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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Obiter Dicta, by Augustine Birrell
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Obiter Dicta
+
+Author: Augustine Birrell
+
+
+Release Date: January, 2005 [EBook #7299]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+Last Updated: May 10, 2013
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OBITER DICTA ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Robert Shimmin, Tiffany Vergon, Charles
+Aldarondo, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+OBITER DICTA
+
+
+By Augustine Birrell
+
+
+   'An _obiter dictum_, in the language of the law, is
+    a gratuitous opinion, an individual impertinence, which,
+    whether it be wise or foolish, right or wrong, bindeth
+    none--not even the lips that utter it.'
+
+OLD JUDGE.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION.
+
+
+_This seems a very little book to introduce to so large a continent. No
+such enterprise would ever have suggested itself to the home-keeping
+mind of the Author, who, none the less, when this edition was proposed
+to him by Messrs. Scribner on terms honorable to them and grateful
+to him, found the notion of being read in America most fragrant and
+delightful.
+
+London, February 13, 1885._
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+   CARLYLE
+   ON THE ALLEGED OBSCURITY OF MR. BROWNING'S POETRY
+   TRUTH-HUNTING
+   ACTORS
+   A ROGUE'S MEMOIRS
+   THE VIA MEDIA
+   FALSTAFF
+
+
+
+
+CARLYLE
+
+
+The accomplishments of our race have of late become so varied, that it
+is often no easy task to assign him whom we would judge to his proper
+station among men; and yet, until this has been done, the guns of
+our criticism cannot be accurately levelled, and as a consequence the
+greater part of our fire must remain futile. He, for example, who would
+essay to take account of Mr. Gladstone, must read much else besides
+Hansard; he must brush up his Homer, and set himself to acquire some
+theology. The place of Greece in the providential order of the world,
+and of laymen in the Church of England, must be considered, together
+with a host of other subjects of much apparent irrelevance to a
+statesman's life. So too in the case of his distinguished rival,
+whose death eclipsed the gaiety of politics and banished epigram from
+Parliament: keen must be the critical faculty which can nicely discern
+where the novelist ended and the statesman began in Benjamin Disraeli.
+
+Happily, no such difficulty is now before us. Thomas Carlyle was a
+writer of books, and he was nothing else. Beneath this judgment he would
+have winced, but have remained silent, for the facts are so.
+
+Little men sometimes, though not perhaps so often as is taken for
+granted, complain of their destiny, and think they have been hardly
+treated, in that they have been allowed to remain so undeniably small;
+but great men, with hardly an exception, nauseate their greatness, for
+not being of the particular sort they most fancy. The poet Gray was
+passionately fond, so his biographers tell us, of military history; but
+he took no Quebec. General Wolfe took Quebec, and whilst he was taking
+it, recorded the fact that he would sooner have written Gray's 'Elegy';
+and so Carlyle--who panted for action, who hated eloquence, whose heroes
+were Cromwell and Wellington, Arkwright and the 'rugged Brindley,'
+who beheld with pride and no ignoble envy the bridge at Auldgarth
+his mason-father had helped to build half a century before, and then
+exclaimed, 'A noble craft, that of a mason; a good building will last
+longer than most books--than one book in a million'; who despised men of
+letters, and abhorred the 'reading public'; whose gospel was Silence
+and Action--spent his life in talking and writing; and his legacy to the
+world is thirty-four volumes octavo.
+
+There is a familiar melancholy in this; but the critic has no need to
+grow sentimental. We must have men of thought as well as men of action:
+poets as much as generals; authors no less than artizans; libraries
+at least as much as militia; and therefore we may accept and proceed
+critically to examine Carlyle's thirty-four volumes, remaining somewhat
+indifferent to the fact that had he had the fashioning of his own
+destiny, we should have had at his hands blows instead of books.
+
+Taking him, then, as he was--a man of letters--perhaps the best type of
+such since Dr. Johnson died in Fleet Street, what are we to say of his
+thirty-four volumes?
+
+In them are to be found criticism, biography, history, politics, poetry,
+and religion. I mention this variety because of a foolish notion, at one
+time often found suitably lodged in heads otherwise empty, that Carlyle
+was a passionate old man, dominated by two or three extravagant
+ideas, to which he was for ever giving utterance in language of equal
+extravagance. The thirty-four volumes octavo render this opinion
+untenable by those who can read. Carlyle cannot be killed by an epigram,
+nor can the many influences that moulded him be referred to any single
+source. The rich banquet his genius has spread for us is of many
+courses. The fire and fury of the Latter-Day Pamphlets may be
+disregarded by the peaceful soul, and the preference given to the
+'Past' of 'Past and Present,' which, with its intense and sympathetic
+mediaevalism, might have been written by a Tractarian. The 'Life of
+Sterling' is the favourite book of many who would sooner pick oakum
+than read 'Frederick the Great' all through; whilst the mere student of
+_belles lettres_ may attach importance to the essays on Johnson, Burns,
+and Scott, on Voltaire and Diderot, on Goethe and Novalis, and yet
+remain blankly indifferent to 'Sartor Resartus' and 'The French
+Revolution.'
+
+But true as this is, it is none the less true that, excepting possibly
+the 'Life of Schiller,' Carlyle wrote nothing not clearly recognisable
+as his. All his books are his very own--bone of his bone, and flesh
+of his flesh. They are not stolen goods, nor elegant exhibitions of
+recently and hastily acquired wares.
+
+This being so, it may be as well if, before proceeding any further, I
+attempt, with a scrupulous regard to brevity, to state what I take to
+be the invariable indications of Mr. Carlyle's literary handiwork--the
+tokens of his presence--'Thomas Carlyle, his mark.'
+
+First of all, it may be stated, without a shadow of a doubt, that he
+is one of those who would sooner be wrong with Plato than right with
+Aristotle; in one word, he is a mystic. What he says of Novalis may with
+equal truth be said of himself: 'He belongs to that class of persons
+who do not recognise the syllogistic method as the chief organ for
+investigating truth, or feel themselves bound at all times to stop short
+where its light fails them. Many of his opinions he would despair of
+proving in the most patient court of law, and would remain well content
+that they should be disbelieved there.' In philosophy we shall not be
+very far wrong if we rank Carlyle as a follower of Bishop Berkeley;
+for an idealist he undoubtedly was. 'Matter,' says he, 'exists only
+spiritually, and to represent some idea, and body it forth. Heaven and
+Earth are but the time-vesture of the Eternal. The Universe is but one
+vast symbol of God; nay, if thou wilt have it, what is man himself but a
+symbol of God? Is not all that he does symbolical, a revelation to sense
+of the mystic God-given force that is in him?--a gospel of Freedom,
+which he, the "Messias of Nature," preaches as he can by act and word.'
+'Yes, Friends,' he elsewhere observes, 'not our logical mensurative
+faculty, but our imaginative one, is King over us, I might say Priest
+and Prophet, to lead us heavenward, or magician and wizard to lead us
+hellward. The understanding is indeed thy window--too clear thou canst
+not make it; but phantasy is thy eye, with its colour-giving retina,
+healthy or diseased.' It would be easy to multiply instances of this,
+the most obvious and interesting trait of Mr. Carlyle's writing; but
+I must bring my remarks upon it to a close by reminding you of his
+two favourite quotations, which have both significance. One from
+Shakespeare's _Tempest_:
+
+   'We are such stuff
+    As dreams are made of, and our little life
+    Is rounded with a sleep;'
+
+the other, the exclamation of the Earth-spirit, in Goethe's _Faust_:
+
+   ''Tis thus at the roaring loom of Time I ply,
+    And weave for God the garment thou seest Him by.'
+
+But this is but one side of Carlyle. There is another as strongly
+marked, which is his second note; and that is what he somewhere calls
+'his stubborn realism.' The combination of the two is as charming as it
+is rare. No one at all acquainted with his writings can fail to remember
+his almost excessive love of detail; his lively taste for facts, simply
+as facts. Imaginary joys and sorrows may extort from him nothing but
+grunts and snorts; but let him only worry out for himself, from that
+great dust-heap called 'history,' some undoubted fact of human and
+tender interest, and, however small it may be, relating possibly to
+some one hardly known, and playing but a small part in the events he is
+recording, and he will wax amazingly sentimental, and perhaps shed as
+many real tears as Sterne or Dickens do sham ones over their figments.
+This realism of Carlyle's gives a great charm to his histories and
+biographies. The amount he tells you is something astonishing--no
+platitudes, no rigmarole, no common-form, articles which are the staple
+of most biography, but, instead of them, all the facts and features
+of the case--pedigree, birth, father and mother, brothers and sisters,
+education, physiognomy, personal habits, dress, mode of speech; nothing
+escapes him. It was a characteristic criticism of his, on one of Miss
+Martineau's American books, that the story of the way Daniel Webster
+used to stand before the fire with his hands in his pockets was worth
+all the politics, philosophy, political economy, and sociology to be
+found in other portions of the good lady's writings. Carlyle's eye was
+indeed a terrible organ: he saw everything. Emerson, writing to
+him, says: 'I think you see as pictures every street, church,
+Parliament-house, barracks, baker's shop, mutton-stall, forge, wharf,
+and ship, and whatever stands, creeps, rolls, or swims thereabout, and
+make all your own.' He crosses over, one rough day, to Dublin; and he
+jots down in his diary the personal appearance of some unhappy creatures
+he never saw before or expected to see again; how men laughed, cried,
+swore, were all of huge interest to Carlyle. Give him a fact, he loaded
+you with thanks; propound a theory, you were rewarded with the most
+vivid abuse.
+
+This intense love for, and faculty of perceiving, what one may call the
+'concrete picturesque,' accounts for his many hard sayings about fiction
+and poetry. He could not understand people being at the trouble of
+inventing characters and situations when history was full of men and
+women; when streets were crowded and continents were being peopled under
+their very noses. Emerson's sphynx-like utterances irritated him at
+times, as they well might; his orations and the like. 'I long,' he says,
+'to see some _concrete thing_, some Event--Man's Life, American Forest,
+or piece of Creation which this Emerson loves and wonders at, well
+_Emersonised_, depicted by Emerson--filled with the life of Emerson, and
+cast forth from him then to live by itself.' [*] But Carlyle forgot
+the sluggishness of the ordinary imagination, and, for the moment, the
+stupendous dulness of the ordinary historian. It cannot be matter
+for surprise that people prefer Smollett's 'Humphrey Clinker' to his
+'History of England.'
+
+    [* Footnote: One need scarcely add, nothing of the sort
+    ever proceeded from Emerson. How should it? Where was it
+    to come from? When, to employ language of Mr. Arnold's
+    own, 'any poor child of nature' overhears the author of
+    'Essays in Criticism' telling two worlds that Emerson's
+    'Essays' are the most valuable prose contributions to the
+    literature of the century, his soul is indeed filled 'with
+    an unutterable sense of lamentation and mourning and woe.'
+    Mr. Arnold's silence was once felt to be provoking.
+    Wordsworth's lines kept occurring to one's mind--
+
+       'Poor Matthew, all his frolics o'er,
+        Is silent as a standing pool.'
+
+    But it was better so.]
+
+The third and last mark to which I call attention is his humour.
+Nowhere, surely, in the whole field of English literature, Shakespeare
+excepted, do you come upon a more abundant vein of humour than
+Carlyle's, though I admit that the quality of the ore is not of the
+finest. His every production is bathed in humour. This must never be,
+though it often has been, forgotten. He is not to be taken literally.
+He is always a humourist, not unfrequently a writer of burlesque, and
+occasionally a buffoon.
+
+Although the spectacle of Mr. Swinburne taking Mr. Carlyle to task, as
+he recently did, for indelicacy, has an oddity all its own, so far as
+I am concerned I cannot but concur with this critic in thinking that
+Carlyle has laid himself open, particularly in his 'Frederick the
+Great,' to the charge one usually associates with the great and terrible
+name of Dean Swift; but it is the Dean with a difference, and the
+difference is all in Carlyle's favour. The former deliberately pelts
+you with dirt, as did in old days gentlemen electors their parliamentary
+candidates; the latter only occasionally splashes you, as does a public
+vehicle pursuing on a wet day its uproarious course.
+
+These, then, I take to be Carlyle's three principal marks or notes:
+mysticism in thought, realism in description, and humour in both.
+
+To proceed now to his actual literary work.
+
+First, then, I would record the fact that he was a great critic, and
+this at a time when our literary criticism was a scandal. He more than
+any other has purged our vision and widened our horizons in this great
+matter. He taught us there was no sort of finality, but only nonsense,
+in that kind of criticism which was content with laying down some
+foreign masterpiece with the observation that it was not suited for the
+English taste. He was, if not the first, almost the first critic, who
+pursued in his criticism the historical method, and sought to make
+us understand what we were required to judge. It has been said that
+Carlyle's criticisms are not final, and that he has not said the last
+word about Voltaire, Diderot, Richter, and Goethe. I can well believe
+it. But reserving 'last words' for the use of the last man (to whom they
+would appear to belong), it is surely something to have said the _first_
+sensible words uttered in English on these important subjects. We ought
+not to forget the early days of the _Foreign and Quarterly Review_. We
+have critics now, quieter, more reposeful souls, taking their ease on
+Zion, who have entered upon a world ready to welcome them, whose keen
+rapiers may cut velvet better than did the two-handed broadsword of
+Carlyle, and whose later date may enable them to discern what their
+forerunner failed to perceive; but when the critics of this century come
+to be criticized by the critics of the next, an honourable, if not the
+highest place will be awarded to Carlyle.
+
+Turn we now to the historian and biographer. History and biography much
+resemble one another in the pages of Carlyle, and occupy more than
+half his thirty-four volumes; nor is this to be wondered at, since they
+afford him fullest scope for his three strong points--his love of the
+wonderful; his love of telling a story, as the children say, 'from the
+very beginning;' and his humour. His view of history is sufficiently
+lofty. History, says he, is the true epic poem, a universal divine
+scripture whose plenary inspiration no one out of Bedlam shall bring
+into question. Nor is he quite at one with the ordinary historian as to
+the true historical method. 'The time seems coming when he who sees no
+world but that of courts and camps, and writes only how soldiers were
+drilled and shot, and how this ministerial conjurer out-conjured that
+other, and then guided, or at least held, something which he called
+the rudder of Government, but which was rather the spigot of Taxation,
+wherewith in place of steering he could tax, will pass for a more or
+less instructive Gazetteer, but will no longer be called an Historian.'
+
+Nor does the philosophical method of writing history please him any
+better:
+
+'Truly if History is Philosophy teaching by examples, the writer fitted
+to compose history is hitherto an unknown man. Better were it that mere
+earthly historians should lower such pretensions, more suitable for
+omniscience than for human science, and aiming only at some picture of
+the things acted, which picture itself will be a poor approximation,
+leave the inscrutable purport of them an acknowledged secret--or at
+most, in reverent faith, pause over the mysterious vestiges of Him whose
+path is in the great deep of Time, whom History indeed reveals, but only
+all History and in Eternity will clearly reveal.'
+
+This same transcendental way of looking at things is very noticeable
+in the following view of Biography: 'For, as the highest gospel was a
+Biography, so is the life of every good man still an indubitable gospel,
+and preaches to the eye and heart and whole man, so that devils
+even must believe and tremble, these gladdest tidings. Man is
+heaven-born--not the thrall of circumstances, of necessity, but the
+victorious subduer thereof.' These, then, being his views, what are
+we to say of his works? His three principal historical works are, as
+everyone knows, 'Cromwell,' 'The French Revolution,' and 'Frederick the
+Great,' though there is a very considerable amount of other historical
+writing scattered up and down his works. But what are we to say of these
+three? Is he, by virtue of them, entitled to the rank and influence of a
+great historian? What have we a right to demand of an historian? First,
+surely, stern veracity, which implies not merely knowledge but honesty.
+An historian stands in a fiduciary position towards his readers, and
+if he withholds from them important facts likely to influence their
+judgment, he is guilty of fraud, and, when justice is done in this
+world, will be condemned to refund all moneys he has made by his false
+professions, with compound interest. This sort of fraud is unknown to
+the law, but to nobody else. 'Let me know the facts!' may well be the
+agonized cry of the student who finds himself floating down what Arnold
+has called 'the vast Mississippi of falsehood, History.' Secondly comes
+a catholic temper and way of looking at things. The historian should be
+a gentleman and possess a moral breadth of temperament. There should be
+no bitter protesting spirit about him. He should remember the world he
+has taken upon himself to write about is a large place, and that nobody
+set him up over us. Thirdly, he must be a born story-teller. If he is
+not this, he has mistaken his vocation. He may be a great philosopher, a
+useful editor, a profound scholar, and anything else his friends like
+to call him, except a great historian. How does Carlyle meet these
+requirements? His veracity, that is, his laborious accuracy, is admitted
+by the only persons competent to form an opinion, namely, independent
+investigators who have followed in his track; but what may be called
+the internal evidence of the case also supplies a strong proof of it.
+Carlyle was, as everyone knows, a hero-worshipper. It is part of his
+mysticism. With him man, as well as God, is a spirit, either of good or
+evil, and as such should be either worshipped or reviled. He is never
+himself till he has discovered or invented a hero; and, when he has got
+him, he tosses and dandles him as a mother her babe. This is a terrible
+temptation to put in the way of an historian, and few there be who are
+found able to resist it. How easy to keep back an ugly fact, sure to
+be a stumbling-block in the way of weak brethren! Carlyle is above
+suspicion in this respect. He knows no reticence. Nothing restrains
+him; not even the so-called proprieties of history. He may, after his
+boisterous fashion, pour scorn upon you for looking grave, as you read
+in his vivid pages of the reckless manner in which too many of his
+heroes drove coaches-and-six through the Ten Commandments. As likely as
+not he will call you a blockhead, and tell you to close your wide mouth
+and cease shrieking. But, dear me! hard words break no bones, and it is
+an amazing comfort to know the facts. Is he writing of Cromwell?--down
+goes everything--letters, speeches, as they were written, as they were
+delivered. Few great men are edited after this fashion. Were they to be
+so--Luther, for example--many eyes would be opened very wide. Nor does
+Carlyle fail in comment. If the Protector makes a somewhat distant
+allusion to the Barbadoes, Carlyle is at your elbow to tell you it
+means his selling people to work as slaves in the West Indies. As for
+Mirabeau, 'our wild Gabriel Honore,' well! we are told all about him;
+nor is Frederick let off a single absurdity or atrocity. But when we
+have admitted the veracity, what are we to say of the catholic temper,
+the breadth of temperament, the wide Shakespearian tolerance? Carlyle
+ought to have them all. By nature he was tolerant enough; so true a
+humourist could never be a bigot. When his war-paint is not on, a child
+might lead him. His judgments are gracious, chivalrous, tinged with a
+kindly melancholy and divine pity. But this mood is never for long. Some
+gadfly stings him: he seizes his tomahawk and is off on the trail.
+It must sorrowfully be admitted that a long life of opposition and
+indigestion, of fierce warfare with cooks and Philistines, spoilt his
+temper, never of the best, and made him too often contemptuous, savage,
+unjust. His language then becomes unreasonable, unbearable, bad.
+Literature takes care of herself. You disobey her rules: well and good,
+she shuts her door in your face; you plead your genius: she replies,
+'Your temper,' and bolts it. Carlyle has deliberately destroyed, by his
+own wilfulness, the value of a great deal he has written. It can never
+become classical. Alas! that this should be true of too many eminent
+Englishmen of our time. Language such as was, at one time, almost
+habitual with Mr. Ruskin, is a national humiliation, giving point to the
+Frenchman's sneer as to our distinguishing literary characteristic
+being '_la brutalite_.' In Carlyle's case much must be allowed for his
+rhetoric and humour. In slang phrase, he always 'piles it on.' Does
+a bookseller misdirect a parcel, he exclaims, 'My malison on all
+Blockheadisms and Torpid Infidelities of which this world is full.'
+Still, all allowances made, it is a thousand pities; and one's thoughts
+turn away from this stormy old man and take refuge in the quiet haven of
+the Oratory at Birmingham, with his great Protagonist, who, throughout
+an equally long life spent in painful controversy, and wielding weapons
+as terrible as Carlyle's own, has rarely forgotten to be urbane, and
+whose every sentence is a 'thing of beauty.' It must, then, be owned
+that too many of Carlyle's literary achievements 'lack a gracious
+somewhat.' By force of his genius he 'smites the rock and spreads
+the water;' but then, like Moses, 'he desecrates, belike, the deed in
+doing.'
+
+Our third requirement was, it may be remembered, the gift of the
+storyteller. Here one is on firm ground. Where is the equal of the man
+who has told us the story of 'The Diamond Necklace'?
+
+It is the vogue, nowadays, to sneer at picturesque writing. Professor
+Seeley, for reasons of his own, appears to think that whilst politics,
+and, I presume religion, may be made as interesting as you please,
+history should be as dull as possible. This, surely, is a jaundiced
+view. If there is one thing it is legitimate to make more interesting
+than another, it is the varied record of man's life upon earth. So long
+as we have human hearts and await human destinies, so long as we are
+alive to the pathos, the dignity, the comedy of human life, so long
+shall we continue to rank above the philosopher, higher than the
+politician, the great artist, be he called dramatist or historian, who
+makes us conscious of the divine movement of events, and of our fathers
+who were before us. Of course we assume accuracy and labor in our
+animated historian; though, for that matter, other things being equal, I
+prefer a lively liar to a dull one.
+
+Carlyle is sometimes as irresistible as 'The Campbells are Coming,' or
+'Auld Lang Syne.' He has described some men and some events once and for
+all, and so takes his place with Thucydides, Tacitus and Gibbon. Pedants
+may try hard to forget this, and may in their laboured nothings seek to
+ignore the author of 'Cromwell' and 'The French Revolution'; but as well
+might the pedestrian in Cumberland or Inverness seek to ignore Helvellyn
+or Ben Nevis. Carlyle is _there_, and will remain there, when the pedant
+of today has been superseded by the pedant of to-morrow.
+
+Remembering all this, we are apt to forget his faults, his
+eccentricities, and vagaries, his buffooneries, his too-outrageous
+cynicisms and his too-intrusive egotisms, and to ask ourselves--if it
+be not this man, who is it then to be? Macaulay, answer some; and
+Macaulay's claims are not of the sort to go unrecognised in a world
+which loves clearness of expression and of view only too well.
+Macaulay's position never admitted of doubt. We know what to expect, and
+we always get it. It is like the old days of W. G. Grace's cricket. We
+went to see the leviathan slog for six, and we saw it. We expected him
+to do it, and he did it. So with Macaulay--the good Whig, as he takes up
+the History, settles himself down in his chair, and knows it is going
+to be a bad time for the Tories. Macaulay's style--his much-praised
+style--is ineffectual for the purpose of telling the truth about
+anything. It is splendid, but _splendide mendax_, and in Macaulay's case
+the style was the man. He had enormous knowledge, and a noble spirit;
+his knowledge enriched his style and his spirit consecrated it to the
+service of Liberty. We do well to be proud of Macaulay; but we must add
+that, great as was his knowledge, great also was his ignorance, which
+was none the less ignorance because it was wilful; noble as was his
+spirit, the range of subject over which it energized was painfully
+restricted. He looked out upon the world, but, behold, only the Whigs
+were good. Luther and Loyola, Cromwell and Claverhouse, Carlyle and
+Newman--they moved him not; their enthusiasms were delusions, and their
+politics demonstrable errors. Whereas, of Lord Somers and Charles first
+Earl Grey it is impossible to speak without emotion. But the world
+does not belong to the Whigs; and a great historian must be capable of
+sympathizing both with delusions and demonstrable errors. Mr. Gladstone
+has commented with force upon what he calls Macaulay's invincible
+ignorance, and further says that to certain aspects of a case
+(particularly those aspects most pleasing to Mr. Gladstone) Macaulay's
+mind was hermetically sealed. It is difficult to resist these
+conclusions; and it would appear no rash inference from them, that a man
+in a state of invincible ignorance and with a mind hermetically sealed,
+whatever else he may be--orator, advocate, statesman, journalist, man of
+letters--can never be a great historian. But, indeed, when one remembers
+Macaulay's limited range of ideas: the commonplaceness of his morality,
+and of his descriptions; his absence of humour, and of pathos--for
+though Miss Martineau says she found one pathetic passage in the
+History, I have often searched for it in vain; and then turns to
+Carlyle--to his almost bewildering affluence of thought, fancy, feeling,
+humour, pathos--his biting pen, his scorching criticism, his world-wide
+sympathy (save in certain moods) with everything but the smug
+commonplace--to prefer Macaulay to him, is like giving the preference to
+Birket Foster over Salvator Rosa. But if it is not Macaulay, who is it
+to be? Mr. Hepworth Dixon or Mr. Froude? Of Bishop Stubbs and Professor
+Freeman it behoves every ignoramus to speak with respect. Horny-handed
+sons of toil, they are worthy of their wage. Carlyle has somewhere
+struck a distinction between the historical artist and the historical
+artizan. The bishop and the professor are historical artizans; artists
+they are not--and the great historian is a great artist.
+
+England boasts two such artists. Edward Gibbon and Thomas Carlyle.
+The elder historian may be compared to one of the great Alpine
+roadways--sublime in its conception, heroic in its execution, superb in
+its magnificent uniformity of good workmanship. The younger resembles
+one of his native streams, pent in at times between huge rocks, and
+tormented into foam, and then effecting its escape down some precipice,
+and spreading into cool expanses below; but however varied may be its
+fortunes--however startling its changes--always in motion, always in
+harmony with the scene around. Is it gloomy? It is with the gloom of the
+thunder-cloud. Is it bright? It is with the radiance of the sun.
+
+It is with some consternation that I approach the subject of Carlyle's
+politics. One handles them as does an inspector of police a parcel
+reported to contain dynamite. The Latter-Day Pamphlets might not unfitly
+be labelled 'Dangerous Explosives.'
+
+In this matter of politics there were two Carlyles; and, as generally
+happens in such cases, his last state was worse than his first. Up to
+1843, he not unfairly might be called a Liberal--of uncertain vote it
+may be--a man difficult to work with, and impatient of discipline, but
+still aglow with generous heat; full of large-hearted sympathy with
+the poor and oppressed, and of intense hatred of the cruel and
+shallow sophistries that then passed for maxims, almost for axioms, of
+government. In the year 1819, when the yeomanry round Glasgow was called
+out to keep down some dreadful monsters called 'Radicals,' Carlyle
+describes how he met an advocate of his acquaintance hurrying along,
+musket in hand, to his drill on the Links. 'You should have the like of
+this,' said he, cheerily patting his gun. 'Yes, was the reply, 'but
+I haven't yet quite settled on which side.' And when he did make his
+choice, on the whole he chose rightly. The author of that noble pamphlet
+'Chartism,' published in 1840, was at least once a Liberal. Let me quote
+a passage that has stirred to effort many a generous heart now cold in
+death: 'Who would suppose that Education were a thing which had to be
+advocated on the ground of local expediency, or indeed on any ground?
+As if it stood not on the basis of an everlasting duty, as a prime
+necessity of man! It is a thing that should need no advocating; much
+as it does actually need. To impart the gift of thinking to those who
+cannot think, and yet who could in that case think: this, one
+would imagine, was the first function a government had to set about
+discharging. Were it not a cruel thing to see, in any province of an
+empire, the inhabitants living all mutilated in their limbs, each strong
+man with his right arm lamed? How much crueller to find the strong soul
+with its eyes still sealed--its eyes extinct, so that it sees not! Light
+has come into the world; but to this poor peasant it has come in vain.
+For six thousand years the sons of Adam, in sleepless effort, have been
+devising, doing, discovering; in mysterious, infinite, indissoluble
+communion, warring, a little band of brothers, against the black empire
+of necessity and night; they have accomplished such a conquest and
+conquests; and to this man it is all as if it had not been. The
+four-and-twenty letters of the alphabet are still runic enigmas to him.
+He passes by on the other side; and that great spiritual kingdom,
+the toil-won conquest of his own brothers, all that his brothers have
+conquered, is a thing not extant for him. An invisible empire; he knows
+it not--suspects it not. And is not this his withal; the conquest of
+his own brothers, the lawfully acquired possession of all men? Baleful
+enchantment lies over him, from generation to generation; he knows
+not that such an empire is his--that such an empire is his at all....
+Heavier wrong is not done under the sun. It lasts from year to year,
+from century to century; the blinded sire slaves himself out, and leaves
+a blinded son; and men, made in the image of God, continue as two-legged
+beasts of labour: and in the largest empire of the world it is a debate
+whether a small fraction of the revenue of one day shall, after thirteen
+centuries, be laid out on it, or not laid out on it. Have we governors?
+Have we teachers? Have we had a Church these thirteen hundred years?
+What is an overseer of souls, an archoverseer, archiepiscopus? Is he
+something? If so, let him lay his hand on his heart and say what thing!'
+
+Nor was the man who in 1843 wrote as follows altogether at sea in
+politics:
+
+'Of Time Bill, Factory Bill, and other such Bills, the present editor
+has no authority to speak. He knows not, it is for others than he
+to know, in what specific ways it may be feasible to interfere with
+legislation between the workers and the master-workers--knows only and
+sees that legislative interference, and interferences not a few, are
+indispensable. Nay, interference has begun; there are already factory
+inspectors. Perhaps there might be mine inspectors too. Might there
+not be furrow-field inspectors withal, to ascertain how, on _7s. 6d._
+a week, a human family does live? Again, are not sanitary regulations
+possible for a legislature? Baths, free air, a wholesome temperature,
+ceilings twenty feet high, might be ordained by Act of Parliament in
+all establishments licensed as mills. There are such mills already
+extant--honour to the builders of them. The legislature can say to
+others, "Go you and do likewise--better if you can."'
+
+By no means a bad programme for 1843; and a good part of it has been
+carried out, but with next to no aid from Carlyle.
+
+The Radical party has struggled on as best it might, without the author
+of 'Chartism' and 'The French Revolution'--
+
+   'They have marched prospering, not through his presence;
+    Songs have inspired them, not from his lyre;'
+
+and it is no party spirit that leads one to regret the change of mind
+which prevented the later public life of this great man, and now
+the memory of it, from being enriched with something better than a
+five-pound note for Governor Eyre.
+
+But it could not be helped. What brought about the rupture was his
+losing faith in the ultimate destiny of man upon earth. No more terrible
+loss can be sustained. It is of both heart and hope. He fell back upon
+heated visions of heaven-sent heroes, devoting their early days for
+the most part to hoodwinking the people, and their latter ones, more
+heroically, to shooting them.
+
+But it is foolish to quarrel with results, and we may learn something
+even from the later Carlyle. We lay down John Bright's Reform Speeches,
+and take up Carlyle and light upon a passage like this: 'Inexpressibly
+delirious seems to me the puddle of Parliament and public upon what it
+calls the Reform Measure, that is to say, the calling in of new supplies
+of blockheadism, gullibility, bribability, amenability to beer and
+balderdash, by way of amending the woes we have had from previous
+supplies of that bad article.' This view must be accounted for as well
+as Mr. Bright's. We shall do well to remember, with Carlyle, that the
+best of all Reform Bills is that which each citizen passes in his own
+breast, where it is pretty sure to meet with strenuous opposition.
+The reform of ourselves is no doubt an heroic measure never to be
+overlooked, and, in the face of accusations of gullibility, bribability,
+amenability to beer and balderdash, our poor humanity can only stand
+abashed, and feebly demur to the bad English in which the charges are
+conveyed. But we can't all lose hope. We remember Sir David Ramsay's
+reply to Lord Rea, once quoted by Carlyle himself. Then said his
+lordship: 'Well, God mend all.' 'Nay, by God, Donald, we must help Him
+to mend it!' It is idle to stand gaping at the heavens, waiting to feel
+the thong of some hero of questionable morals and robust conscience; and
+therefore, unless Reform Bills can be shown to have checked purity of
+election, to have increased the stupidity of electors, and generally to
+have promoted corruption--which notoriously they have not--we may allow
+Carlyle to make his exit 'swearing,' and regard their presence in the
+Statute Book, if not with rapture, at least, with equanimity.
+
+But it must not be forgotten that the battle is still raging--the
+issue is still uncertain. Mr. Froude is still free to assert that the
+'_post-mortem_' will prove Carlyle was right. His political sagacity
+no reader of 'Frederick' can deny; his insight into hidden causes
+and far-away effects was keen beyond precedent--nothing he ever said
+deserves contempt, though it may merit anger. If we would escape his
+conclusion, we must not altogether disregard his premises. Bankruptcy
+and death are the final heirs of imposture and make-believes. The old
+faiths and forms are worn too threadbare by a thousand disputations to
+bear the burden of the new democracy, which, if it is not merely to win
+the battle but to hold the country, must be ready with new faiths and
+forms of her own. They are within her reach if she but knew it; they
+lie to her hand: surely they will not escape her grasp! If they do not,
+then, in the glad day when worship is once more restored to man, he
+will with becoming generosity forget much that Carlyle has written, and
+remembering more, rank him amongst the prophets of humanity.
+
+Carlyle's poetry can only be exhibited in long extracts, which would
+be here out of place, and might excite controversy as to the meaning of
+words, and draw down upon me the measureless malice of the metricists.
+There are, however, passages in 'Sartor Resartus' and the 'French
+Revolution' which have long appeared to me to be the sublimest poetry of
+the century; and it was therefore with great pleasure that I found Mr.
+Justice Stephen, in his book on 'Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity,'
+introducing a quotation from the 8th chapter of the 3rd book of 'Sartor
+Resartus,' with the remark that 'it is perhaps the most memorable
+utterance of the greatest poet of the age.'
+
+As for Carlyle's religion, it may be said he had none, inasmuch as
+he expounded no creed and put his name to no confession. This is the
+pedantry of the schools. He taught us religion, as cold water and fresh
+air teach us health, by rendering the conditions of disease well nigh
+impossible. For more than half a century, with superhuman energy, he
+struggled to establish the basis of all religions, 'reverence and godly
+fear.' 'Love not pleasure, love God; this is the everlasting Yea.'
+
+One's remarks might here naturally come to an end, with a word or two of
+hearty praise of the brave course of life led by the man who awhile back
+stood the acknowledged head of English letters. But the present time is
+not the happiest for a panegyric on Carlyle. It would be in vain to
+deny that the brightness of his reputation underwent an eclipse, visible
+everywhere, by the publication of his 'Reminiscences.' They surprised
+most of us, pained not a few, and hugely delighted that ghastly crew,
+the wreckers of humanity, who are never so happy as when employed in
+pulling down great reputations to their own miserable levels. When these
+'baleful creatures,' as Carlyle would have called them, have lit upon
+any passage indicative of conceit or jealousy or spite, they have
+fastened upon it and screamed over it, with a pleasure but ill-concealed
+and with a horror but ill-feigned. 'Behold,' they exclaim, 'your hero
+robbed of the nimbus his inflated style cast around him--this preacher
+and fault-finder reduced to his principal parts: and lo! the main
+ingredient is most unmistakably "bile!"'
+
+The critic, however, has nought to do either with the sighs of the
+sorrowful, 'mourning when a hero falls,' or with the scorn of the
+malicious, rejoicing, as did Bunyan's Juryman, Mr. Live-loose, when
+Faithful was condemned to die: 'I could never endure him, for he would
+always be condemning my way.'
+
+The critic's task is to consider the book itself, _i. e._, the nature of
+its contents, and how it came to be written at all.
+
+When this has been done, there will not be found much demanding moral
+censure; whilst the reader will note with delight, applied to the
+trifling concerns of life, those extraordinary gifts of observation and
+apprehension which have so often charmed him in the pages of history and
+biography.
+
+These peccant volumes contain but four sketches: one of his father,
+written in 1832; the other three, of Edward Irving, Lord Jeffrey, and
+Mrs. Carlyle, all written after the death of the last-named, in 1866.
+
+The only fault that has been found with the first sketch is, that in
+it Carlyle hazards the assertion that Scotland does not now contain his
+father's like. It ought surely to be possible to dispute this opinion
+without exhibiting emotion. To think well of their forbears is one
+of the few weaknesses of Scotchmen. This sketch, as a whole, must be
+carried to Carlyle's credit, and is a permanent addition to literature.
+It is pious, after the high Roman fashion. It satisfies our finest sense
+of the fit and proper. Just exactly so should a literate son write of an
+illiterate peasant father. How immeasurable seems the distance between
+the man from whom proceeded the thirty-four volumes we have been writing
+about and the Calvinistic mason who didn't even know his Burns!--and yet
+here we find the whole distance spanned by filial love.
+
+The sketch of Lord Jeffrey is inimitable. One was getting tired of
+Jeffrey, and prepared to give him the go-by, when Carlyle creates him
+afresh, and, for the first time, we see the bright little man bewitching
+us by what he is, disappointing us by what he is not. The spiteful
+remarks the sketch contains may be considered, along with those of
+the same nature to be found only too plentifully in the remaining two
+papers.
+
+After careful consideration of the worst of these remarks, Mrs.
+Oliphant's explanation seems the true one; they are most of them
+sparkling bits of Mrs. Carlyle's conversation. She, happily for herself,
+had a lively wit, and, perhaps not so happily, a biting tongue, and was,
+as Carlyle tells us, accustomed to make him laugh, as they drove home
+together from London crushes, by far from genial observations on her
+fellow-creatures, little recking--how should she?--that what was so
+lightly uttered was being engraven on the tablets of the most marvellous
+of memories, and was destined long afterwards to be written down in grim
+earnest by a half-frenzied old man, and printed, in cold blood, by an
+English gentleman.
+
+The horrible description of Mrs. Irving's personal appearance, and the
+other stories of the same connection, are recognised by Mrs. Oliphant as
+in substance Mrs. Carlyle's; whilst the malicious account of Mrs. Basil
+Montague's head-dress is attributed by Carlyle himself to his wife.
+Still, after dividing the total, there is a good helping for each, and
+blame would justly be Carlyle's due if we did not remember, as we
+are bound to do, that, interesting as these three sketches are, their
+interest is pathological, and ought never to have been given us. Mr.
+Froude should have read them in tears, and burnt them in fire. There is
+nothing surprising in the state of mind which produced them. They are
+easily accounted for by our sorrow-laden experience. It is a familiar
+feeling which prompts a man, suddenly bereft of one whom he alone really
+knew and loved, to turn in his fierce indignation upon the world, and
+deride its idols whom all are praising, and which yet to him seem
+ugly by the side of one of whom no one speaks. To be angry with such
+a sentence as 'scribbling Sands and Eliots, not fit to compare with my
+incomparable Jeannie,' is at once inhuman and ridiculous. This is the
+language of the heart, not of the head. It is no more criticism than is
+the trumpeting of a wounded elephant zooelogy.
+
+Happy is the man who at such a time holds both peace and pen; but
+unhappiest of all is he who, having dipped his sorrow into ink, entrusts
+the manuscript to a romantic historian.
+
+The two volumes of the 'Life,' and the three volumes of Mrs. Carlyle's
+'Correspondence,' unfortunately did not pour oil upon the troubled
+waters. The partizanship they evoked was positively indecent. Mrs.
+Carlyle had her troubles and her sorrows, as have most women who live
+under the same roof with a man of creative genius; but of one thing we
+may be quite sure, that she would have been the first, to use her
+own expressive language, to require God 'particularly to damn' her
+impertinent sympathizers. As for Mr. Froude, he may yet discover his
+Nemesis in the spirit of an angry woman whose privacy he has invaded,
+and whose diary he has most wantonly published.
+
+These dark clouds are ephemeral. They will roll away, and we shall once
+more gladly recognise the lineaments of an essentially lofty character,
+of one who, though a man of genius and of letters, neither outraged
+society nor stooped to it; was neither a rebel nor a slave; who in
+poverty scorned wealth; who never mistook popularity for fame; but from
+the first assumed, and throughout maintained, the proud attitude of one
+whose duty it was to teach and not to tickle mankind.
+
+Brother-dunces, lend me your ears! not to crop, but that I may whisper
+into their furry depths: 'Do not quarrel with genius. We have none
+ourselves, and yet are so constituted that we cannot live without it.'
+
+
+
+
+ON THE ALLEGED OBSCURITY OF MR. BROWNING'S POETRY.
+
+
+'The sanity of true genius' was a happy phrase of Charles Lamb's. Our
+greatest poets were our sanest men. Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare,
+Milton, and Wordsworth might have defied even a mad doctor to prove his
+worst.
+
+To extol sanity ought to be unnecessary in an age which boasts its
+realism; but yet it may be doubted whether, if the author of the phrase
+just quoted were to be allowed once more to visit the world he loved
+so well and left so reluctantly, and could be induced to forswear his
+Elizabethans and devote himself to the literature of the day, he would
+find many books which his fine critical faculty would allow him to
+pronounce 'healthy,' as he once pronounced 'John Buncle' to be in the
+presence of a Scotchman, who could not for the life of him understand
+how a book could properly be said to enjoy either good or bad health.
+
+But, however this may be, this much is certain, that lucidity is one
+of the chief characteristics of sanity. A sane man ought not to be
+unintelligible. Lucidity is good everywhere, for all time and in all
+things, in a letter, in a speech, in a book, in a poem. Lucidity is not
+simplicity. A lucid poem is not necessarily an easy one. A great poet
+may tax our brains, but he ought not to puzzle our wits. We may often
+have to ask in Humility, What _does_ he mean? but not in despair, What
+_can_ he mean?
+
+Dreamy and inconclusive the poet sometimes, nay, often, cannot help
+being, for dreaminess and inconclusiveness are conditions of thought
+when dwelling on the very subjects that most demand poetical treatment.
+
+Misty, therefore, the poet has our kind permission sometimes to be; but
+muddy, never! A great poet, like a great peak, must sometimes be
+allowed to have his head in the clouds, and to disappoint us of the wide
+prospect we had hoped to gain; but the clouds which envelop him must be
+attracted to, and not made by him.
+
+In a sentence, though the poet may give expression to what Wordsworth
+has called 'the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible
+world,' we, the much-enduring public who have to read his poems, are
+entitled to demand that the unintelligibility of which we are made to
+feel the weight, should be all of it the world's, and none of it merely
+the poet's.
+
+We should not have ventured to introduce our subject with such very
+general and undeniable observations, had not experience taught us that
+the best way of introducing any subject is by a string of platitudes,
+delivered after an oracular fashion. They arouse attention, without
+exhausting it, and afford the pleasant sensation of thinking, without
+any of the trouble of thought. But, the subject once introduced, it
+becomes necessary to proceed with it.
+
+In considering whether a poet is intelligible and lucid, we ought not to
+grope and grub about his work in search of obscurities and oddities, but
+should, in the first instance at all events, attempt to regard his
+whole scope and range; to form some estimate, if we can, of his general
+purport and effect, asking ourselves, for this purpose, such questions
+as these: How are we the better for him? Has he quickened any passion,
+lightened any burden, purified any taste? Does he play any real part
+in our lives? When we are in love, do we whisper him in our lady's ear?
+When we sorrow, does he ease our pain? Can he calm the strife of mental
+conflict? Has he had anything to say, which wasn't twaddle, on those
+subjects which, elude analysis as they may, and defy demonstration as
+they do, are yet alone of perennial interest--
+
+   'On man, on nature, and on human life,'
+
+on the pathos of our situation, looking back on to the irrevocable and
+forward to the unknown? If a poet has said, or done, or been any of
+these things to an appreciable extent, to charge him with obscurity is
+both folly and ingratitude.
+
+But the subject may be pursued further, and one may be called upon to
+investigate this charge with reference to particular books or poems.
+In Browning's case this fairly may be done; and then another crop of
+questions arises, such as: What is the book about, _i. e._, with what
+subject does it deal, and what method of dealing does it employ? Is it
+didactical, analytical, or purely narrative? Is it content to describe,
+or does it aspire to explain? In common fairness these questions must be
+asked and answered, before we heave our critical half-bricks at strange
+poets. One task is of necessity more difficult than another. Students of
+geometry, who have pushed their researches into that fascinating science
+so far as the fifth proposition of the first book, commonly called the
+_Pons Asinorum_ (though now that so many ladies read Euclid, it ought,
+in common justice to them, to be at least sometimes called the _Pons
+Asinarum_), will agree that though it may be more difficult to prove
+that the angles at the base of an isosceles triangle are equal, and that
+if the equal sides be produced, the angles on the other side of the base
+shall be equal, than it was to describe an equilateral triangle on a
+given finite straight line; yet no one but an ass would say that the
+fifth proposition was one whit less intelligible than the first. When we
+consider Mr. Browning in his later writings, it will be useful to bear
+this distinction in mind.
+
+Our first duty, then, is to consider Mr. Browning in his whole scope and
+range, or, in a word, generally. This is a task of such dimensions
+and difficulty as, in the language of joint-stock prospectuses, 'to
+transcend individual enterprise,' and consequently, as we all know, a
+company has been recently floated, or a society established, having Mr.
+Browning for its principal object. It has a president, two secretaries,
+male and female, and a treasurer. You pay a guinea, and you become a
+member. A suitable reduction is, I believe, made in the unlikely event
+of all the members of one family flocking to be enrolled. The existence
+of this society is a great relief, for it enables us to deal with our
+unwieldy theme in a light-hearted manner, and to refer those who have
+a passion for solid information and profound philosophy to the printed
+transactions of this learned society, which, lest we should forget all
+about it, we at once do.
+
+When you are viewing a poet generally, as is our present plight, the
+first question is: When was he born? The second, When did he (to use
+a favourite phrase of the last century, now in disuse)--When did he
+commence author? The third, How long did he keep at it? The fourth, How
+much has he written? And the fifth may perhaps be best expressed in the
+words of Southey's little Peterkin:
+
+  '"What good came of it all at last?"
+    Quoth little Peterkin.'
+
+Mr. Browning was born in 1812; he commenced author with the fragment
+called 'Pauline,' published in 1833. He is still writing, and his works,
+as they stand upon my shelves--for editions vary--number twenty-three
+volumes. Little Peterkin's question is not so easily answered; but,
+postponing it for a moment, the answers to the other four show that
+we have to deal with a poet, more than seventy years old, who has been
+writing for half a century, and who has filled twenty-three volumes.
+The Browning Society at all events has assets. The way I propose to deal
+with this literary mass is to divide it in two, taking the year 1864 as
+the line of cleavage. In that year the volume called 'Dramatis Personae'
+was published, and then nothing happened till the year 1868, when our
+poet presented the astonished English language with the four volumes and
+the 21,116 lines called 'The Ring and the Book,' a poem which it may
+be stated, for the benefit of that large, increasing, and highly
+interesting class of persons who prefer statistics to poetry, is longer
+than Pope's 'Homer's Iliad' by exactly 2,171 lines. We thus begin with
+'Pauline' in 1833, and end with 'Dramatis Personae' in 1864. We then
+begin again with 'The Ring and the Book,' in 1868; but when or where
+we shall end cannot be stated. 'Sordello,' published in 1840, is better
+treated apart, and is therefore excepted from the first period, to which
+chronologically it belongs.
+
+Looking then at the first period, we find in its front eight plays:
+
+1. 'Strafford,' written in 1836, when its author was twenty-four years
+old, and put upon the boards of Covent Garden Theatre on the 1st of May,
+1837, Macready playing Strafford, and Miss Helen Faucit Lady Carlisle.
+It was received with much enthusiasm; but the company was rebellious and
+the manager bankrupt; and after running five nights, the man who played
+Pym threw up his part, and the theatre was closed.
+
+2. 'Pippa Passes.'
+
+3. 'King Victor and King Charles.'
+
+4. 'The Return of the Druses.'
+
+5. 'A Blot in the 'Scutcheon.'
+
+This beautiful and pathetic play was put on the stage of Drury Lane
+on the 11th of February, 1843, with Phelps as Lord Tresham, Miss Helen
+Faucit as Mildred Tresham, and Mrs. Stirling, still known to us all,
+as Guendolen. It was a brilliant success. Mr. Browning was in the
+stage-box; and if it is any satisfaction for a poet to hear a crowded
+house cry 'Author, author!' that satisfaction has belonged to Mr.
+Browning. The play ran several nights; and was only stopped because one
+of Mr. Macready's bankruptcies happened just then to intervene. It was
+afterwards revived by Mr. Phelps, during his 'memorable management' of
+Sadlers' Wells.
+
+6. 'Colombe's Birthday.' Miss Helen Faucit put this upon the stage in
+1852, when it was reckoned a success.
+
+7. 'Luria.'
+
+8. 'A Soul's Tragedy.'
+
+To call any of these plays unintelligible is ridiculous; and nobody
+who has ever read them ever did, and why people who have not read them
+should abuse them is hard to see. Were society put upon its oath, we
+should be surprised to find how many people in high places have not read
+'All's Well that Ends Well,' or 'Timon of Athens;' but they don't
+go about saying these plays are unintelligible. Like wise folk, they
+pretend to have read them, and say nothing. In Browning's case they
+are spared the hypocrisy. No one need pretend to have read 'A Soul's
+Tragedy;' and it seems, therefore, inexcusable for anyone to assert that
+one of the plainest, most pointed, and piquant bits of writing in the
+language is unintelligible. But surely something more may be truthfully
+said of these plays than that they are comprehensible. First of all,
+they are _plays_, and not _works_--like the dropsical dramas of Sir
+Henry Taylor and Mr. Swinburne. Some of them have stood the ordeal of
+actual representation; and though it would be absurd to pretend that
+they met with that overwhelming measure of success our critical age
+has reserved for such dramatists as the late Lord Lytton, the author of
+'Money,' the late Tom Taylor, the author of 'The Overland Route,' the
+late Mr. Robertson, the author of 'Caste,' Mr. H. Byron, the author
+of 'Our Boys,' Mr. Wills, the author of 'Charles I.,' Mr. Burnand, the
+author of 'The Colonel,' and Mr. Gilbert, the author of so much that
+is great and glorious in our national drama; at all events they proved
+themselves able to arrest and retain the attention of very ordinary
+audiences. But who can deny dignity and even grandeur to 'Luria,' or
+withhold the meed of a melodious tear from 'Mildred Tresham'? What
+action of what play is more happily conceived or better rendered than
+that of 'Pippa Passes'?--where innocence and its reverse, tender love
+and violent passion, are presented with emphasis, and yet blended into a
+dramatic unity and a poetic perfection, entitling the author to the very
+first place amongst those dramatists of the century who have laboured
+under the enormous disadvantage of being poets to start with.
+
+Passing from the plays, we are next attracted by a number of splendid
+poems, on whose base the structure of Mr. Browning's fame perhaps rests
+most surely--his dramatic pieces--poems which give utterance to the
+thoughts and feelings of persons other than himself, or, as he puts it,
+when dedicating a number of them to his wife:
+
+   'Love, you saw me gather men and women,
+    Live or dead, or fashioned by my fancy,
+    Enter each and all, and use their service,
+    Speak from every mouth the speech--a poem;'
+
+or, again, in 'Sordello':
+
+   'By making speak, myself kept out of view,
+    The very man, as he was wont to do.'
+
+At a rough calculation, there must be at least sixty of these pieces.
+Let me run over the names of a very few of them. 'Saul,' a poem beloved
+by all true women; 'Caliban,' which the men, not unnaturally perhaps,
+often prefer. The 'Two Bishops'; the sixteenth century one ordering his
+tomb of jasper and basalt in St. Praxed's Church, and his nineteenth
+century successor rolling out his post-prandial _Apologia_. 'My Last
+Duchess,' the 'Soliloquy in a Spanish Cloister,' 'Andrea del Sarto,'
+'Fra Lippo Lippi,' 'Rabbi Ben Ezra,' 'Cleon,' 'A Death in the Desert,'
+'The Italian in England,' and 'The Englishman in Italy.'
+
+It is plain truth to say that no other English poet, living or dead,
+Shakespeare excepted, has so heaped up human interest for his readers as
+has Robert Browning.
+
+Fancy stepping into a room and finding it full of Shakespeare's
+principal characters! What a babel of tongues! What a jostling of
+wits! How eagerly one's eye would go in search of Hamlet and Sir John
+Falstaff, but droop shudderingly at the thought of encountering the
+distraught gaze of Lady Macbeth! We should have no difficulty in
+recognising Beatrice in the central figure of that lively group of
+laughing courtiers; whilst did we seek Juliet, it would, of course,
+be by appointment on the balcony. To fancy yourself in such company
+is pleasant matter for a midsummer's night's dream. No poet has such a
+gallery as Shakespeare, but of our modern poets Browning comes nearest
+him.
+
+Against these dramatic pieces the charge of unintelligibility fails
+as completely as it does against the plays. They are all perfectly
+intelligible; but--and here is the rub--they are not easy reading, like
+the estimable writings of the late Mrs. Hemans. They require the same
+honest attention as it is the fashion to give to a lecture of Professor
+Huxley's or a sermon of Canon Liddon's: and this is just what too many
+persons will not give to poetry. They
+
+       'Love to hear
+    A soft pulsation in their easy ear;
+    To turn the page, and let their senses drink
+    A lay that shall not trouble them to think.'
+
+It is no great wonder it should be so. After dinner, when disposed to
+sleep, but afraid of spoiling our night's rest, behold the witching
+hour reserved by the nineteenth century for the study of poetry! This
+treatment of the muse deserves to be held up to everlasting scorn and
+infamy in a passage of Miltonic strength and splendour. We, alas! must
+be content with the observation, that such an opinion of the true
+place of poetry in the life of a man excites, in the breasts of the
+rightminded, feelings akin to those which Charles Lamb ascribes to the
+immortal Sarah Battle, when a young gentleman of a literary turn, on
+taking a hand in her favourite game of whist, declared that he saw no
+harm in unbending the mind, now and then, after serious studies, in
+recreations of that kind. She could not bear, so Elia proceeds, 'to have
+her noble occupation, to which she wound up her faculties, considered in
+that light. It was her business, her duty--the thing she came into the
+world to do--and she did it: she unbent her mind, afterwards, over a
+book!' And so the lover of poetry and Browning, after winding-up
+his faculties over 'Comus' or 'Paracelsus,' over 'Julius Caesar' or
+'Strafford,' may afterwards, if he is so minded, unbend himself over the
+'Origin of Species,' or that still more fascinating record which tells
+us how little curly worms, only give them time enough, will cover with
+earth even the larger kind of stones.
+
+Next to these dramatic pieces come what we may be content to call simply
+poems: some lyrical, some narrative. The latter are straightforward
+enough, and, as a rule, full of spirit and humour; but this is more than
+can always be said of the lyrical pieces. Now, for the first time,
+in dealing with this first period, excluding 'Sordello,' we strike
+difficulty. The Chinese puzzle comes in. We wonder whether it all turns
+on the punctuation. And the awkward thing for Mr. Browning's reputation
+is this, that these bewildering poems are, for the most part, very
+short. We say awkward, for it is not more certain that Sarah Gamp liked
+her beer drawn mild, than it is that your Englishman likes his poetry
+cut short; and so, accordingly, it often happens that some estimable
+paterfamilias takes up an odd volume of Browning his volatile son or
+moonstruck daughter has left lying about, pishes and pshaws! and then,
+with an air of much condescension and amazing candour, remarks that
+he will give the fellow another chance, and not condemn him unread. So
+saying, he opens the book, and carefully selects the very shortest poem
+he can find; and in a moment, without sign or signal, note or warning,
+the unhappy man is floundering up to his neck in lines like these, which
+are the third and final stanza of a poem called 'Another Way of Love':
+
+   'And after, for pastime,
+    If June be refulgent
+    With flowers in completeness,
+    All petals, no prickles,
+    Delicious as trickles
+    Of wine poured at mass-time,
+    And choose One indulgent
+    To redness and sweetness;
+    Or if with experience of man and of spider,
+    She use my June lightning, the strong insect-ridder
+    To stop the fresh spinning,--why June will consider.'
+
+He comes up gasping, and more than ever persuaded that Browning's poetry
+is a mass of inconglomerate nonsense, which nobody understands--least of
+all members of the Browning Society.
+
+We need be at no pains to find a meaning for everything Mr. Browning
+has written. But when all is said and done--when these few freaks of a
+crowded brain are thrown overboard to the sharks of verbal criticism
+who feed on such things--Mr. Browning and his great poetical achievement
+remain behind to be dealt with and accounted for. We do not get rid of
+the Laureate by quoting:
+
+   'O darling room, my heart's delight,
+    Dear room, the apple of my sight,
+    With thy two couches soft and white
+    There is no room so exquisite--
+    No little room so warm and bright
+    Wherein to read, wherein to write;'
+
+or of Wordsworth by quoting:
+
+   'At this, my boy hung down his head:
+    He blushed with shame, nor made reply,
+    And five times to the child I said,
+    "Why, Edward? tell me why?"'--
+
+or of Keats by remembering that he once addressed a young lady as
+follows:
+
+   'O come, Georgiana! the rose is full blown,
+    The riches of Flora are lavishly strown:
+    The air is all softness and crystal the streams,
+    The west is resplendently clothed in beams.'
+
+The strength of a rope may be but the strength of its weakest part; but
+poets are to be judged in their happiest hours, and in their greatest
+works.
+
+Taking, then, this first period of Mr. Browning's poetry as a whole, and
+asking ourselves if we are the richer for it, how can there be any doubt
+as to the reply? What points of human interest has he left untouched?
+With what phase of life, character, or study does he fail to sympathize?
+So far from being the rough-hewn block 'dull fools' have supposed him,
+he is the most dilettante of great poets. Do you dabble in art and
+perambulate picture-galleries? Browning must be your favourite poet: he
+is art's historian. Are you devoted to music? So is he: and alone of our
+poets has sought to fathom in verse the deep mysteries of sound. Do you
+find it impossible to keep off theology? Browning has more theology
+than most bishops--could puzzle Gamaliel and delight Aquinas. Are you
+in love? Read 'A Last Ride Together,' 'Youth and Art,' 'A Portrait,'
+'Christine,' 'In a Gondola,' 'By the Fireside,' 'Love amongst the
+Ruins,' 'Time's Revenges,' 'The Worst of It,' and a host of others,
+being careful always to end with 'A Madhouse Cell'; and we are much
+mistaken if you do not put Browning at the very head and front of the
+interpreters of passion. The many moods of sorrow are reflected in
+his verse, whilst mirth, movement, and a rollicking humour abound
+everywhere.
+
+I will venture upon but three quotations, for it is late in the day to
+be quoting Browning. The first shall be a well-known bit of blank verse
+about art from 'Fra Lippo Lippi':
+
+   'For, don't you mark, we're made so that we love
+    First when we see them painted, things we have passed
+    Perhaps a hundred times, nor cared to see:
+    And so they are better painted--better to us,
+    Which is the same thing. Art was given for that--
+    God uses us to help each other so,
+    Lending our minds out. Have you noticed now
+    Your cullion's hanging face? A bit of chalk,
+    And, trust me, but you should though. How much more
+    If I drew higher things with the same truth!
+    That were to take the prior's pulpit-place--
+    Interpret God to all of you! Oh, oh!
+    It makes me mad to see what men shall do,
+    And we in our graves! This world's no blot for us,
+    Nor blank: it means intensely, and means good.
+    To find its meaning is my meat and drink.'
+
+The second is some rhymed rhetoric from 'Holy Cross Day'--the testimony
+of the dying Jew in Rome:
+
+       'This world has been harsh and strange,
+    Something is wrong: there needeth a change.
+    But what or where? at the last or first?
+    In one point only we sinned at worst.
+
+   'The Lord will have mercy on Jacob yet,
+    And again in his border see Israel set.
+    When Judah beholds Jerusalem,
+    The stranger seed shall be joined to them:
+    To Jacob's house shall the Gentiles cleave:
+    So the prophet saith, and his sons believe.
+
+   'Ay, the children of the chosen race
+    Shall carry and bring them to their place;
+    In the land of the Lord shall lead the same,
+    Bondsmen and handmaids. Who shall blame
+    When the slaves enslave, the oppressed ones o'er
+    The oppressor triumph for evermore?
+
+   'God spoke, and gave us the word to keep:
+    Bade never fold the hands, nor sleep
+    'Mid a faithless world, at watch and ward,
+    Till the Christ at the end relieve our guard.
+    By His servant Moses the watch was set:
+    Though near upon cockcrow, we keep it yet.
+
+   'Thou! if Thou wast He, who at mid-watch came,
+    By the starlight naming a dubious Name;
+    And if we were too heavy with sleep, too rash
+    With fear--O Thou, if that martyr-gash
+    Fell on Thee, coming to take Thine own,
+    And we gave the Cross, when we owed the throne;
+
+   'Thou art the Judge. We are bruised thus.
+    But, the Judgment over, join sides with us!
+    Thine, too, is the cause! and not more Thine
+    Than ours is the work of these dogs and swine,
+    Whose life laughs through and spits at their creed,
+    Who maintain Thee in word, and defy Thee in deed.
+
+   'We withstood Christ then? Be mindful how
+    At least we withstand Barabbas now!
+    Was our outrage sore? But the worst we spared,
+    To have called these--Christians--had we dared!
+    Let defiance to them pay mistrust of Thee,
+    And Rome make amends for Calvary!
+
+   'By the torture, prolonged from age to age;
+    By the infamy, Israel's heritage;
+    By the Ghetto's plague, by the garb's disgrace,
+    By the badge of shame, by the felon's place,
+    By the branding-tool, the bloody whip,
+    And the summons to Christian fellowship,
+
+   'We boast our proof, that at least the Jew
+    Would wrest Christ's name from the devil's crew.'
+
+The last quotation shall be from the veritable Browning--of one of those
+poetical audacities none ever dared but the Danton of modern poetry.
+Audacious in its familiar realism, in its total disregard of poetical
+environment, in its rugged abruptness: but supremely successful, and
+alive with emotion:
+
+   'What is he buzzing in my ears?
+      Now that I come to die,
+    Do I view the world as a vale of tears?
+      Ah, reverend sir, not I.
+
+   'What I viewed there once, what I view again,
+      Where the physic bottles stand
+    On the table's edge, is a suburb lane,
+      With a wall to my bedside hand.
+
+   'That lane sloped, much as the bottles do,
+      From a house you could descry
+    O'er the garden-wall. Is the curtain blue
+      Or green to a healthy eye?
+
+   'To mine, it serves for the old June weather,
+      Blue above lane and wall;
+    And that farthest bottle, labelled "Ether,"
+      Is the house o'ertopping all.
+
+   'At a terrace somewhat near its stopper,
+      There watched for me, one June,
+    A girl--I know, sir, it's improper:
+      My poor mind's out of tune.
+
+   'Only there was a way--you crept
+      Close by the side, to dodge
+    Eyes in the house--two eyes except.
+      They styled their house "The Lodge."
+
+   'What right had a lounger up their lane?
+      But by creeping very close,
+    With the good wall's help their eyes might strain
+      And stretch themselves to oes,
+
+   'Yet never catch her and me together,
+      As she left the attic--there,
+    By the rim of the bottle labelled "Ether"--
+      And stole from stair to stair,
+
+   'And stood by the rose-wreathed gate. Alas!
+      We loved, sir; used to meet.
+    How sad and bad and mad it was!
+      But then, how it was sweet!'
+
+The second period of Mr. Browning's poetry demands a different line of
+argument; for it is, in my judgment, folly to deny that he has of late
+years written a great deal which makes very difficult reading indeed. No
+doubt you may meet people who tell you that they read 'The Ring and the
+Book' for the first time without much mental effort; but you will do
+well not to believe them. These poems are difficult--they cannot help
+being so. What is 'The Ring and the Book'? A huge novel in 20,000
+lines--told after the method not of Scott but of Balzac; it tears the
+hearts out of a dozen characters; it tells the same story from ten
+different points of view. It is loaded with detail of every kind and
+description: you are let off nothing. As with a schoolboy's life at a
+large school, if he is to enjoy it at all, he must fling himself into
+it, and care intensely about everything--so the reader of 'The Ring and
+the Book' must be interested in everybody and everything, down to the
+fact that the eldest daughter of the counsel for the prosecution of
+Guido is eight years old on the very day he is writing his speech, and
+that he is going to have fried liver and parsley for his supper.
+
+If you are prepared for this, you will have your reward; for the
+_style_, though rugged and involved, is throughout, with the exception
+of the speeches of counsel, eloquent, and at times superb; and as for
+the _matter_, if your interest in human nature is keen, curious,
+almost professional--if nothing man, woman, or child has been, done, or
+suffered, or conceivably can be, do, or suffer, is without interest for
+you; if you are fond of analysis, and do not shrink from dissection--you
+will prize 'The Ring and the Book' as the surgeon prizes the last great
+contribution to comparative anatomy or pathology.
+
+But this sort of work tells upon style. Browning has, I think, fared
+better than some writers. To me, at all events, the step from 'A Blot
+in the 'Scutcheon' to 'The Ring and the Book' is not so marked as is the
+_mauvais pas_ that lies between 'Amos Barton' and 'Daniel Deronda.' But
+difficulty is not obscurity. One task is more difficult than another.
+The angles at the base of the isosceles triangles are apt to get
+mixed, and to confuse us all--man and woman alike. 'Prince Hohenstiel'
+something or another is a very difficult poem, not only to pronounce but
+to read; but if a poet chooses as his subject Napoleon III.--in whom
+the cad, the coward, the idealist, and the sensualist were inextricably
+mixed--and purports to make him unbosom himself over a bottle of
+Gladstone claret in a tavern in Leicester Square, you cannot expect that
+the product should belong to the same class of poetry as Mr. Coventry
+Patmore's admirable 'Angel in the House.'
+
+It is the method that is difficult. Take the husband in 'The Ring and
+the Book.' Mr. Browning remorselessly hunts him down, tracks him to
+the last recesses of his mind, and there bids him stand and deliver. He
+describes love, not only broken but breaking; hate in its germ; doubt at
+its birth. These are difficult things to do either in poetry or prose,
+and people with easy, flowing Addisonian or Tennysonian styles cannot do
+them.
+
+I seem to overhear a still, small voice asking, But are they worth
+doing? or at all events is it the province of art to do them? The
+question ought not to be asked. It is heretical, being contrary to the
+whole direction of the latter half of this century. The chains binding
+us to the rocks of realism are faster riveted every day; and the Perseus
+who is destined to cut them is, I expect, some mischievous little boy
+at a Board-school. But as the question has been asked, I will own that
+sometimes, even when deepest in works of this, the now orthodox school,
+I have been harassed by distressing doubts whether, after all, this
+enormous labour is not in vain; and, wearied by the effort, overloaded
+by the detail, bewildered by the argument, and sickened by the pitiless
+dissection of character and motive, have been tempted to cry aloud,
+quoting--or rather, in the agony of the moment, misquoting--Coleridge:
+
+       'Simplicity--
+    Thou better name than all the family of Fame.'
+
+But this ebullition of feeling is childish and even sinful. We must take
+our poets as we do our meals--as they are served up to us. Indeed, you
+may, if full of courage, give a cook notice, but not the time-spirit who
+makes our poets. We may be sure--to appropriate an idea of the late
+Sir James Stephen--that if Robert Browning had lived in the sixteenth
+century, he would not have written a poem like 'The Ring and the Book';
+and if Edmund Spenser had lived in the nineteenth century he would not
+have written a poem like the 'Faerie Queen.'
+
+It is therefore idle to arraign Mr. Browning's later method and style
+for possessing difficulties and intricacies which are inherent to it.
+The method, at all events, has an interest of its own, a strength of
+its own, a grandeur of its own. If you do not like it, you must leave it
+alone. You are fond, you say, of romantic poetry; well, then, take down
+your Spenser and qualify yourself to join 'the small transfigured band'
+of those who are able to take their Bible-oaths they have read their
+'Faerie Queen' all through. The company, though small, is delightful,
+and you will have plenty to talk about without abusing Browning, who
+probably knows his Spenser better than you do. Realism will not for ever
+dominate the world of letters and art--the fashion of all things passeth
+away--but it has already earned a great place: it has written books,
+composed poems, painted pictures, all stamped with that 'greatness'
+which, despite fluctuations, nay, even reversals of taste and opinion,
+means immortality.
+
+But against Mr. Browning's later poems it is sometimes alleged that
+their meaning is obscure because their grammar is bad. A cynic was once
+heard to observe with reference to that noble poem 'The Grammarian's
+Funeral,' that it was a pity the talented author had ever since allowed
+himself to remain under the delusion that he had not only buried the
+grammarian, but his grammar also. It is doubtless true that Mr. Browning
+has some provoking ways, and is something too much of a verbal acrobat.
+Also, as his witty parodist, the pet poet of six generations of
+Cambridge undergraduates, reminds us:
+
+   'He loves to dock the smaller parts of speech,
+    As we curtail the already curtailed cur.'
+
+It is perhaps permissible to weary a little of his _i_'s and _o_'s, but
+we believe we cannot be corrected when we say that Browning is a poet
+whose grammar will bear scholastic investigation better than that of
+most of Apollo's children.
+
+A word about 'Sordello.' One half of 'Sordello,' and that, with Mr.
+Browning's usual ill-luck, the first half, is undoubtedly obscure. It is
+as difficult to read as 'Endymion' or the 'Revolt of Islam,' and for the
+same reason--the author's lack of experience in the art of composition.
+We have all heard of the young architect who forgot to put a staircase
+in his house, which contained fine rooms, but no way of getting into
+them. 'Sordello' is a poem without a staircase. The author, still in his
+twenties, essayed a high thing. For his subject--
+
+       'He singled out
+    Sordello compassed murkily about
+    With ravage of six long sad hundred years.'
+
+He partially failed; and the British public, with its accustomed
+generosity, and in order, I suppose, to encourage the others, has never
+ceased girding at him, because forty-two years ago he published, at his
+own charges, a little book of two hundred and fifty pages, which even
+such of them as were then able to read could not understand.
+
+Poetry should be vital--either stirring our blood by its divine
+movement, or snatching our breath by its divine perfection. To do both
+is supreme glory; to do either is enduring fame.
+
+There is a great deal of beautiful poetical writing to be had nowadays
+from the booksellers. It is interesting reading, but as one reads one
+trembles. It smells of mortality. It would seem as if, at the very birth
+of most of our modern poems,
+
+       'The conscious Parcae threw
+    Upon their roseate lips a Stygian hue.'
+
+That their lives may be prolonged is my pious prayer. In these bad days,
+when it is thought more educationally useful to know the principle of
+the common pump than Keats's 'Ode on a Grecian Urn,' one cannot afford
+to let any good poetry die.
+
+But when we take down Browning, we cannot think of him and the 'wormy
+bed' together. He is so unmistakably and deliciously alive. Die, indeed!
+when one recalls the ideal characters he has invested with reality; how
+he has described love and joy, pain and sorrow, art and music; as poems
+like 'Childe Roland,' 'Abt Vogler,' 'Evelyn Hope,' 'The Worst of It,'
+'Pictor Ignotus,' 'The Lost Leader,' 'Home Thoughts from Abroad,'
+'Old Pictures in Florence,' 'Herve Riel,' 'A Householder,' 'Fears and
+Scruples,' come tumbling into one's memory, one over another--we are
+tempted to employ the language of hyperbole, and to answer the question
+'Will Browning die?' by exclaiming, 'Yes; when Niagara stops.' In him
+indeed we can
+
+      'Discern
+    Infinite passion and the pain
+      Of finite hearts that yearn.'
+
+But love of Mr. Browning's poetry is no exclusive cult.
+
+Of Lord Tennyson it is needless to speak. Certainly amongst his Peers
+there is no such Poet.
+
+Mr. Arnold may have a limited poetical range and a restricted style, but
+within that range and in that style, surely we must exclaim:
+
+   'Whence that completed form of all completeness?
+    Whence came that high perfection of all sweetness?'
+
+Rossetti's luscious lines seldom fail to cast a spell by which
+
+   'In sundry moods 'tis pastime to be bound.'
+
+William Morris has a sunny slope of Parnassus all to himself, and Mr.
+Swinburne has written some verses over which the world will long love to
+linger.
+
+Dull must he be of soul who can take up Cardinal Newman's 'Verses on
+Various Occasions,' or Miss Christina Rossetti's poems, and lay them
+down without recognising their diverse charms.
+
+Let us be Catholics in this great matter, and burn our candles at many
+shrines. In the pleasant realms of poesy, no liveries are worn, no paths
+prescribed; you may wander where you will, stop where you like, and
+worship whom you love. Nothing is demanded of you, save this, that
+in all your wanderings and worships, you keep two objects steadily in
+view--two, and two only, truth and beauty.
+
+
+
+
+TRUTH-HUNTING.
+
+
+It is common knowledge that the distinguishing characteristic of the
+day is the zeal displayed by us all in hunting after Truth. A really not
+inconsiderable portion of whatever time we are able to spare from making
+or losing money or reputation, is devoted to this sport, whilst both
+reading and conversation are largely impressed into the same service.
+
+Nor are there wanting those who avow themselves anxious to see
+this, their favourite pursuit, raised to the dignity of a national
+institution. They would have Truth-hunting established and endowed.
+
+Mr. Carlyle has somewhere described with great humour the 'dreadfully
+painful' manner in which Kepler made his celebrated calculations and
+discoveries; but our young men of talent fail to see the joke, and take
+no pleasure in such anecdotes. Truth, they feel, is not to be had from
+them on any such terms. And why should it be? Is it not notorious that
+all who are lucky enough to supply wants grow rapidly and enormously
+rich; and is not Truth a now recognised want in ten thousand
+homes--wherever, indeed, persons are to be found wealthy enough to pay
+Mr. Mudie a guinea and so far literate as to be able to read? What, save
+the modesty, is there surprising in the demand now made on behalf of
+some young people, whose means are incommensurate with their talents,
+that they should be allowed, as a reward for doling out monthly or
+quarterly portions of truth, to live in houses rent-free, have their
+meals for nothing, and a trifle of money besides? Would Bass consent
+to supply us with beer in return for board and lodging, we of course
+defraying the actual cost of his brewery, and allowing him some L300 a
+year for himself? Who, as he read about 'Sun-spots,' or 'Fresh Facts for
+Darwin,' or the 'True History of Modesty or Veracity,' showing how it
+came about that these high-sounding virtues are held in their present
+somewhat general esteem, would find it in his heart to grudge the
+admirable authors their freedom from petty cares?
+
+But, whether Truth-hunting be ever established or not, no one can doubt
+that it is a most fashionable pastime, and one which is being pursued
+with great vigour.
+
+All hunting is so far alike as to lead one to believe that there must
+sometimes occur in Truth-hunting, just as much as in fox-hunting, long
+pauses, whilst the covers are being drawn in search of the game, and
+when thoughts are free to range at will in pursuit of far other objects
+than those giving their name to the sport. If it should chance to any
+Truth-hunter, during some 'lull in his hot chase,' whilst, for example,
+he is waiting for the second volume of an 'Analysis of Religion,' or for
+the last thing out on the Fourth Gospel, to take up this book, and
+open it at this page, we should like to press him for an answer to the
+following question: 'Are you sure that it is a good thing for you to
+spend so much time in speculating about matters outside your daily life
+and walk?'
+
+Curiosity is no doubt an excellent quality. In a critic it is especially
+excellent. To want to know all about a thing, and not merely one man's
+account or version of it; to see all round it, or, at any rate, as far
+round as is possible; not to be lazy or indifferent, or easily put
+off, or scared away--all this is really very excellent. Sir Fitz James
+Stephen professes great regret that we have not got Pilate's account
+of the events immediately preceding the Crucifixion. He thinks it would
+throw great light upon the subject; and no doubt, if it had occurred
+to the Evangelists to adopt in their narratives the method which long
+afterwards recommended itself to the author of 'The Ring and the Book,'
+we should now be in possession of a mass of very curious information.
+But, excellent as all this is in the realm of criticism, the question
+remains, How does a restless habit of mind tell upon conduct?
+
+John Mill was not one from whose lips the advice '_Stare super
+antiquas vias_' was often heard to proceed, and he was by profession
+a speculator, yet in that significant book, the 'Autobiography,'
+he describes this age of Truth-hunters as one 'of weak convictions,
+paralyzed intellects, and growing laxity of opinions.'
+
+Is Truth-hunting one of those active mental habits which, as Bishop
+Butler tells us, intensify their effects by constant use; and are weak
+convictions, paralyzed intellects, and laxity of opinions amongst
+the effects of Truth-hunting on the majority of minds? These are not
+unimportant questions.
+
+Let us consider briefly the probable effects of speculative habits on
+conduct.
+
+The discussion of a question of conduct has the great charm of
+justifying, if indeed not requiring, personal illustration; and this
+particular question is well illustrated by instituting a comparison
+between the life and character of Charles Lamb and those of some of his
+distinguished friends.
+
+Personal illustration, especially when it proceeds by way of comparison,
+is always dangerous, and the dangers are doubled when the subjects
+illustrated and compared are favourite authors. It behoves us to proceed
+warily in this matter. A dispute as to the respective merits of Gray
+and Collins has been known to result in a visit to an attorney and
+the revocation of a will. An avowed inability to see anything in Miss
+Austen's novels is reported to have proved destructive of an otherwise
+good chance of an Indian judgeship. I believe, however, I run no great
+risk in asserting that, of all English authors, Charles Lamb is the one
+loved most warmly and emotionally by his admirers, amongst whom I reckon
+only those who are as familiar with the four volumes of his 'Life and
+Letters' as with 'Elia.'
+
+But how does he illustrate the particular question now engaging our
+attention?
+
+Speaking of his sister Mary, who, as everyone knows, throughout 'Elia'
+is called his Cousin Bridget, he says:
+
+'It has been the lot of my cousin, oftener, perhaps, than I could have
+wished, to have had for her associates and mine freethinkers, leaders
+and disciples of novel philosophies and systems, but she neither
+wrangles with nor accepts their opinions.'
+
+Nor did her brother. He lived his life cracking his little jokes and
+reading his great folios, neither wrangling with nor accepting the
+opinions of the friends he loved to see around him. To a contemporary
+stranger it might well have appeared as if his life were a frivolous and
+useless one as compared with those of these philosophers and thinkers.
+_They_ discussed their great schemes and affected to probe deep
+mysteries, and were constantly asking, 'What is Truth?' _He_ sipped his
+glass, shuffled his cards, and was content with the humbler inquiry,
+'What are Trumps?' But to us, looking back upon that little group,
+and knowing what we now do about each member of it, no such mistake is
+possible. To us it is plain beyond all question that, judged by whatever
+standard of excellence it is possible for any reasonable human being to
+take, Lamb stands head and shoulders a better man than any of them. No
+need to stop to compare him with Godwin, or Hazlitt, or Lloyd; let
+us boldly put him in the scales with one whose fame is in all the
+churches--with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 'logician, metaphysician, bard.'
+
+There are some men whom to abuse is pleasant. Coleridge is not one of
+them. How gladly we would love the author of 'Christabel' if we could!
+But the thing is flatly impossible. His was an unlovely character. The
+sentence passed upon him by Mr. Matthew Arnold (parenthetically, in one
+of the 'Essays in Criticism')--'Coleridge had no morals'--is no less
+just than pitiless. As we gather information about him from numerous
+quarters, we find it impossible to resist the conclusion that he was a
+man neglectful of restraint, irresponsive to the claims of those who had
+every claim upon him, willing to receive, slow to give.
+
+In early manhood Coleridge planned a Pantisocracy where all the virtues
+were to thrive. Lamb did something far more difficult: he played
+cribbage every night with his imbecile father, whose constant stream of
+querulous talk and fault-finding might well have goaded a far stronger
+man into practising and justifying neglect.
+
+That Lamb, with all his admiration for Coleridge, was well aware of
+dangerous tendencies in his character, is made apparent by many letters,
+notably by one written in 1796, in which he says:
+
+'O my friend, cultivate the filial feelings! and let no man think
+himself released from the kind charities of relationship: these shall
+give him peace at the last; these are the best foundation for every
+species of benevolence. I rejoice to hear that you are reconciled with
+all your relations.'
+
+This surely is as valuable an 'aid to reflection' as any supplied by the
+Highgate seer.
+
+Lamb gave but little thought to the wonderful difference between the
+'reason' and the 'understanding.' He preferred old plays--an odd diet.
+some may think, on which to feed the virtues; but, however that may be,
+the noble fact remains, that he, poor, frail boy! (for he was no more,
+when trouble first assailed him) stooped down and, without sigh or sign,
+took upon his own shoulders the whole burden of a life-long sorrow.
+
+Coleridge married. Lamb, at the bidding of duty, remained single,
+wedding himself to the sad fortunes of his father and sister. Shall
+we pity him? No; he had his reward--the surpassing reward that is
+only within the power of literature to bestow. It was Lamb, and not
+Coleridge, who wrote 'Dream-Children: a Reverie':
+
+'Then I told how for seven long years, in hope sometimes, sometimes in
+despair, yet persisting ever, I courted the fair Alice W----n; and as
+much as children could understand, I explained to them what coyness and
+difficulty and denial meant in maidens--when, suddenly turning to Alice,
+the soul of the first Alice looked out at her eyes with such a reality
+of representment that I became in doubt which of them stood before
+me, or whose that bright hair was; and while I stood gazing, both the
+children gradually grew fainter to my view, receding and still receding,
+till nothing at last but two mournful features were seen in the
+uttermost distance, which, without speech, strangely impressed upon
+me the effects of speech. "We are not of Alice nor of thee, nor are
+we children at all. The children of Alice call Bartrum father. We are
+nothing, less than nothing, and dreams. We are only _what might have
+been_."'
+
+Godwin! Hazlitt! Coleridge! Where now are their 'novel philosophies and
+systems'? Bottled moonshine, which does _not_ improve by keeping.
+
+   'Only the actions of the just
+    Smell sweet and blossom in the dust.'
+
+Were we disposed to admit that Lamb would in all probability have been
+as good a man as everyone agrees he was--as kind to his father, as full
+of self-sacrifice for the sake of his sister, as loving and ready a
+friend--even though he had paid more heed to current speculations, it
+is yet not without use in a time like this, when so much stress is laid
+upon anxious inquiry into the mysteries of soul and body, to point out
+how this man attained to a moral excellence denied to his speculative
+contemporaries; performed duties from which they, good men as they were,
+would one and all have shrunk; how, in short, he contrived to achieve
+what no one of his friends, not even the immaculate Wordsworth or the
+precise Southey, achieved--the living of a life, the records of
+which are inspiriting to read, and are indeed 'the presence of a good
+diffused;' and managed to do it all without either 'wrangling with or
+accepting' the opinions that 'hurtled in the air' about him.
+
+But _was_ there no relation between his unspeculative habit of mind and
+his honest, unwavering service of duty, whose voice he ever obeyed as
+the ship the rudder? It would be difficult to name anyone more unlike
+Lamb, in many aspects of character, than Dr. Johnson, for whom he had
+(mistakenly) no warm regard; but they closely resemble one another in
+their indifference to mere speculation about things--if things they
+can be called--outside our human walk; in their hearty love of honest
+earthly life, in their devotion to their friends, their kindness to
+dependents, and in their obedience to duty. What caused each of them the
+most pain was the recollection of a past unkindness. The poignancy of
+Dr. Johnson's grief on one such recollection is historical; and amongst
+Lamb's letters are to be found several in which, with vast depths of
+feeling, he bitterly upbraids himself for neglect of old friends.
+
+Nothing so much tends to blur moral distinctions, and to obliterate
+plain duties, as the free indulgence of speculative habits. We must all
+know many a sorry scrub who has fairly talked himself into the belief
+that nothing but his intellectual difficulties prevents him from being
+another St. Francis. We think we could suggest a few score of other
+obstacles.
+
+Would it not be better for most people, if, instead of stuffing their
+heads with controversy, they were to devote their scanty leisure to
+reading books, such as, to name one only, Kaye's 'History of the Sepoy
+War,' which are crammed full of activities and heroisms, and which force
+upon the reader's mind the healthy conviction that, after all, whatever
+mysteries may appertain to mind and matter, and notwithstanding grave
+doubts as to the authenticity of the Fourth Gospel, it is bravery, truth
+and honour, loyalty and hard work, each man at his post, which make this
+planet inhabitable?
+
+In these days of champagne and shoddy, of display of teacups and rotten
+foundations--especially, too, now that the 'nexus' of 'cash payment,'
+which was to bind man to man in the bonds of a common pecuniary
+interest, is hopelessly broken--it becomes plain that the real wants
+of the age are not analyses of religious belief, nor discussions as to
+whether 'Person' or 'Stream of Tendency' are the apter words to describe
+God by; but a steady supply of honest, plain-sailing men who can be
+safely trusted with small sums, and to do what in them lies to maintain
+the honour of the various professions, and to restore the credit of
+English workmanship. We want Lambs, not Coleridges. The verdict to be
+striven for is not 'Well guessed,' but 'Well done.'
+
+All our remarks are confined to the realm of opinion. Faith may be well
+left alone, for she is, to give her her due, our largest manufacturer of
+good works, and whenever her furnaces are blown out, morality suffers.
+
+But speculation has nothing to do with faith. The region of speculation
+is the region of opinion, and a hazy, lazy, delightful region it is;
+good to talk in, good to smoke in, peopled with pleasant fancies and
+charming ideas, strange analogies and killing jests. How quickly the
+time passes there! how well it seems spent! The Philistines are all
+outside; everyone is reasonable and tolerant, and good-tempered; you
+think and scheme and talk, and look at everything in a hundred ways and
+from all possible points of view; and it is not till the company breaks
+up and the lights are blown out, and you are left alone with silence,
+that the doubt occurs to you, What is the good of it all?
+
+Where is the actuary who can appraise the value of a man's opinions?
+'When we speak of a man's opinions,' says Dr. Newman, 'what do we mean
+but the collection of notions he happens to have?' Happens to have! How
+did he come by them? It is the knowledge we all possess of the sorts of
+ways in which men get their opinions that makes us so little affected in
+our own minds by those of men for whose characters and intellects we may
+have great admiration. A sturdy Nonconformist minister, who thinks Mr.
+Gladstone the ablest and most honest man, as well as the ripest scholar
+within the three kingdoms, is no whit shaken in his Nonconformity
+by knowing that his idol has written in defence of the Apostolical
+Succession, and believes in special sacramental graces. Mr. Gladstone
+may have been a great student of Church history, whilst Nonconformist
+reading under that head usually begins with Luther's Theses--but what
+of that? Is it not all explained by the fact that Mr. Gladstone was at
+Oxford in 1831? So at least the Nonconformist minister will think.
+
+The admission frankly made, that these remarks are confined to the
+realms of opinion, prevents me from urging on everyone my prescription,
+but, with the two exceptions to be immediately named, I believe it would
+be found generally useful. It may be made up thus: 'As much reticence
+as is consistent with good-breeding upon, and a wisely tempered
+indifference to, the various speculative questions now agitated in our
+midst.'
+
+This prescription would be found to liberate the mind from all kinds
+of cloudy vapours which obscure the mental vision and conceal from men
+their real position, and would also set free a great deal of time which
+might be profitably spent in quite other directions.
+
+The first of the two exceptions I have alluded to is of those
+who possess--whether honestly come by or not we cannot stop to
+inquire--strong convictions upon these very questions. These convictions
+they must be allowed to iterate and reiterate, and to proclaim that in
+them is to be found the secret of all this (otherwise) unintelligible
+world.
+
+The second exception is of those who pursue Truth as by a divine
+compulsion, and who can be likened only to the nympholepts of old; those
+unfortunates who, whilst carelessly strolling amidst sylvan shades,
+caught a hasty glimpse of the flowing robes or even of the gracious
+countenance of some spiritual inmate of the woods, in whose pursuit
+their whole lives were ever afterwards fruitlessly spent.
+
+The nympholepts of Truth are profoundly interesting figures in the
+world's history, but their lives are melancholy reading, and seldom fail
+to raise a crop of gloomy thoughts. Their finely touched spirits are not
+indeed liable to succumb to the ordinary temptations of life, and they
+thus escape the evils which usually follow in the wake of speculation;
+but what is their labour's reward?
+
+Readers of Dr. Newman will remember, and will thank me for recalling it
+to mind, an exquisite passage, too long to be quoted, in which, speaking
+as a Catholic to his late Anglican associates, he reminds them how he
+once participated in their pleasures and shared their hopes, and thus
+concludes:
+
+'When, too, shall I not feel the soothing recollection of those dear
+years which I spent in retirement, in preparation for my deliverance
+from Egypt, asking for light, and by degrees getting it, with less of
+temptation in my heart and sin on my conscience than ever before?'
+
+But the passage is sad as well as exquisite, showing to us, as it does,
+one who from his earliest days has rejoiced in a faith in God, intense,
+unwavering, constant; harassed by distressing doubts, he carries them
+all, in the devotion of his faith, the warmth of his heart, and the
+purity of his life, to the throne where Truth sits in state; living, he
+tells us, in retirement, and spending great portions of every day on
+his knees; and yet--we ask the question with all reverence--what did Dr.
+Newman get in exchange for his prayers?
+
+'I think it impossible to withstand the evidence which is brought for
+the liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius at Naples, or for the
+motion of the eyes of the pictures of the Madonna in the Roman States. I
+see no reason to doubt the material of the Lombard Cross at Monza, and
+I do not see why the Holy Coat at Treves may not have been what it
+professes to be. I firmly believe that portions of the True Cross are
+at Rome and elsewhere, that the Crib of Bethlehem is at Rome, and the
+bodies of St. Peter and St. Paul; also I firmly believe that the relics
+of the Saints are doing innumerable miracles and graces daily. I firmly
+believe that before now Saints have raised the dead to life, crossed
+the seas without vessels, multiplied grain and bread, cured incurable
+diseases, and stopped the operations of the laws of the universe in a
+multitude of ways.'
+
+So writes Dr. Newman, with that candour, that love of putting the
+case most strongly against himself, which is only one of the lovely
+characteristics of the man whose long life has been a miracle of beauty
+and grace, and who has contrived to instil into his very controversies
+more of the spirit of Christ than most men can find room for in their
+prayers. But the dilemma is an awkward one. Does the Madonna wink, or is
+Heaven deaf?
+
+Oh, Spirit of Truth, where wert thou, when the remorseless deep of
+superstition closed over the head of John Henry Newman, who surely
+deserved to be thy best-loved son?
+
+But this is a digression. With the nympholepts of Truth we have nought
+to do. They must be allowed to pursue their lonely and devious
+paths, and though the records of their wanderings, their conflicting
+conclusions, and their widely-parted resting-places may fill us with
+despair, still they are witnesses whose testimony we could ill afford to
+lose.
+
+But there are not many nympholepts. The symptoms of the great majority
+of our modern Truth-hunters are very different, as they will, with
+their frank candour, be the first to admit. They are free 'to drop their
+swords and daggers' whenever so commanded, and it is high time they did.
+
+With these two exceptions I think my prescription will be found of
+general utility, and likely to promote a healthy flow of good works.
+
+I had intended to say something as to the effect of speculative habits
+upon the intellect, but cannot now do so. The following shrewd remark
+of Mr. Latham's in his interesting book on the 'Action of Examinations'
+may, however, be quoted; its bearing will be at once seen, and its truth
+recognised by many:
+
+'A man who has been thus provided with views and acute observations may
+have destroyed in himself the germs of that power which he simulates. He
+might have had a thought or two now and then if he had been let alone,
+but if he is made first to aim at a standard of thought above his
+years, and then finds he can get the sort of thoughts he wants without
+thinking, he is in a fair way to be spoiled.'
+
+
+
+
+ACTORS.
+
+
+Most people, I suppose, at one time or another in their lives, have felt
+the charm of an actor's life, as they were free to fancy it, well-nigh
+irresistible.
+
+What is it to be a great actor? I say a great actor, because (I am sure)
+no amateur ever fancied himself a small one. Is it not always to have
+the best parts in the best plays; to be the central figure of every
+group; to feel that attention is arrested the moment you come on the
+stage; and (more exquisite satisfaction still) to be aware that it
+is relaxed when you go off; to have silence secured for your smallest
+utterances; to know that the highest dramatic talent has been exercised
+to invent situations for the very purpose of giving effect to _your_
+words and dignity to _your_ actions; to quell all opposition by the
+majesty of your bearing or the brilliancy of your wit; and finally,
+either to triumph over disaster, or if you be cast in tragedy, happier
+still, to die upon the stage, supremely pitied and honestly mourned
+for at least a minute? And then, from first to last, applause loud and
+long--not postponed, not even delayed, but following immediately after.
+For a piece of diseased egotism--that is, for a man--what a lot is this!
+
+How pointed, how poignant the contrast between a hero on the boards
+and a hero in the streets! In the world's theatre the man who is really
+playing the leading part--did we but know it--is too often, in the
+general estimate, accounted but one of the supernumeraries, a figure
+in dingy attire, who might well be spared, and who may consider himself
+well paid with a pound a week. _His_ utterances procure no silence.
+He has to pronounce them as best he may, whilst the gallery sucks its
+orange, the pit pares its nails, the boxes babble, and the stalls yawn.
+Amidst, these pleasant distractions he is lucky if he is heard at all;
+and perhaps the best thing that can befall him is for somebody to think
+him worth the trouble of a hiss. As for applause, it may chance with
+such men, if they live long enough, as it has to the great ones who have
+preceded them, in their old age,
+
+   'When they are frozen up within, and quite
+      The phantom of themselves,
+    To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost
+      Which blamed the living man.'
+
+The great actor may sink to sleep, soothed by the memory of the tears
+or laughter he has evoked, and wake to find the day far advanced, whose
+close is to witness the repetition of his triumph; but the great man
+will lie tossing and turning as he reflects on the seemingly unequal war
+he is waging with stupidity and prejudice, and be tempted to exclaim,
+as Milton tells us he was, with the sad prophet Jeremy: 'Woe is me, my
+mother, that thou hast borne me, a man of strife and contention!'
+
+The upshot of all this is, that it is a pleasanter thing to represent
+greatness than to be great.
+
+But the actor's calling is not only pleasant in itself--it gives
+pleasure to others. In this respect, how favourably it contrasts with
+the three learned professions!
+
+Few pleasures are greater than to witness some favourite character,
+which hitherto has been but vaguely bodied forth by our sluggish
+imaginations, invested with all the graces of living man or woman. A
+distinguished man of letters, who years ago was wisely selfish enough to
+rob the stage of a jewel and set it in his own crown, has addressed to
+his wife some radiant lines which are often on my lips:
+
+   'Beloved, whose life is with mine own entwined,
+    In whom, whilst yet thou wert my dream, I viewed,
+    Warm with the life of breathing womanhood,
+    What Shakespeare's visionary eye divined--
+    Pure Imogen; high-hearted Rosalind,
+    Kindling with sunshine the dusk greenwood;
+    Or changing with the poet's changing mood,
+    Juliet, or Constance of the queenly mind.'
+
+But a truce to these compliments.
+
+   'I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.'
+
+It is idle to shirk disagreeable questions, and the one I have to ask is
+this, 'Has the world been wrong in regarding with disfavour and lack of
+esteem the great profession of the stage?'
+
+That the world, ancient and modern, has despised the actor's profession
+cannot be denied. An affecting story I read many years ago--in that
+elegant and entertaining work, Lempriere's 'Classical Dictionary'--well
+illustrates the feeling of the Roman world. Julius Decimus Laberius was
+a Roman knight and dramatic author, famous for his mimes, who had
+the misfortune to irritate a greater Julius, the author of the
+'Commentaries,' when the latter was at the height of his power. Caesar,
+casting about how best he might humble his adversary, could think of
+nothing better than to condemn him to take a leading part in one of his
+own plays. Laberius entreated in vain. Caesar was obdurate, and had his
+way. Laberius played his part--how, Lempriere sayeth not; but he
+also took his revenge, after the most effectual of all fashions, the
+literary. He composed and delivered a prologue of considerable power, in
+which he records the act of spiteful tyranny, and which, oddly enough,
+is the only specimen of his dramatic art that has come down to us. It
+contains lines which, though they do not seem to have made Caesar, who
+sat smirking in the stalls, blush for himself, make us, 1,900 years
+afterwards, blush for Caesar. The only lines, however, now relevant are,
+being interpreted, as follow:
+
+'After having lived sixty years with honour, I left my home this morning
+a Roman knight, but I shall return to it this evening an infamous
+stage-player. Alas! I have lived a day too long.'
+
+Turning to the modern world, and to England, we find it here the popular
+belief that actors are by statute rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars.
+This, it is true, is founded on a misapprehension of the effect of 39
+Eliz. chap. 4, which only provides that common players wandering abroad
+without authority to play, shall be taken to be 'rogues and vagabonds;'
+a distinction which one would have thought was capable of being
+perceived even by the blunted faculties of the lay mind.[*]
+
+    [* Footnote: See note at end of Essay.]
+
+But the fact that the popular belief rests upon a misreading of an Act
+of Parliament three hundred years old does not affect the belief,
+but only makes it exquisitely English, and as a consequence entirely
+irrational.
+
+Is there anything to be said in support of this once popular prejudice?
+
+It may, I think, be supported by two kinds of argument. One derived
+from the nature of the case, the other from the testimony of actors
+themselves.
+
+A serious objection to an actor's calling is that from its nature it
+admits of no other test of failure or success than the contemporary
+opinion of the town. This in itself must go far to rob life of dignity.
+A Milton may remain majestically indifferent to the 'barbarous noise'
+of 'owls and cuckoos, asses, apes, and dogs,' but the actor can steel
+himself to no such fortitude. He can lodge no appeal to posterity. The
+owls must hoot, the cuckoos cry, the apes yell, and the dogs bark on
+his side, or he is undone. This is of course inevitable, but it is an
+unfortunate condition of an artist's life.
+
+Again, no record of his art survives to tell his tale or account for his
+fame. When old gentlemen wax garrulous over actors dead and gone, young
+gentlemen grow somnolent. Chippendale the cabinet-maker is more potent
+than Garrick the actor. The vivacity of the latter no longer charms
+(save in Boswell); the chairs of the former still render rest impossible
+in a hundred homes.
+
+This, perhaps, is why no man of lofty genius or character has ever
+condescended to remain an actor. His lot pressed heavily even on so
+mercurial a trifler as David Garrick, who has given utterance to the
+feeling in lines as good perhaps as any ever written by a successful
+player:
+
+   'The painter's dead, yet still he charms the eye,
+    While England lives his fame shall never die;
+    But he who struts his hour upon the stage
+    Can scarce protract his fame thro' half an age;
+    Nor pen nor pencil can the actor save--
+    Both art and artist have one common grave.'
+
+But the case must be carried farther than this, for the mere fact that
+a particular pursuit does not hold out any peculiar attractions for
+soaring spirits will not justify us in calling that pursuit bad names.
+I therefore proceed to say that the very act of acting, _i. e._, the art
+of mimicry, or the representation of feigned emotions called up by sham
+situations, is, in itself, an occupation an educated man should be slow
+to adopt as the profession of a life.
+
+I believe--for we should give the world as well as the devil its
+due--that it is to a feeling, a settled persuasion of this sort, lying
+deeper than the surface brutalities and snobbishnesses visible to
+all, that we must attribute the contempt, seemingly so cruel and so
+ungrateful, the world has visited upon actors.
+
+I am no great admirer of beards, be they never so luxurious or glossy,
+yet I own I cannot regard off the stage the closely shaven face of an
+actor without a feeling of pity, not akin to love. Here, so I cannot
+help saying to myself, is a man who has adopted a profession whose very
+first demand upon him is that he should destroy his own identity. It is
+not what you are, or what by study you may become, but how few obstacles
+you present to the getting of yourself up as somebody else, that settles
+the question of your fitness for the stage. Smoothness of face, mobility
+of feature, compass of voice--these things, but the toys of other
+trades, are the tools of this one.
+
+Boswellites will remember the name of Tom Davies as one of frequent
+occurrence in the great biography. Tom was an actor of some repute, and
+(so it was said) read 'Paradise Lost' better than any man in England.
+One evening, when Johnson was lounging behind the scenes at Drury (it
+was, I hope, before his pious resolution to go there no more), Davies
+made his appearance on his way to the stage in all the majesty and
+millinery of his part. The situation is picturesque. The great and
+dingy Reality of the eighteenth century, the Immortal, and the bedizened
+little player. 'Well, Tom,' said the great man (and this is the
+whole story), 'well, Tom, and what art thou to-night?' 'What art thou
+to-night?' It may sound rather like a tract, but it will, I think, be
+found difficult to find an answer to the question consistent with any
+true view of human dignity.
+
+Our last argument derived from the nature of the case is, that
+deliberately to set yourself as the occupation of your life to amuse the
+adult and to astonish, or even to terrify, the infant population of your
+native land, is to degrade yourself.
+
+Three-fourths of the acted drama is, and always must be, comedy, farce,
+and burlesque. We are bored to death by the huge inanities of life. We
+observe with horror that our interest in our dinner becomes languid. We
+consult our doctor, who simulates an interest in our stale symptoms,
+and after a little talk about Dr. Diet, Dr. Quiet, and Dr. Merriman,
+prescribes Toole. If we are very innocent we may inquire what night we
+are to go, but if we do we are at once told that it doesn't in the least
+matter when we go, for it is always equally funny. Poor Toole! to be
+made up every night as a safe prescription for the blues! To make people
+laugh is not necessarily a crime, but to adopt as your trade the making
+people laugh by delivering for a hundred nights together another man's
+jokes, in a costume the author of the jokes would blush to be seen
+in, seems to me a somewhat unworthy proceeding on the part of a man of
+character and talent.
+
+To amuse the British public is a task of herculean difficulty and
+danger, for the blatant monster is, at times, as whimsical and coy as a
+maiden, and if it once makes up its mind not to be amused, nothing will
+shake it. The labour is enormous, the sacrifice beyond what is demanded
+of saints. And if you succeed, what is your reward? Read the lives of
+comedians, and closing them, you will see what good reason an actor has
+for exclaiming with the old-world poet:
+
+   'Odi profanum vulgus!'
+
+We now turn to the testimony of actors themselves.
+
+Shakespeare is, of course, my first witness. There is surely
+significance in this. 'Others abide our question,' begins Arnold's fine
+sonnet on Shakespeare--'others abide our question; thou art free.' The
+little we know about our greatest poet has become a commonplace. It is
+a striking tribute to the endless loquacity of man, and a proof how that
+great creature is not to be deprived of his talk, that he has managed to
+write quite as much about there being nothing to write about as he could
+have written about Shakespeare, if the author of _Hamlet_ had been as
+great an egoist as Rousseau. The fact, however, remains that he who has
+told us most about ourselves, whose genius has made the whole civilized
+world kin, has told us nothing about himself, except that he hated and
+despised the stage. To say that he has told us this is not, I think, any
+exaggeration. I have, of course, in mind the often quoted lines to be
+found in that sweet treasury of melodious verse and deep feeling, the
+'Sonnets of Shakespeare.' The 110th begins thus:
+
+   'Alas! 'tis true I have gone here and there,
+    And made myself a motley to the view,
+    Gor'd my own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear,
+    Made old offences of affections new.'
+
+And the 111th:
+
+   'O for my sake do thou with Fortune chide,
+    The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
+    That did not better for my life provide
+    Than public means, which public manners breeds.
+    Thence comes it that my name receives a brand,
+    And almost thence my nature is subdued
+    To what it works on, like the dyer's hand.
+    Pity me, then, and wish I were renewed.'
+
+It is not much short of three centuries since those lines were written,
+but they seem still to bubble with a scorn which may indeed be called
+immortal.
+
+   'Sold cheap what is most dear.'
+
+There, compressed in half a line, is the whole case against an actor's
+calling.
+
+But it may be said Shakespeare was but a poor actor. He could write
+_Hamlet_ and _As You Like It_; but when it came to casting the parts,
+the Ghost in the one and old Adam in the other were the best he could
+aspire to. Verbose biographers of Shakespeare, in their dire extremity,
+and naturally desirous of writing a big book about a big man, have
+remarked at length that it was highly creditable to Shakespeare that he
+was not, or at all events that it does not appear that he was, jealous,
+after the true theatrical tradition, of his more successful brethren of
+the buskin.
+
+It surely might have occured, even to a verbose biographer in his direst
+need, that to have had the wit to write and actually to have written the
+soliloquies in _Hamlet_, might console a man under heavier afflictions
+than the knowledge that in the popular estimate somebody else spouted
+those soliloquies better than he did himself. I can as easily fancy
+Milton jealous of Tom Davies as Shakespeare of Richard Burbage.
+But--good, bad, or indifferent--Shakespeare was an actor, and as such I
+tender his testimony.
+
+I now--for really this matter must be cut short--summon pell-mell all
+the actors and actresses who have ever strutted their little hour on the
+stage, and put to them the following comprehensive question: Is there in
+your midst one who had an honest, hearty, downright pride and pleasure
+in your calling, or do not you all (tell the truth) mournfully echo the
+lines of your great master (whom nevertheless you never really cared
+for), and with him
+
+       'Your fortunes chide,
+    That did not better for your lives provide
+    Than public means, which public manners breeds.'
+
+They all assent: with wonderful unanimity.
+
+But, seriously, I know of no recorded exception, unless it be Thomas
+Betterton, who held the stage for half a century--from 1661 to 1708--and
+who still lives, as much as an actor can, in the pages of Colley
+Cibber's _Apology_. He was a man apparently of simple character, for he
+had only one benefit-night all his life.
+
+Who else is there? Read Macready's 'Memoirs'--the King Arthur of
+the stage. You will find there, I am sorry to say, all the actor's
+faults--if faults they can be called which seem rather hard necessities,
+the discolouring of the dyer's hand; greedy hungering after applause,
+endless egotism, grudging praise--all are there; not perhaps in the
+tropical luxuriance they have attained elsewhere, but plain enough.
+But do we not also find, deeply engrained and constant, a sense of
+degradation, a longing to escape from the stage for ever?
+
+He did not like his children to come and see him act, and was always
+regretting--heaven help him!--that he wasn't a barrister-at-law. Look
+upon this picture and on that. Here we have Macbeth, that mighty thane;
+Hamlet, the intellectual symbol of the whole world of modern thought;
+Strafford, in Robert Browning's fine play; splendid dresses, crowded
+theatres, beautiful women, royal audiences; and on the other side, a
+rusty gown, a musty wig, a fusty court, a deaf judge, an indifferent
+jury, a dispute about a bill of lading, and ten guineas on your
+brief--which you have not been paid, and which you can't recover--why,
+''tis Hyperion to a satyr!'
+
+Again, we find Mrs. Siddons writing of her sister's marriage:
+
+'I have lost one of the sweetest companions in the world. She has
+married a respectable man, though of small fortune. I thank God she is
+off the stage.' What is this but to say, 'Better the most humdrum of
+existences with the most "respectable of men," than to be upon the
+stage'?
+
+The volunteered testimony of actors is both large in bulk and valuable
+in quality, and it is all on my side.
+
+Their involuntary testimony I pass over lightly. Far be from me the
+disgusting and ungenerous task of raking up a heap of the weaknesses,
+vanities, and miserablenesses of actors and actresses dead and gone.
+After life's fitful fever they sleep (I trust) well; and in common
+candour, it ought never to be forgotten that whilst it has always been
+the fashion--until one memorable day Mr. Froude ran amuck of it--for
+biographers to shroud their biographees (the American Minister must
+bear the brunt of this word on his broad shoulders) in a crape veil of
+respectability, the records of the stage have been written in another
+spirit. We always know the worst of an actor, seldom his best. David
+Garrick was a better man than Lord Eldon, and Macready was at least as
+good as Dickens.
+
+There is however, one portion of this body of involuntary testimony
+on which I must be allowed to rely, for it may be referred to without
+offence.
+
+Our dramatic literature is our greatest literature. It is the best thing
+we have done. Dante may over-top Milton, but Shakespeare surpasses both.
+He is our finest achievement; his plays our noblest possession; the
+things in the world most worth thinking about. To live daily in his
+company, to study his works with minute and loving care--in no spirit
+of pedantry searching for double endings, but in order to discover their
+secret, and to make the spoken word tell upon the hearts of man and
+woman--this might have been expected to produce great intellectual if
+not moral results.
+
+The most magnificent compliment ever paid by man to woman is undoubtedly
+Steele's to the Lady Elizabeth Hastings. 'To love her,' wrote he, 'is a
+liberal education.' As much might surely be said of Shakespeare.
+
+But what are the facts--the ugly, hateful facts? Despite this great
+advantage--this close familiarity with the noblest and best in our
+literature--the taste of actors, their critical judgment, always has
+been and still is, if not beneath contempt, at all events far below
+the average intelligence of their day. By taste, I do not mean taste in
+flounces and in furbelows, tunics and stockings; but in the weightier
+matters of the truly sublime and the essentially ridiculous. Salvini's
+Macbeth is undoubtedly a fine performance; and yet that great actor,
+as the result of his study, has placed it on record that he thinks the
+sleep-walking scene ought to be assigned to Macbeth instead of to his
+wife. Shades of Shakespeare and Siddons, what think you of that?
+
+It is a strange fatality, but a proof of the inherent pettiness of
+the actor's art, that though it places its votary in the very midst of
+literary and artistic influences, and of necessity informs him of the
+best and worthiest, he is yet, so far as his own culture is concerned,
+left out in the cold--art's slave, not her child.
+
+What have the devotees of the drama taught us? Nothing! it is we who
+have taught them. We go first, and they come lumbering after. It was
+not from the stage the voice arose bidding us recognise the supremacy of
+Shakespeare's genius. Actors first ignored him, then hideously mutilated
+him; and though now occasionally compelled, out of deference to the
+taste of the day, to forego their green-room traditions, to forswear
+their Tate and Brady emendations, in their heart of hearts they love
+him not; and it is with a light step and a smiling face that our great
+living tragedian flings aside Hamlet's tunic or Shylock's gaberdine
+to revel in the melodramatic glories of _The Bells_ and _The Corsican
+Brothers_.
+
+Our gratitude is due in this great matter to men of letters, not to
+actors. If it be asked, 'What have actors to do with literature and
+criticism?' I answer, 'Nothing;' and add, 'That is my case.'
+
+But the notorious bad taste of actors is not entirely due to their
+living outside Literature, with its words for ever upon their lips, but
+none of its truths engraven on their hearts. It may partly be accounted
+for by the fact that for the purposes of an ambitious actor bad plays
+are the best.
+
+In reading actors' lives, nothing strikes you more than their delight
+in making a hit in some part nobody ever thought anything of before.
+Garrick was proud past all endurance of his Beverley in the _Gamester_,
+and one can easily see why. Until people saw Garrick's Beverley, they
+didn't think there was anything in the _Gamester_; nor was there, except
+what Garrick put there. This is called creating a part, and he is the
+greatest actor who creates most parts.
+
+But genius in the author of the play is a terrible obstacle in the way
+of an actor who aspires to identify himself once and for all with the
+leading part in it. Mr. Irving may act Hamlet well or ill--and, for
+my part, I think he acts it exceedingly well--but behind Mr. Irving's
+Hamlet, as behind everybody else's Hamlet, there looms a greater Hamlet
+than them all--Shakespeare's Hamlet, the real Hamlet.
+
+But Mr. Irving's Mathias is quite another kettle of fish, all of Mr.
+Irving's own catching. Who ever, on leaving the Lyceum, after seeing
+_The Bells_, was heard to exclaim, 'It is all mighty fine; but that
+is not my idea of Mathias'? Do not we all feel that without Mr. Irving
+there could be no Mathias?
+
+We best like doing what we do best: and an actor is not to be blamed for
+preferring the task of making much of a very little to that of making
+little of a great deal.
+
+As for actresses, it surely would be the height of ungenerosity to blame
+a woman for following the only regular profession commanding fame and
+fortune the kind consideration of man has left open to her. For two
+centuries women have been free to follow this profession, onerous and
+exacting though it be, and by doing so have won the rapturous applause
+of generations of men, who are all ready enough to believe that where
+their pleasure is involved, no risks of life or honour are too great for
+a woman to run. It is only when the latter, tired of the shams of life,
+would pursue the realities, that we become alive to the fact--hitherto,
+I suppose, studiously concealed from us--how frail and feeble a creature
+she is.
+
+Lastly, it must not be forgotten that we are discussing a question
+of casuistry, one which is 'stuff o' the conscience,' and where
+consequently words are all important.
+
+Is an actor's calling an eminently worthy one?--that is the question. It
+may be lawful, useful, delightful; but is it worthy?
+
+An actor's life is an artist's life. No artist, however eminent, has
+more than one life, or does anything worth doing in that life, unless
+he is prepared to spend it royally in the service of his art, caring for
+nought else. Is an actor's art worth the price? I answer, No!
+
+
+
+VAGABONDS AND PLAYERS.
+
+The Statute Law on this subject is not without interest. Stated shortly
+it stands thus: By 39 Eliz. c. 4, it was enacted, 'That all persons
+calling themselves Schollers going abroad begging ... all idle persons
+using any subtile craft or fayning themselves to have knowledge in
+Phisiognomye, Palmestry, or other like crafty science; or pretending
+that they can tell Destyneyes, Fortunes, or such other like fantasticall
+Ymagynaeons; all Fencers, Bearwards, _common players of Interludes and
+Minstrels wandering abroad_ (other than players of Interludes belonging
+to any Baron of this realm, or any honourable personage of greater
+degree to be auctorised to play under the hand and seale of Arms of such
+Baron or Personage); all Juglers, Tinkers, Pedlars, and Petty Chapmen
+wandering abroad ... shall be taken, adjudged, and deemed Rogues,
+Vagabonds, and Sturdy Beggars, and shall sustain such payne and
+punyshment as by this Act is in that behalf appointed.'
+
+Such 'payne and punyshment' was as follows:
+
+'To be stripped naked from the middle upwards, and shall be openly
+whipped until his or her body be bloudye, and shall be forthwith
+sent from parish to parish by the officers of every the same the next
+streghte way to the parish where he was borne. After which whipping
+the same person shall have a Testimonyall testifying that he has been
+punyshed according to law.'
+
+This statute was repealed by 13 Anne c. 26, which, however, includes
+within its new scope 'common players of Interludes,' and names no
+exceptions. The whipping continues, but there is an alternative in the
+House of Correction: 'to be stript naked from the middle, and be openly
+whipped until his or her body be bloody, or may be sent to the House
+of Correction.' 17 Geo. II. c. 5 repeals a previous statute of the same
+king which had repealed the statute of Anne, and provides that 'all
+common players of Interludes and all persons who shall for Hire, Gain,
+or Reward act, represent, or perform any Interlude, Tragedy, Comedy,
+Opera, Play, Farce, or other Entertainment of the Stage, not being
+authorized by law, shall be deemed Rogues and Vagabonds within the true
+meaning of the Act.' The punishment was to be 'publicly whipt,' or to be
+sent to the House of Correction. This Act has been repealed, and the law
+is regulated by 5 Geo. IV. c. 83, which makes no mention of actors, who
+are therefore now wholly quit of this odious imputation.
+
+
+
+
+A ROGUE'S MEMOIRS.
+
+
+One is often tempted of the Devil to forswear the study of history
+altogether as the pursuit of the Unknowable. 'How is it possible,'
+he whispers in our ear, as we stand gloomily regarding the portly
+calf-bound volumes without which no gentleman's library is complete,
+'how is it possible to suppose that you have there, on your shelves--the
+actual facts of history--a true record of what men, dead long ago, felt
+and thought?' Yet, if we have not, I for one, though of a literary
+turn, would sooner spend my leisure playing skittles with boors than in
+reading sonorous lies in stout volumes.
+
+'It is not so much,' wilily insinuates the Tempter, 'that these renowned
+authors lack knowledge. Their habit of giving an occasional reference
+(though the verification of these is usually left to the malignancy of a
+rival and less popular historian) argues at least some reading. No; what
+is wanting is ignorance, carefully acquired and studiously maintained.
+This is no paradox. To carry the truisms, theories, laws, language of
+to-day, along with you in your historical pursuits, is to turn the muse
+of history upside down--a most disrespectful proceeding--and yet to
+ignore them--to forget all about them--to hang them up with your hat
+and coat in the hall, to remain there whilst you sit in the library
+composing your immortal work, which is so happily to combine all that
+is best in Gibbon and Macaulay--a sneerless Gibbon and an impartial
+Macaulay--is a task which, if it be not impossible is, at all events, of
+huge difficulty.
+
+Another blemish in English historical work has been noticed by the
+Rev. Charles Kingsley, and may therefore be referred to by me without
+offence. Your standard historians, having no unnatural regard for their
+most indefatigable readers, the wives and daughters of England, feel it
+incumbent upon them to pass over, as unfit for dainty ears and dulcet
+tones, facts, and rumours of facts, which none the less often determined
+events by stirring the strong feelings of your ancestors, whose conduct,
+unless explained by this light, must remain enigmatical.
+
+When, to these anachronisms of thought and omissions of fact, you have
+added the dishonesty of the partisan historian and the false glamour
+of the picturesque one, you will be so good as to proceed to find the
+present value of history!'
+
+Thus far the Enemy of Mankind:
+
+An admirable lady orator is reported lately to have 'brought down'
+Exeter Hall by observing, 'in a low but penetrating voice,' that the
+Devil was a very stupid person. It is true that Ben Jonson is on the
+side of the lady, but I am far too orthodox to entertain any such
+opinion; and though I have, in this instance of history, so far resisted
+him as to have refrained from sending my standard historians to the
+auction mart--where, indeed, with the almost single exception of Mr.
+Grote's History of Greece (the octavo edition in twelve volumes), prices
+rule so low as to make cartage a consideration--I have still of late
+found myself turning off the turnpike of history to loiter down the
+primrose paths of men's memoirs of themselves and their times.
+
+Here at least, so we argue, we are comparatively safe. Anachronisms of
+thought are impossible; omissions out of regard for female posterity
+unlikely, and as for party spirit, if found, it forms part of what
+lawyers call the _res gestae_, and has therefore a value of its own.
+Against the perils of the picturesque, who will insure us?
+
+But when we have said all this, and, sick of prosing, would begin
+reading, the number of really readable memoirs is soon found to be but
+few. This is, indeed, unfortunate; for it launches us off on another
+prose-journey by provoking the question, What makes memoirs interesting?
+
+Is it necessary that they should be the record of a noble character?
+Certainly not. We remember Pepys, who--well, never mind what he does.
+We call to mind Cellini; _he_ runs behind a fellow-creature, and with
+'admirable address' sticks a dagger in the nape of his neck, and long
+afterwards records the fact, almost with reverence, in his life's story.
+Can anything be more revolting than some portions of the revelation
+Benjamin Franklin was pleased to make of himself in writing? And what
+about Rousseau? Yet, when we have pleaded guilty for these men, a modern
+Savonarola, who had persuaded us to make a bonfire of their works, would
+do well to keep a sharp look-out, lest at the last moment we should
+be found substituting 'Pearson on the Creed' for Pepys, Coleridge's
+'Friend' for Cellini, John Foster's Essays for Franklin, and Roget's
+Bridgewater Treatise for Rousseau.
+
+Neither will it do to suppose that the interest of a memoir depends on
+its writer having been concerned in great affairs, or lived in stirring
+times. The dullest memoirs written even in English, and not excepting
+those maimed records of life known as 'religious biography,' are the
+work of men of the 'attache' order, who, having been mixed up in events
+which the newspapers of the day chronicled as 'Important Intelligence,'
+were not unnaturally led to cherish the belief that people would like to
+have from their pens full, true and particular accounts of all that
+then happened, or, as they, if moderns, would probably prefer to say,
+transpired. But the World, whatever an over-bold Exeter Hall may say of
+her old associate the Devil, is not a stupid person, and declines to
+be taken in twice; and turning a deaf ear to the most painstaking and
+trustworthy accounts of deceased Cabinets and silenced Conferences, goes
+journeying along her broad way, chuckling over some old joke in Boswell,
+and reading with fresh delight the all-about-nothing letters of Cowper
+and Lamb.
+
+How then does a man--be he good or bad--big or little--a philosopher or
+a fribble--St. Paul or Horace Walpole--make his memoirs interesting?
+
+To say that the one thing needful is individuality, is not quite enough.
+To be an individual is the inevitable, and in most cases the unenviable,
+lot of every child of Adam. Each one of us has, like a tin soldier, a
+stand of his own. To have an individuality is no sort of distinction,
+but to be able to make it felt in writing is not only distinction but
+under favouring circumstances immortality.
+
+Have we not all some correspondents, though probably but few, from whom
+we never receive a letter without feeling sure that we shall find inside
+the envelope something written that will make us either glow with the
+warmth or shiver with the cold of our correspondent's life? But how many
+other people are to be found, good, honest people too, who no sooner
+take pen in hand than they stamp unreality on every word they write. It
+is a hard fate, but they cannot escape it. They may be as literal as the
+late Earl Stanhope, as painstaking as Bishop Stubbs, as much in earnest
+as the Prime Minister--their lives may be noble, their aims high, but no
+sooner do they seek to narrate to us their story, than we find it is not
+to be. To hearken to them is past praying for. We turn from them as from
+a guest who has outstayed his welcome. Their writing wearies, irritates,
+disgusts.
+
+Here then, at last, we have the two classes of memoir writers--those who
+manage to make themselves felt, and those who do not. Of the latter, a
+very little is a great deal too much--of the former we can never have
+enough.
+
+What a liar was Benvenuto Cellini!--who can believe a word he says? To
+hang a dog on his oath would be a judicial murder. Yet when we lay down
+his Memoirs and let our thoughts travel back to those far-off days he
+tells us of, there we see him standing, in bold relief, against the
+black sky of the past, the very man he was. Not more surely did he, with
+that rare skill of his, stamp the image of Clement VII. on the papal
+currency than he did the impress of his own singular personality upon
+every word he spoke and every sentence he wrote.
+
+We ought, of course, to hate him, but do we? A murderer he has written
+himself down. A liar he stands self-convicted of being. Were anyone
+in the nether world bold enough to call him thief, it may be doubted
+whether Rhadamanthus would award him the damages for which we may be
+certain he would loudly clamour. Why do we not hate him? Listen to him:
+
+'Upon my uttering these words, there was a general outcry, the noblemen
+affirming that I promised too much. But one of them, who was a great
+philosopher, said in my favour, "From the admirable symmetry of shape
+and happy physiognomy of this young man, I venture to engage that he
+will perform all he promises, and more." The Pope replied, "I am of the
+same opinion;" then calling Trajano, his gentleman of the bed-chamber,
+he ordered him to fetch me five hundred ducats.'
+
+And so it always ended; suspicions, aroused most reasonably, allayed
+most unreasonably, and then--ducats. He deserved hanging, but he died
+in his bed. He wrote his own memoirs after a fashion that ought to have
+brought posthumous justice upon him, and made them a literary gibbet, on
+which he should swing, a creaking horror, for all time; but nothing
+of the sort has happened. The rascal is so symmetrical, and his
+physiognomy, as it gleams upon us through the centuries, so happy, that
+we cannot withhold our ducats, though we may accompany the gift with a
+shower of abuse.
+
+This only proves the profundity of an observation made by Mr. Bagehot--a
+man who carried away into the next world more originality of thought
+than is now to be found in the Three Estates of the Realm. Whilst
+remarking upon the extraordinary reputation of the late Francis Horner
+and the trifling cost he was put to in supporting it, Mr. Bagehot said
+that it proved the advantage of 'keeping an atmosphere.'
+
+The common air of heaven sharpens men's judgments. Poor Horner, but for
+that kept atmosphere of his, always surrounding him, would have been
+bluntly asked, 'What he had done since he was breeched,' and in reply
+he could only have muttered something about the currency. As for our
+especial rogue Cellini, the question would probably have assumed this
+shape: 'Rascal, name the crime you have not committed, and account for
+the omission.'
+
+But these awkward questions are not put to the lucky people who keep
+their own atmospheres. The critics, before they can get at them, have
+to step out of the everyday air, where only achievements count and the
+Decalogue still goes for something, into the kept atmosphere, which they
+have no sooner breathed than they begin to see things differently,
+and to measure the object thus surrounded with a tape of its
+own manufacture. Horner--poor, ugly, a man neither of words nor
+deeds--becomes one of our great men; a nation mourns his loss and erects
+his statue in the Abbey. Mr. Bagehot gives several instances of the same
+kind, but he does not mention Cellini, who is, however, in his own way,
+an admirable example.
+
+You open his book--a Pharisee of the Pharisees. Lying indeed! Why, you
+hate prevarication. As for murder, your friends know you too well to
+mention the subject in your hearing, except in immediate connection with
+capital punishment. You are, of course, willing to make some allowance
+for Cellini's time and place--the first half of the sixteenth century
+and Italy. 'Yes,' you remark, 'Cellini shall have strict justice at my
+hands.' So you say as you settle yourself in your chair and begin to
+read. We seem to hear the rascal laughing in his grave. His spirit
+breathes upon you from his book--peeps at you roguishly as you turn the
+pages. His atmosphere surrounds you; you smile when you ought to frown,
+chuckle when you should groan, and--O final triumph!--laugh aloud when,
+if you had a rag of principle left, you would fling the book into the
+fire. Your poor moral sense turns away with a sigh, and patiently awaits
+the conclusion of the second volume.
+
+How cautiously does he begin, how gently does he win your ear by his
+seductive piety! I quote from Mr. Roscoe's translation:--
+
+'It is a duty incumbent on upright and credible men of all ranks, who
+have performed anything noble or praiseworthy, to record, in their own
+writing, the events of their lives; yet they should not commence this
+honourable task before they have passed their fortieth year. Such, at
+least, is my opinion, now that I have completed my fifty-eighth year,
+and am settled in Florence, where, considering the numerous ills that
+constantly attend human life, I perceive that I have never before been
+so free from vexations and calamities, or possessed of so great a share
+of content and health as at this period. Looking back on some
+delightful and happy events of my life, and on many misfortunes so truly
+overwhelming that the appalling retrospect makes me wonder how I have
+reached this age in vigour and prosperity, through God's goodness I have
+resolved to publish an account of my life; and ... I must, in commencing
+my narrative, satisfy the public on some few points to which its
+curiosity is usually directed; the first of which is to ascertain
+whether a man is descended from a virtuous and ancient family.... I
+shall therefore now proceed to inform the reader how it pleased God that
+I should come into the world.'
+
+So you read on page 1; what you read on page 191 is this:--
+
+'Just after sunset, about eight o'clock, as this musqueteer stood at his
+door with his sword in his hand, when he had done supper, I with great
+address came close up to him with a long dagger, and gave him a violent
+back-handed stroke, which I aimed at his neck. He instantly turned
+round, and the blow, falling directly upon his left shoulder, broke the
+whole bone of it; upon which he dropped his sword, quite overcome by the
+pain, and took to his heels. I pursued, and in four steps came up with
+him, when, raising the dagger over his head, which he lowered down, I
+hit him exactly upon the nape of the neck. The weapon penetrated so
+deep that, though I made a great effort to recover it again, I found it
+impossible.'
+
+So much for murder. Now for manslaughter, or rather Cellini's notion of
+manslaughter.
+
+'Pompeo entered an apothecary's shop at the corner of the Chiavica,
+about some business, and stayed there for some time. I was told he had
+boasted of having bullied me, but it turned out a fatal adventure to
+him. Just as I arrived at that quarter he was coming out of the shop,
+and his bravoes, having made an opening, formed a circle round him. I
+thereupon clapped my hand to a sharp dagger, and having forced my way
+through the file of ruffians, laid hold of him by the throat, so quickly
+and with such presence of mind, that there was not one of his friends
+could defend him. I pulled him towards me to give him a blow in front,
+but he turned his face about through excess of terror, so that I wounded
+him exactly under the ear; and upon repeating my blow, he fell down
+dead. It had never been my intention to kill him, but blows are not
+always under command.'
+
+We must all feel that it would never have done to have begun with these
+passages, but long before the 191st page has been reached Cellini has
+retreated into his own atmosphere, and the scales of justice have been
+hopelessly tampered with.
+
+That such a man as this encountered suffering in the course of his life,
+should be matter for satisfaction to every well-regulated mind; but,
+somehow or another, you find yourself pitying the fellow as he
+narrates the hardships he endured in the Castle of S. Angelo. He is so
+symmetrical a rascal! Just hear him! listen to what he says well on in
+the second volume, after the little incidents already quoted:
+
+'Having at length recovered my strength and vigour, after I had composed
+myself and resumed my cheerfulness of mind, I continued to read my
+Bible, and so accustomed my eyes to that darkness, that though I was at
+first able to read only an hour and a half, I could at length read three
+hours. I then reflected on the wonderful power of the Almighty upon
+the hearts of simple men, who had carried their enthusiasm so far as to
+believe firmly that God would indulge them in all they wished for; and
+I promised myself the assistance of the Most High, as well through His
+mercy as on account of my innocence. Thus turning constantly to the
+Supreme Being, sometimes in prayer, sometimes in silent meditation
+on the divine goodness, I was totally engrossed by these heavenly
+reflections, and came to take such delight in pious meditations that I
+no longer thought of past misfortunes. On the contrary, I was all day
+long singing psalms and many other compositions of mine, in which I
+celebrated and praised the Deity.'
+
+Thus torn from their context, these passages may seem to supply the best
+possible falsification of the previous statement that Cellini told the
+truth about himself. Judged by these passages alone, he may appear a
+hypocrite of an unusually odious description. But it is only necessary
+to read his book to dispel that notion. He tells lies about other
+people; he repeats long conversations, sounding his own praises, during
+which, as his own narrative shows, he was not present; he exaggerates
+his own exploits, his sufferings--even, it may be, his crimes; but when
+we lay down his book, we feel we are saying good-bye to a man whom we
+know.
+
+He has introduced himself to us, and though doubtless we prefer saints
+to sinners, we may be forgiven for liking the company of a live rogue
+better than that of the lay-figures and empty clock-cases labelled with
+distinguished names, who are to be found doing duty for men in the works
+of our standard historians. What would we not give to know Julius Caesar
+one half as well as we know this outrageous rascal? The saints of the
+earth, too, how shadowy they are! Which of them do we really know?
+Excepting one or two ancient and modern Quietists, there is hardly one
+amongst the whole number who being dead yet speaketh. Their memoirs far
+too often only reveal to us a hazy something, certainly not recognisable
+as a man. This is generally the fault of their editors, who, though
+men themselves, confine their editorial duties to going up and down the
+diaries and papers of the departed saint, and obliterating all human
+touches. This they do for the 'better prevention of scandals;' and one
+cannot deny that they attain their end, though they pay dearly for it.
+
+I shall never forget the start I gave when, on reading some old book
+about India, I came across an after-dinner jest of Henry Martyn's.
+The thought of Henry Martyn laughing over the walnuts and the wine was
+almost, as Robert Browning's unknown painter says, 'too wildly dear;'
+and to this day I cannot help thinking that there must be a mistake
+somewhere.
+
+To return to Cellini, and to conclude. On laying down his 'Memoirs,' let
+us be careful to recall our banished moral sense, and make peace
+with her, by passing a final judgment on this desperate sinner, which
+perhaps, after all, we cannot do better than by employing language of
+his own concerning a monk, a fellow-prisoner of his, who never, so far
+as appears, murdered anybody, but of whom Cellini none the less felt
+himself entitled to say:
+
+'I admired his shining qualities, but his odious vices I freely censured
+and held in abhorrence.'
+
+
+
+
+THE VIA MEDIA.
+
+
+The world is governed by logic. Truth as well as Providence is always on
+the side of the strongest battalions. An illogical opinion only requires
+rope enough to hang itself.
+
+Middle men may often seem to be earning for themselves a place in
+Universal Biography, and middle positions frequently, seem to afford
+the final solution of vexed questions; but this double delusion seldom
+outlives a generation. The world wearies of the men, for, attractive
+as their characters may be, they are for ever telling us, generally at
+great length, how it comes about that they stand just where they do, and
+we soon tire of explanations and forget apologists. The positions, too,
+once hailed with such acclaim, so eagerly recognised as the true
+refuges for poor mortals anxious to avoid being run over by fast-driving
+logicians, how untenable do they soon appear! how quickly do they grow
+antiquated! how completely they are forgotten!
+
+The Via Media, alluring as is its direction, imposing as are its
+portals, is, after all, only what Londoners call a blind alley, leading
+nowhere.
+
+'Ratiocination,' says one of the most eloquent and yet exact of modern
+writers,[*] 'is the great principle of order in thinking: it reduces
+a chaos into harmony, it catalogues the accumulations of knowledge; it
+maps out for us the relations of its separate departments. It enables
+the independent intellects of many acting and re-acting on each other
+to bring their collective force to bear upon the same subject-matter. If
+language is an inestimable gift to man, the logical faculty prepares it
+for our use. Though it does not go so far as to ascertain truth; still,
+it teaches us the _direction_ in which truth lies, and _how propositions
+lie towards each other_. Nor is it a slight benefit to know what is
+needed for the proof of a point, what is wanting in a theory, how a
+theory hangs together, _and what will follow if it be admitted_.'
+
+    [* Footnote: Dr. Newman in the 'Grammar of Assent.']
+
+This great principle of order in thinking is what we are too apt to
+forget. 'Give us,' cry many, 'safety in our opinions, and let who
+will be logical. An Englishman's creed is compromise. His _bete noir_
+extravagance. We are not saved by syllogism.' Possibly not; but yet
+there can be no safety in an illogical position, and one's chances of
+snug quarters in eternity cannot surely be bettered by our believing at
+one and the same moment of time self-contradictory propositions.
+
+But, talk as we may, for the bulk of mankind it will doubtless always
+remain true that a truth does not exclude its contradictory. Darwin and
+Moses are both right. Between the Gospel according to Matthew and the
+Gospel according to Matthew Arnold there is no difference.
+
+If the too apparent absurdity of this is pressed home, the baffled
+illogician, persecuted in one position, flees into another, and may be
+heard assuring his tormentor that in a period like the present, which
+is so notoriously transitional, a logician is as much out of place as
+a bull in a china shop, and that unless he is quiet, and keeps his tail
+well wrapped round his legs, the mischief he will do to his neighbours'
+china creeds and delicate porcelain opinions is shocking to contemplate.
+But this excuse is no longer admissible. The age has remained
+transitional so unconscionably long, that we cannot consent to forego
+the use of logic any longer. For a decade or two it was all well enough,
+but when it comes to fourscore years, one's patience gets exhausted.
+Carlyle's celebrated Essay, 'Characteristics,' in which this
+transitional period is diagnosed with unrivalled acumen, is half a
+century old. Men have been born in it--have grown old in it--have died
+in it. It has outlived the old Court of Chancery. It is high time the
+spurs of logic were applied to its broken-winded sides.
+
+Notwithstanding the obstinate preference the 'bulk of mankind' always
+show for demonstrable errors over undeniable truths, the number of
+persons is daily increasing who have begun to put a value upon mental
+coherency and to appreciate the charm of a logical position.
+
+It was common talk at one time to express astonishment at the extending
+influence of the Church of Rome, and to wonder how people who went about
+unaccompanied by keepers could submit their reason to the Papacy, with
+her open rupture with science and her evil historical reputation. From
+astonishment to contempt is but a step. We first open wide our eyes and
+then our mouths.
+
+   'Lord So-and-so, his coat bedropt with wax,
+    All Peter's chains about his waist, his back
+    Brave with the needlework of Noodledom,
+    Believes,--who wonders and who cares?'
+
+It used to be thought a sufficient explanation to say either that the
+man was an ass or that it was all those Ritualists. But gradually it
+became apparent that the pervert was not always an ass, and that the
+Ritualists had nothing whatever to do with it. If a man's tastes run
+in the direction of Gothic Architecture, free seats, daily services,
+frequent communions, lighted candles and Church millinery, they can all
+be gratified, not to say glutted, in the Church of his baptism.
+
+It is not the Roman ritual, however splendid, nor her ceremonial,
+however spiritually significant, nor her system of doctrine, as well
+arranged as Roman law and as subtle as Greek philosophy, that makes
+Romanists nowadays.
+
+It is when a person of religious spirit and strong convictions as to the
+truth and importance of certain dogmas--few in number it may be; perhaps
+only one, the Being of God--first becomes fully alive to the tendency
+and direction of the most active opinions of the day; when, his alarm
+quickening his insight, he reads as it were between the lines of books,
+magazines, and newspapers; when, struck with a sudden trepidation,
+he asks, 'Where is this to stop? how can I, to the extent of a poor
+ability, help to stem this tide of opinion which daily increases its
+volume and floods new territory?'--then it is that the Church of Rome
+stretches out her arms and seems to say, 'Quarrel not with your destiny,
+which is to become a Catholic. You may see difficulties and you may have
+doubts. They abound everywhere. You will never get rid of them. But I,
+and I alone, have never coquetted with the spirit of the age. I, and I
+alone, have never submitted my creeds to be overhauled by infidels. Join
+me, acknowledge my authority, and you need dread no side attack and fear
+no charge of inconsistency. Succeed finally I must, but even were I to
+fail, yours would be the satisfaction of knowing that you had never held
+an opinion, used an argument, or said a word, that could fairly have
+served the purpose of your triumphant enemy.'
+
+At such a crisis as this in a man's life, he does not ask himself, How
+little can I believe? With how few miracles can I get off?--he demands
+sound armour, sharp weapons, and, above all, firm ground to stand on--a
+good footing for his faith--and these he is apt to fancy he can get from
+Rome alone.
+
+No doubt he has to pay for them, but the charm of the Church of Rome is
+this: when you have paid her price you get your goods--a neat assortment
+of coherent, interdependent, logical opinions.
+
+It is not much use, under such circumstances, to call the convert a
+coward, and facetiously to inquire of him what he really thinks about
+St. Januarius. Nobody ever began with Januarius. I have no doubt a good
+many Romanists would be glad to be quit of him. He is part of the price
+they have to pay in order that their title to the possession of other
+miracles may be quieted. If you can convince the convert that he can
+disbelieve Januarius of Naples without losing his grip of Paul of
+Tarsus, you will be well employed; but if you begin with merry gibes,
+and end with contemptuously demanding that he should have done with such
+nonsense and fling the rubbish overboard, he will draw in his horns and
+perhaps, if he knows his Browning, murmur to himself:--
+
+   'To such a process, I discern no end.
+    Cutting off one excrescence to see two;
+    There is ever a next in size, now grown as big,
+    That meets the knife. I cut and cut again;
+    First cut the Liquefaction, what comes last
+    But Fichte's clever cut at God Himself?'
+
+To suppose that no person is logically entitled to fear God and to
+ridicule Januarius at the same time, is doubtless extravagant, but to do
+so requires care. There is an 'order in thinking. We must consider how
+propositions lie towards each other--how a theory hangs together, and
+what will follow if it be admitted.'
+
+It is eminently desirable that we should consider the logical termini
+of our opinions. Travelling up to town last month from the West, a
+gentleman got into my carriage at Swindon, who, as we moved off and
+began to rush through the country, became unable to restrain his delight
+at our speed. His face shone with pride, as if he were pulling us
+himself. 'What a charming train!' he exclaimed. 'This is the pace I like
+to travel at.' I indicated assent. Shortly afterwards, when our windows
+rattled as we rushed through Reading, he let one of them down in a
+hurry, and cried out in consternation, 'Why, I want to get out here.'
+'Charming train,' I observed. 'Just the pace I like to travel at; but it
+_is_ awkward if you want to go anywhere except Paddington.' My companion
+made no reply; his face ceased to shine, and as he sat whizzing past his
+dinner, I mentally compared his recent exultation with that of those who
+in the present day extol much of its spirit, use many of its arguments,
+and partake in most of its triumphs, in utter ignorance as to
+whitherwards it is all tending as surely as the Great Western rails run
+into Paddington. 'Poor victims!' said a distinguished Divine, addressing
+the Evangelicals, then rejoicing over their one legal victory, the
+'Gorham Case'; 'do you dream that the spirit of the age is working for
+you, or are you secretly prepared to go further than you avow?'
+
+Mr. Matthew Arnold's friends, the Nonconformists, are, as a rule,
+nowadays, bad logicians. What Dr. Newman has said of the Tractarians is
+(with but a verbal alteration) also true of a great many Nonconformists:
+'Moreover, there are those among them who have very little grasp of
+principle, even from the natural temper of their minds. They see
+this thing is beautiful, and that is in the Fathers, and a third is
+expedient, and a fourth pious; but of their connection one with another,
+their hidden essence and their life, and the bearing of external matters
+upon each and upon all, they have no perception or even suspicion. They
+do not look at things as part of a whole, and often will sacrifice
+the most important and precious portions of their creed, or make
+irremediable concessions in word or in deed, from mere simplicity and
+want of apprehension.'
+
+We have heard of grown-up Baptists asked to become, and actually
+becoming, godfathers and godmothers to Episcopalian babies! What
+terrible confusion is here! A point is thought to be of sufficient
+importance to justify separation on account of it from the whole
+Christian Church, and yet not to be of importance enough to debar the
+separatist from taking part in a ceremony whose sole significance is
+that it gives the lie direct to the point of separation.
+
+But we all of us--Churchmen and Dissenters alike--select our opinions
+far too much in the same fashion as ladies are reported, I dare say
+quite falsely, to do their afternoon's shopping--this thing because it
+is so pretty, and that thing because it is so cheap. We pick and choose,
+take and leave, approbate and reprobate in a breath. A familiar anecdote
+is never out of place: An English captain, anxious to conciliate a
+savage king, sent him on shore, for his own royal wear, an entire dress
+suit. His majesty was graciously pleased to accept the gift, and as it
+never occurred to the royal mind that he could, by any possibility, wear
+all the things himself, with kingly generosity he distributed what he
+did not want amongst his Court. This done, he sent for the donor to
+thank him in person. As the captain walked up the beach, his majesty
+advanced to meet him, looking every inch a king in the sober dignity of
+a dress-coat. The waistcoat imparted an air of pensive melancholy that
+mightily became the Prime Minister, whilst the Lord Chamberlain, as he
+skipped to and fro in his white gloves, looked a courtier indeed. The
+trousers had become the subject of an unfortunate dispute, in the course
+of which they had sustained such injuries as to be hardly recognisable.
+The captain was convulsed with laughter.
+
+But, in truth, the mental toilet of most of us is as defective and
+almost as risible as was that of this savage Court. We take on our
+opinions without paying heed to conclusions, and the result is absurd.
+Better be without any opinions at all. A naked savage is not necessarily
+an undignified object; but a savage in a dress-coat and nothing else is,
+and must ever remain, a mockery and a show. There is a great relativity
+about a dress-suit. In the language of the logicians, the name of each
+article not only denotes that particular, but connotes all the rest.
+Hence it came about that that which, when worn in its entirety, is
+so dull and decorous, became so provocative of Homeric laughter when
+distributed amongst several wearers.
+
+No person with the least tincture of taste can ever weary of Dr. Newman,
+and no apology is therefore offered for another quotation from his
+pages. In his story, 'Loss and Gain,' he makes one of his characters,
+who has just become a Catholic, thus refer to the stock Anglican
+Divines, a class of writers who are, at all events, immensely superior
+to the Ellicotts and Farrars of these latter days: 'I am embracing that
+creed which upholds the divinity of tradition with Laud, consent of
+Fathers with Beveridge, a visible Church with Bramhall, dogma with Bull,
+the authority of the Pope with Thorndyke, penance with Taylor,
+prayers for the dead with Ussher, celibacy, asceticism, ecclesiastical
+discipline with Bingham.' What is this to say but that, according to the
+Cardinal, our great English divines have divided the Roman dress-suit
+amongst themselves?
+
+This particular charge may perhaps be untrue, but with that I am not
+concerned. If it is not true of them, it is true of somebody else.
+'That is satisfactory so far as Mr. Lydgate is concerned,' says Mrs.
+Farebrother in 'Middlemarch,' with an air of precision; 'but as to
+Bulstrode, the report may be true of some other son.'
+
+We must all be acquainted with the reckless way in which people pluck
+opinions like flowers--a bud here, and a leaf there. The bouquet is
+pretty to-day, but you must look for it to-morrow in the oven.
+
+There is a sense in which it is quite true, what our other Cardinal has
+said about Ultramontanes, Anglicans, and Orthodox Dissenters all being
+in the same boat. They all of them enthrone Opinion, holding it to be,
+when encased in certain dogmas, Truth Absolute. Consequently they have
+all their martyrologies--the bright roll-call of those who have defied
+Caesar even unto death, or at all events gaol. They all, therefore, put
+something above the State, and apply tests other than those recognised
+in our law courts.
+
+The precise way by which they come at their opinions is only detail.
+Be it an infallible Church, an infallible Book, or an inward spiritual
+grace, the outcome is the same. The Romanist, of course, has to bear the
+first brunt, and is the most obnoxious to the State; but he must be
+slow of comprehension and void of imagination who cannot conceive of
+circumstances arising in this country when the State should assert it to
+be its duty to violate what even Protestants believe to be the moral law
+of God. Therefore, in opposing Ultramontanism, as it surely ought to be
+opposed, care ought to be taken by those who are not prepared to go all
+lengths with Caesar, to select their weapons of attack, not from his
+armoury, but from their own.
+
+How ridiculous it is to see some estimable man who subscribes to the
+Bible Society, and takes what he calls 'a warm interest' in the heathen,
+chuckling over some scoffing article in a newspaper--say about a
+Church Congress--and never perceiving, so unaccustomed is he to examine
+directions, that he is all the time laughing at his own folly! Aunt
+Nesbit, in 'Dred,' considered Gibbon a very pious writer. 'I am sure,'
+says she, 'he makes the most religious reflections all along. I liked
+him particularly on that account.' This poor lady had some excuse. A
+vein of irony like Gibbon's is not struck upon every day; but readers
+of newspapers, when they laugh, ought to be able to perceive what it is
+they are laughing at.
+
+Logic is the prime necessity of the hour. Decomposition and
+transformation is going on all around us, but far too slowly. Some
+opinions, bold and erect as they may still stand, are in reality but
+empty shells. One shove would be fatal. Why is it not given?
+
+The world is full of doleful creatures, who move about demanding our
+sympathy. I have nothing to offer them but doses of logic, and
+stern commands to move on or fall back. Catholics in distress about
+Infallibility; Protestants devoting themselves to the dismal task of
+paring down the dimensions of this miracle, and reducing the credibility
+of that one--as if any appreciable relief from the burden of faith could
+be so obtained; sentimental sceptics, who, after labouring to demolish
+what they call the chimera of superstition, fall to weeping as they
+remember they have now no lies to teach their children; democrats
+who are frightened at the rough voice of the people, and aristocrats
+flirting with democracy. Logic, if it cannot cure, might at least
+silence these gentry.
+
+
+
+
+FALSTAFF.
+
+
+There is more material for a life of Falstaff than for a life of
+Shakespeare, though for both there is a lamentable dearth. The
+difficulties of the biographer are, however, different in the two cases.
+There is nothing, or next to nothing, in Shakespeare's works which
+throws light on his own story; and such evidence as we have is of
+the kind called circumstantial. But Falstaff constantly gives us
+reminiscences or allusions to his earlier life, and his companions also
+tell us stories which ought to help us in a biography. The evidence,
+such as it is, is direct; and the only inference we have to draw is that
+from the statement to the truth of the statement.
+
+It has been justly remarked by Sir James Stephen, that this very
+inference is perhaps the most difficult one of all to draw correctly.
+The inference from so-called circumstantial evidence, if you have enough
+of it, is much surer; for whilst facts cannot lie, witnesses can, and
+frequently do. The witnesses on whom we have to rely for the facts are
+Falstaff and his companions--especially Falstaff.
+
+When an old man tries to tell you the story of his youth, he sees the
+facts through a distorting subjective medium, and gives an impression of
+his history and exploits more or less at variance with the bare facts as
+seen by a contemporary outsider. The scientific Goethe, though truthful
+enough in the main, certainly fails in his reminiscences to tell a plain
+unvarnished tale. And Falstaff was _not_ habitually truthful. Indeed,
+that Western American, who wrote affectionately on the tomb of a
+comrade, 'As a truth-crusher he was unrivalled,' had probably not
+given sufficient attention to Falstaff's claims in this matter. Then
+Falstaff's companions are not witnesses above suspicion. Generally
+speaking, they lie open to the charge made by P. P. against the wags
+of his parish, that they were men delighting more in their own conceits
+than in the truth. These are some of our difficulties, and we ask the
+reader's indulgence in our endeavours to overcome them. We will tell
+the story from our hero's birth, and will not begin longer _before_ that
+event than is usual with biographers.
+
+The question, _Where_ was Falstaff born? has given us some trouble.
+We confess to having once entertained a strong opinion that he was a
+Devonshire man. This opinion was based simply on the flow and fertility
+of his wit as shown in his conversation, and the rapid and fantastic
+play of his imagination. But we sought in vain for any verbal
+provincialisms in support of this theory, and there was something in the
+character of the man that rather went against it. Still, we clung to
+the opinion, till we found that philology was against us, and that the
+Falstaffs unquestionably came from Norfolk.
+
+The name is of Scandinavian origin; and we find in 'Domesday' that a
+certain Falstaff held freely from the king a church at Stamford. These
+facts are of great importance. The thirst for which Falstaff was always
+conspicuous was no doubt inherited--was, in fact, a Scandinavian thirst.
+The pirates of early English times drank as well as they fought, and
+their descendants who invade England--now that the war of commerce has
+superseded the war of conquest--still bring the old thirst with them,
+as anyone can testify who has enjoyed the hospitality of the London
+Scandinavian Club. Then this church was no doubt a familiar landmark in
+the family; and when Falstaff stated, late in life, that if he hadn't
+forgotten what the inside of a church was like, he was a peppercorn
+and a brewer's horse, he was thinking with some remorse of the family
+temple.
+
+Of the family between the Conquest and Falstaff's birth we know nothing,
+except that, according to Falstaff's statement, he had a grandfather
+who left him a seal-ring worth forty marks. From this statement we might
+infer that the ring was an heirloom, and consequently that Falstaff was
+an eldest son, and the head of his family. But we must be careful in
+drawing our inferences, for Prince Henry frequently told Falstaff that
+the ring was copper; and on one occasion, when Falstaff alleged that his
+pocket had been picked at the Boar's Head, and this seal-ring and three
+or four bonds of forty pounds apiece abstracted, the Prince assessed the
+total loss at eight-pence.
+
+After giving careful attention to the evidence, and particularly to the
+conduct of Falstaff on the occasion of the alleged robbery, we come to
+the conclusion that the ring _was_ copper, and was not an heirloom. This
+leaves us without any information about Falstaff's family prior to his
+birth. He was born (as he himself informs the Lord Chief Justice) about
+three o'clock in the afternoon, with a white head and something a round
+belly. Falstaffs corpulence, therefore, as well as his thirst, was
+congenital. Let those who are not born with his comfortable figure sigh
+in vain to attain his stately proportions. This is a thing which Nature
+gives us at our birth as much as the Scandinavian thirst or the shaping
+spirit of imagination.
+
+Born somewhere in Norfolk, Falstaff's early months and years were no
+doubt rich with the promise of his after greatness. We have no record of
+his infancy, and are tempted to supply the gap with Rabelais' chapters
+on Gargantua's babyhood. But regard for the truth compels us to add
+nothing that cannot fairly be deduced from the evidence. We leave the
+strapping boy in his swaddling-clothes to answer the question _when_ he
+was born. Now, it is to be regretted that Falstaff, who was so precise
+about the hour of his birth, should not have mentioned the year. On this
+point we are again left to inference from conflicting statements. We
+have this distinct point to start from, that Falstaff, in or about
+the year 1401, gives his age as some fifty or by'r Lady inclining to
+three-score. It is true that in other places he represents himself as
+old, and again in another states that he and his accomplices in the
+Gadshill robbery are in the vaward of their youth. The Chief Justice
+reproves him for this affectation of youth, and puts a question (which,
+it is true, elicits no admission from Falstaff) as to whether every part
+of him is not blasted with antiquity.
+
+We are inclined to think that Falstaff rather understated his age when
+he described himself as by'r Lady inclining to three-score, and that we
+shall not be far wrong if we set down 1340 as the year of his birth. We
+cannot be certain to a year or two. There is a similar uncertainty about
+the year of Sir Richard Whittington's birth. But both these great men,
+whose careers afford in some respects striking contrasts, were born
+within a few years of the middle of the fourteenth century.
+
+Falstaff's childhood was no doubt spent in Norfolk; and we learn from
+his own lips that he plucked geese, played truant, and whipped top,
+and that he did not escape beating. That he had brothers and sisters we
+know; for he tells us that he is _John_ with them and _Sir John_ with
+all Europe. We do not know the dame or pedant who taught his young idea
+how to shoot and formed his manners; but Falstaff says that _if_ his
+manners became him not, he was a fool that taught them him. This does
+not throw much light on his early education: for it is not clear
+that the remark applies to that period, and in any case it is purely
+hypothetical.
+
+But Falstaff, like so many boys since his time, left his home in the
+country and came to London. His brothers and sisters he left behind
+him, and we hear no more of them. Probably none of them ever attained
+eminence, as there is no record of Falstaff's having attempted to
+borrow money of them. We know Falstaff so well as a tun of man, a
+horse-back-breaker, and so forth, that it is not easy to form an idea of
+what he was in his youth. But if we trace back the sack-stained current
+of his life to the day when, full of wonder and hope, he first rode into
+London, we shall find him as different from Shakespeare's picture of him
+as the Thames at Iffley is from the Thames at London Bridge. His figure
+was shapely; he had no difficulty _then_ in seeing his own knee, and
+if he was not able, as he afterwards asserted, to creep through an
+alderman's ring, nevertheless he had all the grace and activity
+of youth. He was just such a lad (to take a description almost
+contemporary) as the Squier who rode with the Canterbury Pilgrims:
+
+   'A lover and a lusty bacheler,
+    With lockes crull as they were laid in presse,
+    Of twenty yere of age he was, I gesse.
+    Of his stature he was of even lengthe,
+    And wonderly deliver, and grete of strengthe.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+      Embrouded was he, as it were a mede,
+    All ful of freshe floures, white and rede;
+    Singing he was, or floyting alle the day,
+    He was as freshe as is the moneth of May.
+    Short was his goune, with sleves long and wide,
+    Wel coude he sitte on hors, and fayre ride,
+    He coude songes make, and wel endite,
+    Juste and eke dance, and wel pourtraie and write.
+    So hot he loved that by nightertale,
+    He slep no more than doth the nightingale.'
+
+Such was Falstaff at the age of twenty, or something earlier, when he
+entered at Clement's Inn, where were many other young men reading law,
+and preparing for their call to the Bar. How much law he read it is
+impossible now to ascertain. That he had, in later life, a considerable
+knowledge of the subject is clear, but this may have been acquired like
+Mr. Micawber's, by experience, as defendant on civil process. We are
+inclined to think he read but little. _Amici fures temporis:_ and he had
+many friends at Clement's Inn who were not smugs, nor, indeed, reading
+men in any sense. There was John Doit of Staffordshire, and Black George
+Barnes, and Francis Pickbone, and Will Squele, a Cotswold man,
+and Robert Shallow from Gloucestershire. Four of these were such
+swinge-bucklers as were not to be found again in all the Inns o' Court,
+and we have it on the authority of Justice Shallow that Falstaff was
+a good backswordsman, and that before he had done growing he broke
+the head of Skogan at the Court gate. This Skogan appears to have been
+Court-jester to Edward III. No doubt the natural rivalry between the
+amateur and the professional caused the quarrel, and Skogan must have
+been a good man if he escaped with a broken head only, and without
+damage to his reputation as a professional wit. The same day that
+Falstaff did this deed of daring--the only one of the kind recorded of
+him--Shallow fought with Sampson Stockfish, a fruiterer, behind Gray's
+Inn. Shallow was a gay dog in his youth, according to his own account:
+he was called Mad Shallow, Lusty Shallow--indeed, he was called
+anything. He played Sir Dagonet in Arthur's show at Mile End Green; and
+no doubt Falstaff and the rest of the set were cast for other parts
+in the same pageant. These tall fellows of Clement's Inn kept well
+together, for they liked each other's company, and they needed each
+other's help in a row in Turnbull Street or elsewhere. Their watchword
+was 'Hem, boys!' and they made the old Strand ring with their songs
+as they strolled home to their chambers of an evening. They heard the
+chimes at midnight--which, it must be confessed, does not seem to us a
+desperately dissipated entertainment. But midnight was a late hour in
+those days. The paralytic masher of the present day, who is most alive
+at midnight, rises at noon. _Then_ the day began earlier with a long
+morning, followed by a pleasant period called the forenoon. Under modern
+conditions we spend the morning in bed, and to palliate our sloth call
+the forenoon and most of the rest of the day, the morning. These young
+men of Clement's Inn were a lively, not to say a rowdy, set. They would
+do anything that led to mirth or mischief. What passed when they lay all
+night in the windmill in St. George's Field we do not quite know; but
+we are safe in assuming that they did not go there to pursue their legal
+duties, or to grind corn. Anyhow, forty years after, that night raised
+pleasant memories.
+
+John Falstaff was the life and centre of this set, as Robert Shallow was
+the butt of it. The latter had few personal attractions. According to
+Falstaff's portrait of him, he looked like a man made after supper of a
+cheese-paring. When he was naked he was for all the world like a forked
+radish, with a head fantastically carved upon it with a knife: he was so
+forlorn that his dimensions to any thick sight were invincible: he was
+the very genius of famine; and a certain section of his friends called
+him mandrake: he came ever in the rearward of the fashion, and sung
+those tunes to the over-scutched huswives that he heard the carmen
+whistle, and sware they were his fancies or his good-nights. Then he had
+the honour of having his head burst by John o' Gaunt, for crowding among
+the Marshal's men in the Tilt-yard, and this was matter for continual
+gibe from Falstaff and the other boys. Falstaff was in the van of the
+fashion, was witty himself without being at that time the cause that wit
+was in others. No one could come within range of his wit without being
+attracted and overpowered. Late in life Falstaff deplores nothing so
+much in the character of Prince John of Lancaster as this, that a man
+cannot make him laugh. He felt this defect in the Prince's character
+keenly, for laughter was Falstaff's familiar spirit, which never failed
+to come at his call. It was by laughter that young Falstaff fascinated
+his friends and ruled over them. There are only left to us a few scraps
+of his conversation, and these have been, and will be, to all time the
+delight of all good men. The Clement's Inn boys who enjoyed the feast,
+of which we have but the crumbs left to us, were happy almost beyond
+the lot of man. For there is more in laughter than is allowed by the
+austere, or generally recognised by the jovial. By laughter man is
+distinguished from the beasts, but the cares and sorrows of life have
+all but deprived man of this distinguishing grace, and degraded him to
+a brutal solemnity. Then comes (alas, how rarely!) a genius such as
+Falstaff's, which restores the power of laughter and transforms the
+stolid brute into man. This genius approaches nearly to the divine power
+of creation, and we may truly say, 'Some for less were deified.' It is
+no marvel that young Falstaff's friends assiduously served the deity
+who gave them this good gift. At first he was satisfied with the mere
+exercise of his genial power, but he afterwards made it serviceable to
+him. It was but just that he should receive tribute from those who were
+beholden to him, for a pleasure which no other could confer.
+
+It was now that Falstaff began to recognise what a precious gift was his
+congenital Scandinavian thirst, and to lose no opportunity of gratifying
+it. We have his mature views on education, and we may take them as an
+example of the general truth that old men habitually advise a young one
+to shape the conduct of his life after their own. Rightly to apprehend
+the virtues of sherris-sack is the first qualification in an instructor
+of youth. 'If I had a thousand sons,' says he, 'the first humane
+principles I would teach them should be to forswear thin potations, and
+to addict themselves to sack'; and further: 'There's never none of these
+demure boys come to any proof; for their drink doth so over-cool their
+blood, and making many fish-meals, that they fall into a kind of male
+green sickness; and then when they marry they get wenches: they are
+generally fools and cowards, which some of us should be too but for
+inflammation.' There can be no doubt that Falstaff did not in early life
+over-cool his blood, but addicted himself to sack, and gave the subject
+a great part of his attention for all the remainder of his days.
+
+It may be that he found the subject too absorbing to allow of his giving
+much attention to old Father Antic the Law. At any rate, he was never
+called to the Bar, and posterity cannot be too thankful that his great
+mind was not lost in 'the abyss of legal eminence' which has received so
+many men who might have adorned their country. That he was fitted for
+a brilliant legal career can admit of no doubt. His power of detecting
+analogies in cases apparently different, his triumphant handling of
+cases apparently hopeless, his wonderful readiness in reply, and his
+dramatic instinct, would have made him a powerful advocate. It may
+have been owing to difficulties with the Benchers of the period
+over questions of discipline, or it may have been a distaste for the
+profession itself, which induced him to throw up the law and adopt the
+profession of arms.
+
+We know that while he was still at Clement's Inn he was page to Lord
+Thomas Mowbray, who was afterwards created Earl of Nottingham and Duke
+of Norfolk. It must be admitted that here (as elsewhere in Shakespeare)
+there is some little chronological difficulty. We will not inquire too
+curiously, but simply accept the testimony of Justice Shallow on the
+point. Mowbray was an able and ambitious lord, and Falstaff, as page to
+him, began his military career with every advantage. The French wars of
+the later years of Edward III. gave frequent and abundant opportunity
+for distinction. Mowbray distinguished himself in Court and in camp,
+and we should like to believe that Falstaff was in the sea-fight when
+Mowbray defeated the French fleet and captured vast quantities of sack
+from the enemy. Unfortunately, there is no record whatever of Falstaff's
+early military career, and beyond his own ejaculation, 'Would to
+God that my name was not so terrible to the enemy as it is!' and the
+(possible) inference from it that he must have made his name terrible in
+some way, we have no evidence that he was ever in the field before the
+battle of Shrewsbury. Indeed, the absence of evidence on this matter
+goes strongly to prove the negative. Falstaff boasts of his valour,
+his alacrity, and other qualities which were not apparent to the casual
+observer, but he never boasts of his services in battle. If there had
+been anything of the kind to which he could refer with complacency,
+there is no moral doubt that he would have mentioned it freely, adding
+such embellishments and circumstances as he well knew how.
+
+In the absence of evidence as to the course of his life, we are left to
+conjecture how he spent the forty years, more or less, between the time
+of his studies at Clement's Inn and the day when Shakespeare introduces
+him to us. We have no doubt that he spent all, or nearly all, this time
+in London. His habits were such as are formed by life in a great city;
+his conversation betrays a man who has lived, as it were, in a crowd,
+and the busy haunts of men were the appropriate scene for the display of
+his great qualities. London, even then, was a great city, and the study
+of it might well absorb a lifetime. Falstaff knew it well, from the
+Court, with which he always preserved a connection, to the numerous
+taverns where he met his friends and eluded his creditors. The Boar's
+Head in Eastcheap was his headquarters, and, like Barnabee's, two
+centuries later, his journeys were from tavern to tavern; and, like
+Barnabee, he might say '_Multum bibi, nunquam pransi_.' To begin
+with, no doubt the dinner bore a fair proportion to the fluid which
+accompanied it, but by degrees the liquor encroached on and superseded
+the viands, until his tavern bills took the shape of the one purloined
+by Prince Henry, in which there was but one halfpenny-worth of bread to
+an intolerable deal of sack. It was this inordinate consumption of sack
+(and not sighing and grief, as he suggests) which blew him up like a
+bladder. A life of leisure in London always had, and still has, its
+temptations. Falstaff's means were described by the Chief Justice of
+Henry IV. as very slender, but this was after they had been wasted for
+years. Originally they were more ample, and gave him the opportunity of
+living at ease with his friends. No domestic cares disturbed the even
+tenor of his life. Bardolph says he was better accommodated than with a
+wife. Like many another man about town, he thought about settling down
+when he was getting up in years. He weekly swore, so he tells us, to
+marry old Mistress Ursula, but this was only after he saw the first
+white hair on his chin. But he never led Mistress Ursula to the altar.
+The only other women for whom he formed an early attachment were
+Mistress Quickly, the hostess of the Boar's Head, and Doll Tearsheet,
+who is described by the page as a proper gentlewoman, and a kinswoman of
+his master's. There is no denying that Falstaff was on terms of intimacy
+with Mistress Quickly, but he never admitted that he made her an offer
+of marriage. She, however, asserted it in the strongest terms, and with
+a wealth of circumstance.
+
+We must transcribe her story: 'Thou didst swear to me upon a parcel-gilt
+goblet, sitting in my Dolphin-chamber, at the round table, by a sea-coal
+fire, upon Wednesday in Whitsun-week, when the Prince broke thy head for
+liking his father to a singing-man of Windsor; thou didst swear to me
+then, as I was washing thy wound, to marry me, and make me my lady thy
+wife. Canst thou deny it? Did not goodwife Keech, the butcher's wife,
+come in then, and call me Gossip Quickly? coming in to borrow a mess of
+vinegar; telling us she had a good dish of prawns; whereby thou didst
+desire to eat some; whereby I told thee they were ill for a green wound?
+And didst thou not, when she was gone downstairs, desire me to be no
+more so familiarity with such poor people; saying that ere long they
+should call me madam? And didst thou not kiss me, and bid me fetch
+thee thirty shillings? I put thee now to thy book-oath; deny it if thou
+canst!'
+
+We feel no doubt that if Mistress Quickly had given this evidence
+in action for breach of promise of marriage, and goodwife Keech
+corroborated it, the jury would have found a verdict for the plaintiff,
+unless indeed they brought in a special verdict to the effect that
+Falstaff made the promise, but never intended to keep it. But Mistress
+Quickly contented herself with upbraiding Falstaff, and he cajoled her
+with his usual skill, and borrowed more money of her.
+
+Falstaff's attachment for Doll Tearsheet lasted many years, but did not
+lead to matrimony. From the Clement's Inn days till he was threescore he
+lived in London celibate, and his habits and amusements were much like
+those of other single gentlemen about town of his time, or, for that
+matter, of ours. He had only himself to care for, and he cared for
+himself well. Like his page, he had a good angel about him, but the
+devil outbid him. He was as virtuously given as other folk, but perhaps
+the devil had a handle for temptation in that congenital thirst of his.
+He was a social spirit too, and he tells us that company, villainous
+company, was the spoil of him. He was less than thirty when he took the
+faithful Bardolph into his service, and only just past that age when he
+made the acquaintance of the nimble Poins. Before he was forty he
+became the constant guest of Mistress Quickly. Pistol and Nym were later
+acquisitions, and the Prince did not come upon the scene till Falstaff
+was an old man and knighted.
+
+There is some doubt as to when he obtained this honour. Richard II.
+bestowed titles in so lavish a manner as to cause discontent among many
+who didn't receive them. In 1377, immediately on his accession, the
+earldom of Nottingham was given to Thomas Mowbray, and on the same day
+three other earls and nine knights were created. We have not been able
+to discover the names of these knights, but we confidently expect to
+unearth them some day, and to find the name of Sir John Falstaff among
+them. We have already stated that Falstaff had done no service in
+the field at this time, so he could not have earned his title in that
+manner. No doubt he got it through the influence of Mowbray, who was in
+a position to get good things for his friends as well as for himself.
+It was but a poor acknowledgment for the inestimable benefit of
+occasionally talking with Falstaff over a quart of sack.
+
+We will not pursue Falstaff's life further than this. It can from this
+point be easily collected. It is a thankless task to paraphrase a great
+and familiar text. To attempt to tell the story in better words than
+Shakespeare would occur to no one but Miss Braddon, who has epitomised
+Sir Walter, or to Canon Farrar, who has elongated the Gospels. But we
+feel bound to add a few words as to character. There are, we fear, a
+number of people who regard Falstaff as a worthless fellow, and who
+would refrain (if they could) from laughing at his jests. These people
+do not understand his claim to grateful and affectionate regard. He
+did more to produce that mental condition of which laughter is the
+expression than any man who ever lived. But for the cheering presence
+of him, and men like him, this vale of tears would be a more terrible
+dwelling-place than it is. In short, Falstaff has done an immense deal
+to alleviate misery and promote positive happiness. What more can be
+said of your heroes and philanthropists?
+
+It is, perhaps, characteristic of this commercial age that benevolence
+should be always associated, if not considered synonymous, with the
+giving of money. But this is clearly mistaken, for we have to consider
+what effect the money given produces on the minds and bodies of human
+beings. Sir Richard Whittington was an eminently benevolent man,
+and spent his money freely for the good of his fellow-citizens. (We
+sincerely hope, by the way, that he lent some of it to Falstaff without
+security.) He endowed hospitals and other charities. Hundreds were
+relieved by his gifts, and thousands (perhaps) are now in receipt of his
+alms. This is well. Let the sick and the poor, who enjoy his hospitality
+and receive his doles, bless his memory. But how much wider and
+further-reaching is the influence of Falstaff! Those who enjoy his good
+things are not only the poor and the sick, but all who speak the English
+language. Nay, more; translation has made him the inheritance of the
+world, and the benefactor of the entire human race.
+
+It may be, however, that some other nations fail fully to understand and
+appreciate the mirth and the character of the man. A Dr. G. G. Gervinus,
+of Heidelberg, has written, in the German language, a heavy work
+on Shakespeare, in which he attacks Falstaff in a very solemn and
+determined manner, and particularly charges him with selfishness and
+want of conscience. We are inclined to set down this malignant attack
+to envy. Falstaff is the author and cause of universal laughter. Dr.
+Gervinus will never be the cause of anything universal; but, so far as
+his influence extends, he produces headaches. It is probably a painful
+sense of this contrast that goads on the author of headaches to attack
+the author of laughter.
+
+But is there anything in the charge? We do not claim anything like
+perfection, or even saintliness, for Falstaff. But we may say of him, as
+Byron says of Venice, that his very vices are of the gentler sort. And
+as for this charge of selfishness and want of conscience, we think that
+the words of Bardolph on his master's death are an overwhelming answer
+to it. Bardolph said, on hearing the news: 'I would I were with him
+wheresoever he is: whether he be in heaven or hell.' Bardolph was a mere
+serving-man, not of the highest sensibility, and he for thirty years
+knew his master as his valet knows the hero. Surely the man who could
+draw such an expression of feeling from his rough servant is not the man
+to be lightly charged with selfishness! Which of us can hope for such an
+epitaph, not from a hireling, but from our nearest and dearest? Does Dr.
+Gervinus know anyone who will make such a reply to a posthumous charge
+against him of dulness and lack of humour?
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Obiter Dicta, by Augustine Birrell
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