Mr. P. M. Haverty, of New York.</p>
+
+<p>As far as I know, this is the only edition of Mangan which pretends to
+be even comprehensive. It does not lay claim to completeness. At the
+time the late John Mitchel wrote his introduction he was aware of but
+one other edition of Mangan’s poems&mdash;the German Anthology, published in
+Dublin many years ago. I am nearly sure that since the appearance of
+Mitchel’s edition there have been no verses of Mangan’s published in
+book form on this side of the Atlantic, except the selections I have
+already mentioned, and I do not think any edition whatever has been
+published in this country.</p>
+
+<p>During the twenty years which have elapsed since first I made the
+acquaintance of the poems of James Clarence Mangan, I have read much
+verse and many criticisms of verse, and yet I don’t remember to have
+seen one line about Mangan in any publication issued in England. I
+believe two magazine articles have appeared, but I never saw them.
+Almost during these<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_135" id="page_135"></a>{135}</span> years, or within a period which does not extend
+back far beyond them, criticism of verse has ceased to be a matter of
+personal opinion, and has been elevated or degraded, as you will, into
+an exact science. The opinions of old reviewers&mdash;the Jeffreys and
+Broughams&mdash;are now looked on as curiosities of literature. There is as
+wide a gulf between the mode of treating poetry now and eighty years ago
+as there is between the mode of travelling, or the guess-work that makes
+up the physician’s art; and if in a gathering of literary experts any
+one were now to apply to a new bard the dogmas of criticism quoted for
+or against Byron, Shelley, Keats, and the Lakers in their time, a
+silence the reverse of respectful would certainly follow.</p>
+
+<p>This is not the age of great poetry, but it is the age of “poetical
+poetry,” to quote the phrase of one of the finest critics using the
+English language&mdash;one who has, unfortunately for the culture of that
+tongue and those who use it, written lamentably little. The great danger
+by which we stand menaced at present is, that our perceptions may become
+too exquisite and our poetry<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_136" id="page_136"></a>{136}</span> too intellectual. This, anyway, is true of
+poetry which may at all claim to be an expression of thought. There are
+in our time supreme formists in small things, carvers of cameos and
+walnut shells, and musical conjurors who make sweet melodies with richly
+vowelled syllables. But unfortunately the tendency of the poetic men of
+to-day is towards intellectuality, and this is a humiliating decay. In
+the times of Queen Elizabeth, when all the poets were Shakespeares, they
+cared nothing for their intellects. The intellectual side of a poet’s
+mind is an impertinence in his art.</p>
+
+<p>I do not presume to say what place exactly James Clarence Mangan ought
+to occupy on the greater roll of verse-writers, and I am not sure that
+he is, in the finest sense of the phrase, a “poetical poet;” but he is,
+at all events, the most poetical poet Ireland has produced, when we take
+into account the volume and quality of his song. I shall purposely avoid
+any reference to him as a translator, except in acting on John Mitchel’s
+opinion, and treating one of his “translations” from the Arabic as an
+original<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_137" id="page_137"></a>{137}</span> poem; for during his lifetime he confessed that he had passed
+off original poems of his own as translations; and Mitchel assures us
+that Mangan did not know Arabic. As this essay does not profess to be
+orderly or dignified, or anything more than rambling gossip, put into
+writing for no other reason than to introduce to the reader a few pieces
+of verse he may not have met before, I cannot do better than insert here
+the lines of which I am now speaking:</p>
+
+<h3>THE TIME OF THE BARMECIDES.</h3>
+
+<h4>I.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“My eyes are filmed, my beard is grey,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">I am bowed with the weight of years;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I would I were stretched in my bed of clay<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">With my long-lost youth’s compeers!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">For back to the past, though the thought brings woe,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">My memory ever glides&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To the old, old time, long, long ago,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The time of the Barmecides!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To the old, old time, long, long ago,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The time of the Barmecides.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_138" id="page_138"></a>{138}</span></p>
+
+<h4>II.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Then youth was mine, and a fierce wild will,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And an iron arm in war,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And a fleet foot high upon Ishkar’s hill,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">When the watch-lights glimmered afar,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And a barb as fiery as any I know<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">That Khoord or Beddaween rides,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Ere my friends lay low&mdash;long, long ago,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">In the time of the Barmecides;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Ere my friends lay low&mdash;long, long ago,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">In the time of the Barmecides.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h4>III.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“One golden goblet illumed my board,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">One silver dish was there;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">At hand my tried Karamanian sword<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Lay always bright and bare;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">For those were the days when the angry blow<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Supplanted the word that chides&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">When hearts could glow&mdash;long, long ago,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">In the time of the Barmecides;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">When hearts could glow&mdash;long, long ago,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">In the time of the Barmecides.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h4>IV.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Through city and desert my mates and I<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Were free to rove and roam,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_139" id="page_139"></a>{139}</span><br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Our diapered canopy the deep of the sky,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Or the roof of the palace dome.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Oh, ours was the vivid life to and fro,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Which only sloth derides:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Men spent Life so&mdash;long, long ago,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">In the time of the Barmecides;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Men spent Life so&mdash;long, long ago,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">In the time of the Barmecides.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h4>V.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“I see rich Bagdad once again,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">With its turrets of Moorish mould,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And the Kalif’s twice five hundred men<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Whose binishes flamed with gold.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I call up many a gorgeous show<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Which the Pall of Oblivion hides&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">All passed like snow, long, long ago,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">With the time of the Barmecides;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">All passed like snow, long, long ago,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">With the time of the Barmecides.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h4>VI.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“But mine eye is dim, and my beard is grey,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And I bend with the weight of years&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">May I soon go down to the House of Clay,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Where slumber my Youth’s compeers!<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_140" id="page_140"></a>{140}</span><br /></span>
+<span class="i1">For with them and the Past, though the thought wakes woe,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">My memory ever abides,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And I mourn for the Times gone long ago,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">For the Times of the Barmecides!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I mourn for the Times gone long ago,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">For the Times of the Barmecides!”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>This is the poem claimed by Mangan to be from the Arabic. I have no
+means of knowing whether it is or not. There is one translation from the
+Persian, one from the Ottoman, and according to Mitchel, one from the
+Coptic. But seeing that he turned into verse a great number of Irish
+poems from prose translations done by another, and that he did not know
+a word of that language, I think it may be safely assumed that <i>The Last
+of the Barmecides</i> is original. This poem is so old a favourite of mine
+that I cannot pretend to be an impartial judge of it. When I hear it (I
+can never see a poem I know well and love much) I listen as to the
+unchanged voice of an old friend; I wander in a maze of memories; “I see
+rich Bagdad once again;” I am once more owner of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_141" id="page_141"></a>{141}</span> the magic carpet, and
+am floating irresponsibly and at will on the intoxicating atmosphere of
+the poets over the enchanted groves, and streams, and hills, and seas of
+fairyland, or harkening to voices that years ago ceased to stir in my
+ears, gazing at the faces that have long since moulded the face cloth
+into blunted memories of the face for the grave.</p>
+
+<p>On the 20th of June, 1849, Mangan died in the Meath Hospital, Dublin.
+Having been born in 1803, he was, in 1849, eight years older than Poe,
+who died destitute and forlorn at Baltimore in the same year. Both poets
+had been in abject poverty, both had been unfortunate in love, both had
+been consummate artists, both had been piteously unlucky in a thousand
+ways, and both had died the same year, and in common hospitals. Two more
+miserable stories it is impossible to find anywhere. I would recommend
+those of sensitive natures to confine their reading to the work these
+men did, and not to the misfortunes they laboured under, and the follies
+they committed. I think, of the two, Mangan suffered more acutely; for<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_142" id="page_142"></a>{142}</span>
+he never rose up in anger against the world, or those around him, but
+glided like an uncomplaining ghost into the grave, where, long before
+his death, all his hopes lay buried. He had only a half-hearted pity for
+himself. Poe, in his <i>Raven</i>, is, all the time of his most pathetic and
+terrible complaining, conscious that he complains as becomes a fine
+artist. But the raven’s croak does not touch the heart. It appeals to
+the intellect; it affects the fancy, the imagination, the ear, the eye.
+When Mangan opens his bosom and shows you the ravens that prey upon him,
+he cannot repress something like a laugh at the thought that any one
+could be interested in him and his woes. See:</p>
+
+<h3>THE NAMELESS ONE.</h3>
+
+<p class="c">BALLAD.</p>
+
+<h4>I.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Roll forth, my song, like the rushing river,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">That sweeps along to the mighty sea;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">God will inspire me while I deliver<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">My soul of thee!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_143" id="page_143"></a>{143}</span></p>
+
+<h4>II.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Tell thou the world, when my bones lie whitening<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Amid the last homes of youth and eld,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That there was once one whose veins ran lightning<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">No eye beheld.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h4>III.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Tell how his boyhood was one drear night-hour,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">How shone for <i>him</i>, through his griefs and gloom,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">No star of all heaven sends to light our<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">Path to the tomb.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h4>IV.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Roll on, my song, and to after ages<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Tell how, disdaining all earth can give,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">He would have taught men from wisdom’s pages<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">The way to live.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h4>V.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“And tell how, trampled, derided, hated,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And worn by weakness, disease, and wrong,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">He fled for shelter to God, who mated<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">His soul with song&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_144" id="page_144"></a>{144}</span></p>
+
+<h4>VI.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“With song which alway, sublime or vapid,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Flowed like a rill in the morning beam,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Perchance not deep, but intense and rapid&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">A mountain stream.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h4>VII.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Tell how the Nameless, condemned for years long<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To herd with demons from hell beneath,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Saw things that made him, with groans and tears, long<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">For even death.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h4>VIII.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Go on to tell how, with genius wasted,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Betrayed in friendship, befooled in love,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">With spirit shipwrecked and young hopes blasted,<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">He still, still strove.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h4>IX.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Till, spent with toil, dreeing death for others,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And some whose hands should have wrought for <i>him</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i1">(If children live not for sires and mothers),<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">His mind grew dim.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_145" id="page_145"></a>{145}</span></p>
+
+<h4>X.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“And he fell far through the pit abysmal,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The gulf and grave of Maginn and Burns,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And pawned his soul for the devil’s dismal<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">Stock of returns.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h4>XI.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“But yet redeemed it in days of darkness,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And shapes and signs of the final wrath,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Where death in hideous and ghastly starkness<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">Stood in his path.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h4>XII.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“And tell how now, amid wreck and sorrow,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And want and sickness and houseless nights,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">He bides in calmness the silent morrow<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">That no ray lights.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h4>XIII.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“And lives he still, then? Yes! old and hoary<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">At thirty-nine, from despair and woe,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">He lives enduring what future story<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">Will never know.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_146" id="page_146"></a>{146}</span></p>
+
+<h4>XIV.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Him grant a grave to, ye pitying noble,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Deep in your bosoms! There let him dwell!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">He, too, had tears for all souls in trouble,<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">Here and in hell.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>The burden of all his song is sad, and in his translations he has chosen
+chiefly themes which echoed the harpings of his own soul. He began life
+as a copying clerk in an attorney’s office, and had for some time to
+support wholly, or in the main, a mother and sister. In Mitchel’s
+preface there are many passages almost as fine as the verse of the poet.
+Here is one, long as it is, that must find a place. Mitchel is speaking
+of the days when Mangan was in the attorney’s office:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>“At what age he devoted himself to this drudgery, at what age he
+left it, or was discharged from it, does not appear; for his whole
+biography documents are wanting, the man having never, for one
+moment, imagined that his poor life could interest any surviving
+human being, and having never, accordingly, collected his
+biographical assets, and appointed a literary executor to take care
+of his posthumous fame. Neither did he ever acquire the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_147" id="page_147"></a>{147}</span> habit,
+common enough among literary men, of dwelling upon his own early
+trials, struggles, and triumphs. But those who knew him in after
+years can remember with what a shuddering and loathing horror he
+spoke&mdash;when at rare intervals he could be induced to speak at
+all&mdash;of his labours with the scrivener and attorney. He was shy and
+sensitive, with exquisite sensibilities and fine impulses; eye,
+ear, and soul open to all the beauty, music, and glory of heaven
+and earth; humble, gentle, and unexacting; modestly craving nothing
+in the world but celestial, glorified life, seraphic love, and a
+throne among the immortal gods (that’s all); and he was eight or
+ten years scribbling deeds, pleadings, and bills in Chancery.”</p></div>
+
+<p>There is, I believe, but one portrait of him in existence, and a copy of
+it hangs on the wall of the room in which I am writing, a few feet in
+front of my eyes. It is not a face easy to describe. Beauty is the chief
+characteristic of it. But it is not the beauty that men admire or that
+inspires love in women. It is not the face of a poet or a visionary or a
+thinker. There is no passion in it; not even the passionate sadness of
+his own verse. It is not the face of a man who has suffered greatly, or
+rejoiced in ecstasy. It is the face of a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_148" id="page_148"></a>{148}</span> fleshless, worn man of forty,
+with hair pressed back from the forehead and ear. I have been looking at
+it for a long time, trying to find out something positive about it, and
+I have failed. It is not interesting. It is the face of a man who is
+done with the world and humanity. It is the face of a dead man whose
+spirit has passed away, while the body remains alive. The eyes are open,
+and have light in them; the face would be more complete if the light
+were out, and the lids drawn down and composed for the blind tomb.</p>
+
+<p>He gives a picture of his mental attitude at about the time this
+portrait was taken:&mdash;</p>
+
+<h3>TWENTY GOLDEN YEARS AGO.</h3>
+
+<h4>I.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Oh, the rain, the weary, dreary rain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">How it plashes on the window-sill!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Night, I guess too, must be on the wane,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Strass and Gass around are grown so still.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Here I sit with coffee in my cup&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Ah, ’twas rarely I beheld it flow<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">In the tavern where I loved to sup<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Twenty golden years ago!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_149" id="page_149"></a>{149}</span></p>
+
+<h4>II.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Twenty years ago, alas!&mdash;but stay&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">On my life, ’tis half-past twelve o’clock!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">After all, the hours <i>do</i> slip away&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Come, here goes to burn another block!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">For the night, or morn, is wet and cold;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And my fire is dwindling rather low:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I had fire enough, when young and bold<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Twenty golden years ago.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h4>III.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Dear! I don’t feel well at all, somehow:<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Few in Weimar dream how bad I am;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Floods of tears grow common with me now,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">High-Dutch floods that Reason cannot dam.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Doctors think I’ll neither live nor thrive<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">If I mope at home so&mdash;I don’t know&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1"><i>Am</i> I living <i>now</i>? I <i>was</i> alive<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Twenty golden years ago.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h4>IV.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Wifeless, friendless, flagonless, alone,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Not quite bookless, though, unless I choose;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Left with naught to do, except to groan,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Not a soul to woo, except the Muse.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Oh, this is hard for <i>me</i> to bear&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Me who whilom lived so much <i>en haut</i>&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Me who broke all hearts like china-ware,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Twenty golden years ago.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_150" id="page_150"></a>{150}</span></p>
+
+<h4>V.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Perhaps ’tis better;&mdash;time’s defacing waves<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Long have quenched the radiance of my brow&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">They who curse me nightly from their graves<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Scarce could love me were they living now;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">But my loneliness hath darker ills&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Such dun duns as Conscience, Thought, &amp; Co.,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Awful Gorgons! Worse than tailors’ bills<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Twenty golden years ago.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h4>VI.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Did I paint a fifth of what I feel,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Oh, how plaintive you would ween I was!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">But I won’t, albeit I have a deal<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">More to wail about than Kerner has!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Kerner’s tears are wept for withered flowers;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Mine for withered hopes; my scroll of woe<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Dates, alas! from youth’s deserted bowers,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Twenty golden years ago.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h4>VII.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Yet, may Deutschland’s bardlings flourish long!<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Me, I tweak no beak among them;&mdash;hawks<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Must not pounce on hawks: besides, in song<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">I could once beat all of them by chalks.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Though you find me, as I near my goal,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Sentimentalising like Rousseau,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Oh, I had a great Byronian soul<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Twenty golden years ago!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_151" id="page_151"></a>{151}</span></p>
+
+<h4>VIII.</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Tick-tick, tick-tick!&mdash;not a sound save Time’s,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And the wind gust as it drives the rain&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Tortured torturer of reluctant rhymes,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Go to bed and rest thine aching brain!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Sleep!&mdash;no more the dupe of hopes or schemes;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Soon thou sleepest where the thistles blow;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Curious anti-climax to thy dreams<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Twenty golden years ago!”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>I find myself now in a great puzzle. I want, first of all, to say I
+think it most melancholy that Mangan, when of full age and judgment,
+should have thought Byron had “a great Byronian soul.” Observe, he does
+not mean that he had a soul greatly like Byron’s, but that he had a soul
+like the great soul of Byron. I do not believe Byron had a great soul at
+all. I believe he was simply a fine stage-manager of melodrama, the
+finest that ever lived, and that as a property-master he was unrivalled;
+but that to please no one, himself included, could he have written the
+play. I am not descending to so defiling a depth as to talk about
+plagiarism. What I wish to say is, that whether Byron stole<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_152" id="page_152"></a>{152}</span> or not made
+not the least difference in the world, for he never by the aid of his
+gifts or his thefts wrote a poem. I wanted further to say of Byron that
+there was nothing great about him except his vanity. Suddenly I
+remembered some words of the critic of whom I spoke a while back, in
+dealing with the question of poetical poetry and poems. I took down the
+printed page, where I found these lines:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>“Mr. Swinburne’s poetry is almost altogether poetical. Not all the
+poetry of even the Poets is so, and to one who loves this dear and
+intimate quality of which we speak, Coleridge, for instance, is a
+poet of some four poems, Wordsworth of some sixteen, Keats of five,
+Byron of none, though Byron is <i>great and eloquent</i>, but the thing
+we prize so much is far away from eloquence. Poetical poetry is the
+inner garden; there grows the ‘flower of the mind.’<span class="leftspc">”</span></p></div>
+
+<p>Now, my difficulty is plain. My critic, who is also a poet, says Byron
+is great, and I find fault with Mangan for saying Byron had a great
+Byronian soul. Here are two of my select authors against me. Plainly,
+the best thing I can do is say nothing at all about the matter!<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_153" id="page_153"></a>{153}</span></p>
+
+<p><i>Twenty Golden Years Ago</i> is by no means a poetical poem, but there is
+poetry in it. There is no poetical poem by Mangan. But he has written no
+serious verses in which there is not poetry.</p>
+
+<p>After giving Mangan’s own verse account of what he was like in his own
+regard at about forty years of age, I copy what Mitchel saw when the
+poet was first pointed out to him:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>“Being in the College Library [Trinity, Dublin], and having
+occasion for a book in that gloomy apartment of the institution
+called the ‘Fagal Library,’ which is the innermost recess of the
+stately building, an acquaintance pointed out to me a man perched
+on the top of a ladder, with the whispered information that the
+figure was Clarence Mangan. It was an unearthly and ghostly figure,
+in a brown garment; the same garment (to all appearance), which
+lasted till the day of his death. The blanched hair was totally
+unkempt; the corpse-like features still as marble; a large book was
+in his arms, and all his soul was in the book. I had never heard of
+Clarence Mangan before, and knew not for what he was celebrated,
+whether as a magician, a poet, or a murderer; yet took a volume and
+spread it on a table, not to read, but with the pretence of reading
+to gaze on the spectral creature on the ladder.”</p></div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_154" id="page_154"></a>{154}</span></p>
+
+<p>I never met any one who had known Mangan. Mitchel did not know the name
+of the woman who lured him on with smiles that seemed to promise love.
+He always addressed her in his poems as Frances. Some time ago the name
+of the woman was divulged. It is ungallant of me to have forgotten it,
+but such is the case. The address at which Mangan visited her was in
+Mountpleasant Square, Dublin. At the time I saw the name of the lady I
+looked into a directory of 1848 which I happened to have by me, and
+found a different name at the address given in the Square. I know the
+love affair of the poet took place years before his death in 1849, but
+people in quiet and unpretentious houses in Dublin, or correctly
+Ranelagh, often live a whole generation in the same house.</p>
+
+<p>Here I find myself in a second puzzle. So long as I thought merely of
+writing this rambling account of “My Borrowed Poet,” I decided upon
+trying to say something about the stupidity of women and poets in
+general. But I don’t feel in case to do so when I glance up at the face
+of Mangan hanging on the wall, and bring<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_155" id="page_155"></a>{155}</span> myself to realise the fact
+that this face now looking so dead and unburied was young and bright and
+perhaps cheerful when he went wooing in Ranelagh.</p>
+
+<p>Instead of saying anything wise and stupid and commonplace about either
+poets or women, let me quote here stanzas which must have been written
+some day when he saw sunshine among the clouds:&mdash;</p>
+
+<h3>THE MARINER’S BRIDE.</h3>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Look, mother! the mariner’s rowing<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">His galley adown the tide;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I’ll go where the mariner’s going,<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">And be the mariner’s bride!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“I saw him one day through the wicket,<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">I opened the gate and we met&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">As a bird in the fowler’s net,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Was I caught in my own green thicket.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">O mother, my tears are flowing,<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">I’ve lost my maidenly pride&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I’ll go if the mariner’s going,<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">And be the mariner’s bride!<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_156" id="page_156"></a>{156}</span><br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“This Love the tyrant winces,<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">Alas! an omnipotent might,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">He darkens the mind like night,<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">He treads on the necks of Princes!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">O mother, my bosom is glowing,<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">I’ll go whatever betide,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I’ll go where the mariners going,<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">And be the mariner’s bride!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Yes, mother! the spoiler has reft me<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">Of reason and self-control;<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">Gone, gone is my wretched soul,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And only my body is left me!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The winds, O mother, are blowing,<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">The ocean is bright and wide;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I’ll go where the mariner’s going,<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">And be the mariner’s bride.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>This appears among the Apocrypha, and is credited by Mangan to the
+“Spanish;” but it is safe to assume when he is so vague that the poem is
+original. It is one of the most bright and cheerful he has given us. The
+only touch of sorrow we feel is for the poor mother who is about to lose
+so impulsive and vivacious a daughter. The time of this delightful
+ballad is not clearly defined, but we may be absolutely<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_157" id="page_157"></a>{157}</span> certain that we
+of this moribund nineteenth century will never meet except at a function
+of a recondite spiritual medium even the great grandchild of the
+Mariner’s Bride. How much more is our devout gratitude due to a good and
+pious spiritualist than to any riotous and licentious poet! The former
+can give us intercourse with the illustrious defunct of history; the
+latter can give us no more than the image of a figment, the phantom of a
+shade, the echo of sounds that never vibrated in the ear of man. All
+persons who believe the evidence adduced by poets are the victims of
+subornation.</p>
+
+<p>A saw-mill does not seem a good subject for a “copy of verses.” Mangan
+died single and in poverty, and was buried by his friends. Listen:&mdash;</p>
+
+<h3>THE SAW-MILL.</h3>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“My path lay towards the Mourne again,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">But I stopped to rest by the hill-side<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That glanced adown o’er the sunken glen<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Which the Saw-and Water-mills hide,<br /></span>
+<span class="i5">Which now, as then,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_158" id="page_158"></a>{158}</span>   The Saw-and Water-mills hide.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“And there, as I lay reclined on the hill,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Like a man made by sudden <i>qualm</i> ill,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I heard the water in the Water-mill,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And I saw the saw in the Saw-mill!<br /></span>
+<span class="i5">As I thus lay still<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">I saw the saw in the Saw-mill!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“The saw, the breeze, and the humming bees,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Lulled me into a dreamy reverie,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Till the objects round me&mdash;hills, mills, trees,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Seemed grown alive all and every&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i5">By slow degrees<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Took life as it were, all and every!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Anon the sound of the waters grew<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To a Mourne-ful ditty,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And the song of the tree that the saw sawed through<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Disturbed my spirit with pity,<br /></span>
+<span class="i5">Began to subdue<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">My spirit with tenderest pity!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“<span class="leftspc">‘</span>Oh, wanderer, the hour that brings thee back<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Is of all meet hours the meetest.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Thou now, in sooth art on the Track,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And nigher to Home than thou weetest;<br /></span>
+<span class="i5">Thou hast thought Time slack,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">But his flight has been of the fleetest!<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_159" id="page_159"></a>{159}</span><br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“<span class="leftspc">‘</span>For this it is that I dree such pain<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">As, when wounded, even a plank will;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">My bosom is pierced, is rent in twain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">That thine may ever bide tranquil.<br /></span>
+<span class="i5">May ever remain<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Henceforward untroubled and tranquil.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“<span class="leftspc">‘</span>In a few days more, most Lonely One!<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Shall I, as a narrow ark, veil<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Thine eyes from the glare of the world and sun<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">’Mong the urns of yonder dark vale&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i5">In the cold and dun<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Recesses of yonder dark vale!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“<span class="leftspc">‘</span>For this grieve not! Thou knowest what thanks<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The Weary-souled and Meek owe<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To Death!’ I awoke, and heard four planks<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Fall down with a saddening echo.<br /></span>
+<span class="i5"><i>I heard four planks</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i2"><i>Fall down with a hollow echo.</i>”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>This was the epithalamium of James Clarence Mangan sung by himself.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_160" id="page_160"></a>{160}</span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_ENGLISH_OPIUM-EATER" id="THE_ENGLISH_OPIUM-EATER"></a>THE ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER.</h2>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">I bought</span> my copy new for fourpence-halfpenny, in Holywell Street. It was
+published by George Routledge and Sons, of the Broadway, London. The
+little volume is made up of a “Preface,” by Thomas de Quincey;
+“Confessions of an English Opium-eater;” and “Notes from the Pocket-book
+of a late Opium-eater;” including “Walking Stewart,” “On the Knocking at
+the Gates in <i>Macbeth</i>,” and “On Suicide.” When it last left my hands it
+boasted a paper cover, on which appeared the head of the illustrious
+Laker. At my elbow now it lies, divested of its shield; and I sit face
+to face with the title-page, as though my author had taken off his hat
+and overcoat, and I were asking him which he preferred, clear or thick
+soup, while the servant stood behind filling his glass<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_161" id="page_161"></a>{161}</span> with
+Amontillado. How that cover came to be removed I do not know. The last
+borrower was of the less destructive sex, and I am at a great loss to
+account for the injury.</p>
+
+<p>I object to the presence of “Walking Stewart,” and “On Suicide,”
+otherwise I count my copy perfect. With the exception of <i>Robinson
+Crusoe</i> and Poe’s <i>Tales</i> I have read nothing so often as the
+<i>Opium-eater</i>. Only twice in my life up to five-and-twenty years of age
+did I sit up all night to read a book: once when about midnight I came
+into possession of <i>Enoch Arden</i>, and a second time when, at the same
+witching hour I drew a red cloth-bound edition of the <i>Opium-eater</i> out
+of my pocket, in my lonely, dreary bedroom, five hundred miles from
+where I am now writing. The household were all asleep, and I by no means
+strong of nerve. The room was large, the dwelling ghostly. I sat in an
+embrasure of one of the windows, with a little table supporting the
+candles on one side, and on the other a small movable bookcase. Thus I
+was in a kind of dock, only open on one side, that fronting the room. It
+was in<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_162" id="page_162"></a>{162}</span> the beginning of autumn, and a low, warm wind blew the
+complaining rain against the pane on a level with my ear. At that time I
+had not seen London, and I remember being overpowered and broken before
+the spectacle of that sensitive and imaginative boy in the text, hungry
+and forlorn, in the unsympathetic mass of innumerable houses, every door
+of which was shut against him.</p>
+
+<p>As I read on and the hour grew late, the succession of splendours and
+terrors wrought on my imagination, until I felt cold and exhausted, and
+had scarcely strength to sit upright in my chair. My hand trembled, and
+my mind became tremulously apprehensive of something vague and awful; I
+could not tell what. Sounds of the night which I had heard a thousand
+times before, which were as familiar to me as the bell of my parish
+church, now assumed dire, uncertain imports. The rattling of the sash
+was not the work of the wind, not the work of ghostly hands, but worse
+still, of human hands belonging to men in some more dire extremity than
+the approach of death. The beating<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_163" id="page_163"></a>{163}</span> of the rain against the glass was
+made to cover voices trying to tell me secrets I could not hear and
+live, and which yet I would have given my life to know.</p>
+
+<p>I cannot tell why I was so exhilarated by terror. The <i>Confessions</i>
+alone are not calculated to produce inexplicable disturbance of the
+mind. It may be I had eaten little or nothing that day; it may be I had
+steeped myself too deeply in nicotine. All I know for certain is that I
+was in such a state of abject panic I had not courage to cross the room
+to my bed. It was in the dreary, pitiless, raw hour before the dawn I
+finished the book. Then I found I durst not rise. I put down the book
+and looked at the candles. They would last till daylight.</p>
+
+<p>I would have given all the world to lie on that bed over there, with my
+back secure against it, warmed by it, comforted by it. But that open
+space was more terrible to me than if it were filled with flame. I
+should have been much more at my ease in the dark, yet I could not bring
+myself to blow out the lights;<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_164" id="page_164"></a>{164}</span> not because I dreaded the darkness, but
+because I shrank from encountering the possibilities of that awful
+moment of twilight between the full light of the candles and the blank
+gloom.</p>
+
+<p>When I thought of blowing out the lights and imagined the dread of
+catching a glimpse of some spectacle of supreme horror, I imprudently
+gave my imagination rein, and set myself to find out what would terrify
+me most. All at once, and before I had made more than the inquiry of my
+mind, I saw in fancy between me and the bed, a thing of unapproachable
+terror; I had not been recently reading <i>Christabel</i>, and yet it must
+have been remotely from that poem I conjured the spectre which so awed
+me. I placed out in the open of the room on the floor, between me and
+the door, and close to a straight line drawn between me and the bed, a
+figure shrouded in a black cloak, from hidden shoulder to invisible
+feet. Over the head of this figure was cast a cowl, which completely
+concealed the head and face. At any moment the cloak might open and
+disclose the body of that figure. I knew the body<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_165" id="page_165"></a>{165}</span> of that figure was a
+“thing to dream of, not to see.” I felt sure I should lose my reason if
+the cloak opened and discovered the loathsome body. I had no idea what I
+should see, but I knew I should go mad.</p>
+
+<p>In my dock by the window, and with the light behind my eyes I felt
+secure. But at that moment no earthly consideration, no consideration
+whatever, would have induced me to face that ghostly form in the flicker
+of expiring light. I was not under any delusion. I knew then as well as
+I know now that there was no object on which the normal human eye could
+exercise itself between me and the bed. I deliberately willed the figure
+to appear, and although once I had summoned it I could not dismiss it, I
+had complete and self-possessed knowledge that I saw nothing with my
+physical eye. Moreover, full of potentiality for terror as that figure
+was in its present shape and attitude, it had no dread for me. I was
+fascinated by considering possibilities which I knew could not arise so
+long as the present circumstances remained unchanged. In<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_166" id="page_166"></a>{166}</span> other words, I
+knew I could trust my reason to keep my imagination in subjection, so
+long as my senses were not confused or my attention scared. If I
+attempted to extinguish the candles that figure might waver! if I moved
+across the floor it might get behind my back, and as I caught sight of
+it over my shoulder, the cloak might fall aside! Then I should go mad.
+Thus I sat and waited until daylight came. Then I fell asleep in my
+chair.</p>
+
+<p>As I have said, the copy of the <i>Opium-eater</i> I then had was bound in
+red cloth. It was a much handsomer book than the humble one published by
+Routledge. Since that memorable night many years ago in my high, dreary,
+lonely bedroom, I cannot tell you all the copies of the <i>Opium-eater</i>
+which have been mine. I remember another, bound in dark blue cloth, with
+copious notes. There was a third, the outside seeming of which I forget,
+but which I think formed part of two volumes of selections from De
+Quincey. I love my little sixpenny volume for one reason chiefly. I can
+lend it without fear, and lose it without a pang.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_167" id="page_167"></a>{167}</span> Why, the beggarliest
+miser alive can’t think much of fourpence-halfpenny! I have already
+dispensed a few copies of the <i>Opium-eater</i>, price fourpence-halfpenny.
+As it lies on my table now, I take no more care of it than one does of
+yesterday’s morning paper. When I read it I double it back, to show to
+myself how little I value the gross material of the book. Any one coming
+in likely to appreciate the book, and who has not read it is welcome to
+carry it off as a gift. Yet if I am free with the volume, I am jealous
+of the author. I do not mention his name to people I believe unwilling
+or unable to worship him becomingly.</p>
+
+<p>But when I meet a true disciple what prodigal joy environs and suffuses
+me! What talks of him I have had, and speechless raptures in hearing of
+him! How thick with gold the air of evenings has been, spent with him
+and one who loved him! I recall one glorious summer’s day, when an old
+friend and I (we were then, alas! years and years younger than we are
+to-day), had toiled on through mountain heather for hours, until we were
+half-baked<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_168" id="page_168"></a>{168}</span> by the sun and famished with thirst. Suddenly we came upon
+the topmost peak of all the hills, and saw, many miles away, the
+unexpected sea. As we stood, shading our eyes with our hands, my
+companion chanted out, “Obliquely to the right lay the many-languaged
+town of Liverpool; obliquely to the left ‘the multitudinous sea.’<span class="leftspc">”</span>
+“Whose is that?” I asked eagerly, notwithstanding my drought. “What
+isn’t Shakespeare’s is De Quincey’s.” “Where did you find it?” “In the
+<i>Opium-eater</i>.” I remember cursing my memory because I had forgotten
+that passage. When I got home I looked through the copy I then had, and
+could not find the sentence. I wrote to my friend, saying I could not
+come upon his quotation. He answered that he now believed it did not
+occur in the body of the <i>Confessions</i>, but in a note in some edition,
+he could not remember which. What a sense of miserable desolation I had
+that this edition had never come my way!</p>
+
+<p>There are only three marks of any kind in my present copy of the
+<i>Confessions</i>, one dealing<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_169" id="page_169"></a>{169}</span> with the semi-voluntary power children have
+over the coming and going of phantoms painted on the darkness. This mark
+is very indistinct, and, as I remember nothing about it, I think it must
+have been made by accident. The part indicated by it is only
+introductory to an unmarked passage immediately following which has
+always fascinated my imagination. It is in the “Pains of Opium,” and
+runs:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>“In the middle of 1817, I think it was, that this faculty became
+positively distressing to me: at night, when I lay awake in bed,
+vast processions passed along in mournful pomp, friezes of
+never-ending stories, that to my feelings were as sad and solemn as
+if they were stories drawn from times before Œdipus and
+Priam&mdash;before Tyre&mdash;before Memphis. And at the same time a
+corresponding change took place in my dreams: a theatre seemed
+suddenly opened and lighted up within my brain, which presented
+nightly spectacles of more than earthly splendour.”</p></div>
+
+<p>How thankful we ought to be that it has never been our fate to sit in
+that awful theatre of prehistoric woes! There is surely nothing more
+appalling in the past than the interminably vain activities of that
+mysterious<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_170" id="page_170"></a>{170}</span> atomie, Egyptian man. Who could bear to look upon the three
+hundred thousand ant-like slaves swarming among the colossal monoliths
+piled up in thousands for the pyramid of Cheops! The bare thought makes
+one start back aghast and shudder.</p>
+
+<p>I find the next mark opposite another awful passage dealing with
+infinity, on this occasion infinity of numbers, not of time:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>“The waters now changed their character,&mdash;from translucent lakes,
+shining like mirrors, they now became seas and oceans. And now came
+a tremendous change, which, unfolding itself slowly like a scroll,
+through many months, promised an abiding torment; and, in fact, it
+never left me until the winding-up of my case. Hitherto the human
+face had mixed often in my dreams, but not despotically, not with
+any special power of tormenting. But now, that which I have called
+the tyranny of the human face began to unfold itself. Perhaps some
+part of my London life might be answerable for this. Be that as it
+may, now it was that upon the rocking waters of the ocean the human
+face began to appear: the sea appeared paved with innumerable
+faces, upturned to the heavens&mdash;faces imploring, wrathful,
+despairing, surged upwards by thousands, by myriads, by
+generations, by centuries.”</p></div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_171" id="page_171"></a>{171}</span></p>
+
+<p>Upon closer looking, I see an attempt has been made to erase the mark
+opposite this passage. Joining the fact with the faintness of the line
+opposite the former quotation I am driven to the conclusion that there
+is only one “stetted” note of admiration in the book. It is a whole page
+of the little volume. It begins on page 91, and ends on page 92. To show
+you how little I care for my copy of the <i>Confessions</i>, I shall cut it
+out. Even a lawyer would pay me more than fourpence-halfpenny for
+copying a page of the book, and, as I have said before, the volume has
+no extrinsic value for me. Excepting the Bible, I am not familiar with
+any finer passage of so great length in prose in the English language:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>“The dream commenced with a music which now I often heard in
+dreams; a music of preparation and awakening suspense; a music like
+the opening of the Coronation Anthem, and which, like <i>that</i>, gave
+the feeling of a vast march&mdash;of infinite cavalcades filing off&mdash;and
+the tread of innumerable armies. The morning was come of a mighty
+day&mdash;a day of crisis and of final hope for human nature, then
+suffering some mysterious eclipse, and labouring in some dread
+extremity. Somewhere,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_172" id="page_172"></a>{172}</span> I knew not where&mdash;somehow, I knew not
+how&mdash;by some beings, I knew not whom&mdash;a battle, a strife, an agony
+was conducting, was evolving like a great drama, or piece of music;
+with which my sympathy was the more insupportable from my confusion
+as to its place, its cause, its nature, and its possible issue. I,
+as is usual in dreams (where, of necessity, we make ourselves
+central to every movement), had the power and yet had not the
+power, to decide it. I had the power, if I could raise myself, to
+will it; and yet again had not the power, for the weight of twenty
+Atlantics was upon me, or the oppression of inexpiable guilt.
+‘Deeper than ever plummet sounded,’ I lay inactive. Then, like a
+chorus, the passion deepened. Some greater interest was at stake;
+some mightier cause than ever yet the sword had pleaded or trumpet
+had proclaimed. Then came sudden alarms; hurryings to and fro;
+trepidations of innumerable fugitives, I knew not whether from the
+good cause or the bad; darkness and lights; tempest and human
+faces; and at last, with the sense that all was lost, female forms,
+and the features that were all the world to me, and but a moment
+allowed, and clasped hands, and heart-breaking partings, and
+then&mdash;everlasting farewells! and with a sigh such as the caves of
+hell sighed when the incestuous mother uttered the abhorred name of
+death, the sound was reverberated&mdash;everlasting farewells! and again
+and yet again reverberated&mdash;everlasting farewells! And I awoke in
+struggles, and cried aloud, ‘I will sleep no more!’<span class="leftspc">”</span></p></div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_173" id="page_173"></a>{173}</span></p>
+
+<p>Upon reading this passage over I am glad I am not familiar with any
+finer one in English prose&mdash;it would be impossible to endure it. In
+these sentences it is not the consummate style alone that overwhelms
+one, the matter is nearly as fine as the manner. How tremendously the
+numbers and sentences are marshalled! How inevitable, overbearing,
+breathless is the onward movement! What awful expectations are aroused,
+and shadowy fears vaguely realized! As the spectral pageant moves on
+other cohorts of trembling shades join the ghostly legion on the blind
+march! All is vaporous, spectral, spiritual, until when we are wound up
+to the highest pitch of physical awe and apprehension, we stop suddenly,
+arrested by failure of the ground, insufficiency of the road, and are
+recalled to life and light and truth and fellowship with the kindly race
+of man by the despairing human shriek of incommunicable, inarticulable
+agony in the words, “I will sleep no more!” In that despairing cry the
+tortured soul abjectly confesses that it has been vanquished and driven
+wild by the spirit-world.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_174" id="page_174"></a>{174}</span> It is when you contrast the finest passages
+in Macaulay with such a passage as this, that you recognise the
+difference between a clever writer and a great stylist.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_175" id="page_175"></a>{175}</span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="A_GUIDE_TO_IGNORANCE" id="A_GUIDE_TO_IGNORANCE"></a>A GUIDE TO IGNORANCE.</h2>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">For</span> a long time I have had it in my mind to write a guide to ignorance.
+I have been withheld partly by a feeling of diffidence and partly by a
+want of encouragement from those to whom I mentioned the scheme. I have
+submitted a plan of my book to a couple of publishers, but each of these
+assured me that such a work would not be popular. In their
+straightforward commercial way they told me they could see “no money in
+the idea.” I differ from them; I think the book would be greeted with
+acclaim and bought with avidity.</p>
+
+<p>Novelties are, I know, always dangerous speculations except in the form
+of clothes, when they are certain of instant and immense adoption. The
+mind of man cannot conceive the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_176" id="page_176"></a>{176}</span> pattern for trousers’ cloth or the
+design for a bonnet that will not be worn. There is nothing too high or
+too low to set the fashion to men and women in dress. Conquerors were
+crowned with mural wreaths, of which the chimney-pot hat is the lineal
+descendant; pigs started the notion of wearing rings in their noses, and
+man in the southern seas followed the example; kangaroos were the
+earliest pouch-makers and ladies took to carrying reticules.</p>
+
+<p>But an innovation in the domain of education or thought is a widely
+different thing from a frolic in gear. It is easy to set going any craze
+which depends merely or mostly on the way of wearing the hair or the
+height of the cincture. Hence æstheticism gained many followers in a
+little time. But remember it took ages and ages to reconcile people to
+wearing any clothes at all. Once you break the ice the immersion in a
+new custom may become as rapid as the descent of a round shot into the
+sea. The great step was, so to speak, from woad to wampum, with just an
+Atlantic<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_177" id="page_177"></a>{177}</span> of time between the two. If you went to Poole any day this
+week and asked him to make you a suit of wampum he would plead no
+insuperable difficulty. If you asked him to make you a suit of woad he
+would certainly detain you while he inquired as to your sanity and sent
+for your friends. Yet it is only one step, one film, from woad to
+wampum.</p>
+
+<p>Up to this time in the history of man there has, with few exceptions,
+been an infatuated pursuit of this will-o’-the-wisp, knowledge. Why
+should not man now turn his glance to ignorance, if it were only for a
+little while and for the sake of fair play? The idea is of course
+revolutionary, so also is every other new idea revolutionary, and (I am
+not now referring to politics) it is only from revolutionary ideas we
+derive what we regard as advantages. The earth and heavens themselves
+are revolutionary. Why then should we not fairly examine the chance of a
+revolution in the aim of man?</p>
+
+<p>The disinclination to face new attitudes of thought comes from the
+inherent laziness of man, and hence at the outset of my career<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_178" id="page_178"></a>{178}</span> towards
+that guide I should find nearly the whole race against me. Humboldt, who
+met people of all climes and races and colours, declares laziness to be
+the most common vice of human nature. Hence the initial obstacle is
+almost insuperable. But it is only almost, not quite insuperable. Men
+can be stirred from indolence only by a prospect of profit in some form.
+Even in the Civil Service they are incited to make the effort to
+continue living by the hope of greater leisure later in life, for with
+years comes promotion and promotion means less labour.</p>
+
+<p>By a little industry in the pursuit of ignorance greater repose would be
+attained in the immediate future. It would be very difficult to prove
+that up to this hour progress has been of the slightest use or pleasure
+to man. Higher pleasures, higher pains. Complexities of consciousness
+are merely a source of distraction from centralisation. The jelly fish
+may, after all, be the highest ideal of living things, and we may, if
+the phrase be admitted, have been developing backward from him. Of all
+the creatures on earth man is the most stuck<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_179" id="page_179"></a>{179}</span> up. He arrogates
+everything to himself and because he can split a flint or make a bow or
+gun-barrel he thinks he centres the universe, and insists that the
+illimitable deeps of space are focused upon him. Astronomers, a highly
+respectable class of people, assert there are now visible to us one
+hundred million fixed stars, one hundred million suns like our own. Each
+may have its system of planets, such as earth, and each planet again its
+attendant satellites. With that splendid magnanimity characteristic of
+our race, man would rather pitch the hundred million suns into chaos
+than for a moment entertain the idea that he is a humbug and of no use
+whatever. And yet after all the jelly-fish may be a worthier fellow than
+the best of us.</p>
+
+<p>I do not of course insist on reversion to the jelly-fish. In this
+climate his habits of life are too suggestive of ague and rheumatism. In
+fact I do not know that I am urging reversion to anything, even to the
+flocks of pastoral man. But I am saying that as myriads of facilities
+are given for acquiring<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_180" id="page_180"></a>{180}</span> knowledge, one humble means ought to be devised
+for acquiring ignorance. If I had anywhere met with the encouragement
+which I think I merited, I should have undertaken to write the book
+myself.</p>
+
+<p>I should open by saying it was not until I had concluded a long and
+painful investigation that I considered myself in any way qualified to
+undertake so grave and important a task as writing a guide to ignorance:
+that I had not only inquired curiously into my own fitness, but had also
+looked about carefully among my friends in the hope of finding some one
+better qualified to carry out this important undertaking. But upon
+gauging the depth of my own knowledge and considering conscientiously
+the capacity of my acquaintances, I came to the conclusion that no man I
+knew personally had so close a personal intimacy with ignorance as
+myself. There are few branches, I may say no branch, of knowledge except
+that of ignorance in which any one of my friends was not more learned
+than myself. I was born in such profound ignorance<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_181" id="page_181"></a>{181}</span> that I had no
+personal knowledge of the fact at the time. I had existed for a long
+time before I could distinguish between myself and things which were
+not.</p>
+
+<p>As a boy I was averse from study; and since I have grown to manhood I
+have acquired so little substantive information that I could write down
+in a bold hand on one page of this book every single fact, outside facts
+of personal experience, of which I am possessed.</p>
+
+<p>I know that the Norman invasion occurred in 1066, and the Great Fire in
+1666. I know that gunpowder is composed of saltpetre, sulphur, and
+charcoal, and sausages of minced meat and bread under the name of Tommy.
+I am aware Milton and Shakespeare were poets, and that needle-grinders
+are short lived. I know that the primest brands of three-shilling
+champagnes are made in London. I can give the Latin for seven words, and
+the French for four. I can repeat the multiplication table (with the
+pence) up to six times. I know the mere names of a number of people and
+things; but, as far as clear and definite information goes, I don’t
+believe I could<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_182" id="page_182"></a>{182}</span> double the above brief list. I am, I think, therefore,
+warranted in concluding that few men can have a more close or exhaustive
+personal acquaintance with ignorance. If you want learning at secondhand
+you must go to the learned: if you want ignorance at first hand you
+cannot possibly do better than come to me.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place let us consider the “Injury of Knowledge.” How much
+better off the king would be if he had no knowledge! Suppose his mental
+ken had never been directed to any period before the dawn of his own
+memory, he would have no disquieting thoughts of the trouble into which
+Charles I. or Richard II. drifted. He would be filled with no envy of
+the good old King John, who, from four or five ounces of iron in the
+form of thumb-screws, and a few hundredweight of rich Jew, filled up the
+royal pockets as often as they showed any signs of growing empty. And,
+above all, he would be spared the misery of committing dates to memory.
+How it must limit the happiness of a constitutional sovereign to know
+anything about the constitution! Why should he be<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_183" id="page_183"></a>{183}</span> burdened with the
+consciousness of rights and prerogatives? Would he not be much happier
+if he might smoke his cigar in his garden without the fear of the
+Speaker or the Lord Chancellor before his eyes? The Commons want their
+Speaker, the Lords want their Lord Chancellor&mdash;let them have them. The
+king wants neither. Why should he be troubled with any knowledge of
+either? Although he is a king is he not a man and a brother also? Why
+should he be worried out of his life with reasons for all he does? The
+king feels he can do no wrong. That ought to be enough for him. Most men
+believe the same thing of themselves, but few others share the faith.
+The king can do no wrong, then in mercy’s name let the man alone.
+Suppose it is a part of my duty to look out of the oriel window at dawn,
+noon, and sunset, why should I be bored with cause, reason, and
+precedent for this? Let me look out of window if it is my duty to do so;
+but, before and after looking out of the window, let me enjoy my life.</p>
+
+<p>Take the statesman. How knowledge must<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_184" id="page_184"></a>{184}</span> hamper him! He is absolutely
+precluded from acting with decision by the consciousness of the
+difficulties which lay in the path of his predecessors. He has to make
+up his subject, to get facts and figures from his subordinates and
+others. He has to arrange the party manœuvres before he launches his
+scheme, by which time all the energy is gone out of him, and he has not
+half as much faith in his bill as if he had never looked at the <i>pros</i>
+and <i>cons</i>. “Never mind manœuvring, but go at them,” said Nelson. The
+moment you begin to manœuvre you confess your doubtfulness of
+success, unless you can take your adversary at a disadvantage; but if
+you fly headlong at his throat, you terrify him by the display of your
+confidence and valour.</p>
+
+<p>The words of Nelson apply still more closely to the general. His
+knowledge that fifty years ago the British army was worsted on this
+field, unnerves, paralyses him. If he did not know that shells are
+explosive and bullets deadly, he would make his dispositions with twice
+the confidence, and his temerity would fill the foe<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_185" id="page_185"></a>{185}</span> with panic. His
+simple duty is to defeat the enemy, and knowing anything beyond this
+only tends to distract his mind and weaken his arm. In the middle of one
+of his Indian battles, and when he thought the conflict had been decided
+in favour of British arms, a messenger rode hastily up to the general in
+command, who was wiping his reeking forehead on his coat-sleeve: “A
+large fresh force of the enemy has appeared in such a place; what is to
+be done?” Gough rubbed his forehead with the other sleeve, and shouted
+out, “Beat ’em!” Obviously no better command could have been given. What
+the English nation wanted the English army to do with the enemy was to
+“beat ’em.” In the pictures of the Victoria Cross there is one of a
+young dandy officer with an eyeglass in his eye and a sword in his hand,
+among the thick of the foe. He knows he is in that place to kill some
+one. He is quite ignorant of the fact that the enemy is there to kill
+him, and he is taking his time and looking through his eyeglass to try
+to find some enticing man through whom to run his sword. One of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_186" id="page_186"></a>{186}</span>
+Wellington’s most fervent prayers was, “Oh, spare me my dandy officers!”
+Now dandies are never very full of knowledge, and yet the greatest Duke
+thought more of them than of your learning-begrimed sappers or your
+science-bespattered gunners.</p>
+
+<p>If an advocate at the bar knew one quarter of the law of the land, he
+could never get on. In the first place, he would know more than the
+judges, and this would prejudice the bench against him. With regard to a
+barrister, the best position for him to assume, if he is addressing a
+jury, is, “Gentlemen, the indisputable facts of the case, as stated to
+you by the witnesses, are so-and-so. In presence of so distinguished a
+lawyer as occupies the bench in this court, I do not feel myself
+qualified to tell you what the law is; that will be the easy duty of his
+lordship.” Even in Chancery cases, the barrister would best insure
+success by merely citing the precedent cases, in an off-hand way, “Does
+not your lordship think the case of Burke <i>v.</i> Hare meets the exact
+conditions of the one under consideration?” The indices<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_187" id="page_187"></a>{187}</span> are all the
+pleader need look at. The judge will surely strain a point for one who
+does not bore him with extracts and arguments, but leaves all to
+himself, and lets the work of the court run smoothly and just as the
+president wishes.</p>
+
+<p>Knowledge is an absolute hindrance to the doctor of medicine. Supposing
+he is a man of average intelligence (some doctors are), he is able to
+diagnose, let me say, fever. You or I could diagnose fever pretty
+well&mdash;quick pulse, dry skin, thirst, and so on. But as the doctor leans
+over the patient, he is paralysed by the complication of his knowledge.
+Such a theory is against feeding up, such a theory against slops, such a
+theory against bleeding, such a theory in favour of phlebotomy; there
+are the wet and the dry, the hot and the cold methods; and while the
+doctor is deliberating, vacillating, or speculating, the patient has
+ample opportunity of dying, or nature of stepping in and curing the man,
+and thus foiling the doctor. Is there not much more sense and candour in
+the method adopted by the Irish hunting<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_188" id="page_188"></a>{188}</span> dispensary doctor, who, before
+starting with the hounds, locked up all drugs, except the Glauber’s
+salts, a stone or two of which he left in charge of his servant, with
+instructions it was to be meted out impartially to all comers, each
+patient receiving an honest fistful as a dose? It is a remarkable fact
+that within this century homœopathy has gained a firm hold on an
+important section of the community, and yet, notwithstanding the growth
+of what the allopathists or regular profession regard as ignorant
+quackery, the span of human life has had six years added to it in eighty
+years. Still homœopathy is a practical confession of ignorance; for
+it says, in effect, “We don’t know exactly what Nature is trying to do,
+but let us give her a little help, and trust in luck.” Whereas allopathy
+pretended to know everything and to fight Nature. Here, in the result of
+years added to man’s life by the development of the ignorant system, we
+see once more the superiority of ignorance over knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>How full of danger to the unwedded men is knowledge owned by the widow!
+She has<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_189" id="page_189"></a>{189}</span> knowledge of the married state, in which she was far removed
+from all the troubles and responsibilities of life. She had her
+pin-money, her bills paid, stalls taken for her at the opera, agreeable
+company around her board, no occasion to face money difficulties. Now
+all that is changed. There is no elasticity in her revenue, no margin
+for the gratification of her whims; she has to pay her own bills, secure
+her own stalls; she cannot very well entertain company often, and all
+the unpleasantnesses of business matters press her sorely. Her knowledge
+tells her that, if she could secure a second husband, all would be
+pleasant again. It may be said that here knowledge is in favour of the
+widow. Yes; but it is against the “Community.” Remember, the “Community”
+is always a male.</p>
+
+<p>There is hardly any class or member of the community that does not
+suffer drawback or injury from knowledge. As I am giving only a crude
+outline of a design, I leave a great deal to the imagination of the
+reader. He will easily perceive how much happier and more free would be
+the man of business, the girl, the boy,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_190" id="page_190"></a>{190}</span> the scientist, the
+controversialist, and, above all, the literary man, if each knew little
+or nothing, instead of having pressed upon the attention from youth
+accumulated experiences, traditions, discoveries, and reasonings of many
+centuries.</p>
+
+<p>To the “Delights of Ignorance,” I should devote the consideration of man
+devoid of knowledge under various circumstances and in various
+positions.</p>
+
+<p>By the sea who does not love to lie “propt on beds of amaranth and moly,
+how sweet (while warm airs lull, blowing lowly), with half-dropt eyelids
+still, beneath a heaven dark and holy, to watch the long bright river
+drawing slowly his waters from the purple hill&mdash;to hear the dewy echoes
+calling from cave to cave through the thick-twined vine&mdash;to watch the
+emerald-coloured waters falling through many a woven acanthus wreath
+divine! Only to see and hear the far-off sparkling brine, only to hear
+were sweet, stretched out beneath the pine.” Just so! Is not that much
+better than bothering about gravitation and that wretched old clinker
+the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_191" id="page_191"></a>{191}</span> moon, and the tides, and how sea-water is made up of oxygen and
+hydrogen and chloride of sodium and bromide of something else, and fifty
+other things, not one of which has a tolerable smell when you meet it in
+a laboratory? Isn’t it better than thinking of the number of lighthouses
+built on the coast of Albion, and the tonnage which yearly is reported
+and cleared at the custom-houses of London, Liverpool, and that
+prosperous seaport of Bohemia! Isn’t it much better than improving the
+occasion by reading a hand-book on hydraulics or hydrostatics? Who on
+the seashore wants to know anything? There will always, down to the last
+syllable of recorded time, be finer things unknown about the sea than
+can be said about all other matters in the world. Trying to know
+anything about the sea is like shooting into the air an arrow attached
+to a pennyworth of string with a view to sounding space. If we threw all
+the knowledge we have into the ocean the Admiralty standards of
+high-water mark would not have to be altered one-millionth part of a
+line.</p>
+
+<p>What a blessing ignorance would be in<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_192" id="page_192"></a>{192}</span> an inn! Who would not dispense
+with a knowledge of all the miseries that follow in the wake of the vat
+when one is thirsty, and has before him amber sunset-coloured ale, and
+in his hand a capacious, long, cool-meaning churchwarden? Who would at
+such a moment cumber his mind with the unit of specific gravity used by
+excisemen in testing beer? Who would at such a moment care to calculate
+the toll exacted by the Chancellor of the Exchequer before each cool
+gulp may thrill with amazing joy the parched gullet?</p>
+
+<p>Who, when upon a journey, would care to know the precise pressure
+required to blow the boiler of the engine to pieces, or the number of
+people killed in collisions during the corresponding quarter of last
+year? Should we not be better in sickness for not knowing the exact
+percentage of deaths in cases of our class? In adversity should we not
+be infinitely happier were we in ignorance of the chance we ran of
+gaining a good position or of cutting our throats? Should we not enjoy
+our prosperity all the more if we were not, morning<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_193" id="page_193"></a>{193}</span> and evening,
+exercised by the fluctuations of the share-list, fluctuations in all
+likelihood destined never to increase or diminish our fortunes one
+penny? And oh, for ignorance in sleep! For sleep without dream, or
+nightmare, or memory! For sleep such as falls upon the body when the
+soul is done with it and away!</p>
+
+<p>But all this is only rambling talk and likely to come to nothing. I fear
+I shall never find a publisher for my great work. Upon reading over what
+I have written I am impressed by the faintness of the outline it
+displays of the book. In fact there is hardly any outline at all. It is
+no more clear than the figures thrown by a magic-lantern upon a fog. I
+have done nothing more than wave the sacred lamp of ignorance before
+your eyes. I daresay my friend the jelly-fish would shake his fat sides
+with laughter if he became aware of this futile effort to show how far
+we are removed from his state of blissful calm. I feel infinitely
+depressed and discouraged. I feel that not only will I not be hailed as
+a prophet in my own<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_194" id="page_194"></a>{194}</span> country, but that the age will have nothing to do
+with my scheme. It may be thought by many that there is something like
+treason in thus enrolling oneself under the banner of the jelly-fish.
+Egypt, Assyria, Greece, Carthage, and Rome have gone back from
+knowledge, and even the jelly-fish does not flourish on their sites. But
+is the condition of their sites the worse for lacking the jelly-fish?
+Perhaps the “silence, and desolation, and dim night” are better in those
+places than the blare of trumpets and the tramp of man. So far as we
+know man is the only being capable of doing evil or offending heaven.
+His absence may by nature be considered very good company. Whatever part
+of earth he can handle and move he has turned topsy-turvy. One day earth
+will turn on him and wipe him out altogether.</p>
+
+<p>For me and my great scheme for the book there is no hope. Man has always
+been accounted a poor creature when judged by a fellow man whom he does
+not appreciate. How can I be expected to go on taking an interest in<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_195" id="page_195"></a>{195}</span>
+man when not the most credulous or the most crafty publisher in London
+will as much as look at my <i>Guide to Ignorance</i>? I feel that my life is
+wasted and that my functions have been usurped by the School Board. I
+cool the air with sighs for the days when a philosopher might teach his
+disciples in the porch or the grove. I feel as if I could anticipate
+earth and turn on man. But some of the genial good nature of the
+jelly-fish still lingers in my veins. I will not finally desert man
+until man has finally deserted me. I had by me a few scattered essays in
+the style of the book I projected in vain. If in them the reader has not
+found ample proof of my fitness to inculcate the philosophy of Ignorance
+I shall abandon Man to his fate. I have relieved my mind of some of its
+teeming store of vacuity. I can scarcely hope I have added to the
+reader’s hoard. But it would be consoling to fancy that upon laying down
+this book the reader’s mind will if possible be still more empty than
+when he took it up.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_196" id="page_196"></a>{196}</span></p>
+
+<p class="c"><small>
+<span class="smcap">Richard Clay and Sons</span>,<br />
+LONDON AND BUNGAY.</small>
+</p>
+
+<p><a name="transcrib" id="transcrib"></a></p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary=""
+style="padding:2%;border:3px dotted gray;">
+<tr><th align="center">Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:</th></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">the face of a charletan=> the face of a charlatan {pg 13}</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">acccording to Mitchel=> acccording to Mitchel {pg 140}</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">are focussed upon him.=> are focused upon him. {pg 179}</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<hr class="full" />
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Ignorant Essays, by Richard Dowling
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+</body>
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