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If, as I sometimes think, a man's interest inletters is almost the surest measure of his love forLetters in the larger sense of the word, the busyschoolmaster of Olney ought to stand high infavour for the labour he has bestowed on completingand rearranging theCorrespondence ofWilliam Cowper.[1] It may be that Mr. Wright'scompetence as an editor still leaves somethingto be desired. Certainly, if I may speak for myown taste, he has in one respect failed to profitby a golden opportunity; it needed only toprint the more intimate poems of Cowper intheir proper place among the letters to have[Pg 2]produced a work doubly interesting and perfectlyunique. The correspondence itself wouldhave been shot through by a new light, and thepoetry might have been restored once more to itsrightful seat in our affections. The fact is thatnot many readers to-day can approach the verseof the eighteenth century in a mood to enjoy oreven to understand it. We have grown so accustomedto over-emphasis in style and wasteful effusionin sentiment that the clarity and self-restraintof that age repel us as ungenuine; we are warnedby a certainfrigus at the heart to seek our comfortelsewhere. And just here was the chance foran enlightened editor. So much of Cowper'spoetry is the record of his own simple life and ofthe little adventures that befell him in the valleyof the Ouse, that it would have lost its seemingartificiality and would have gained a fresh appealby association with the letters that relate thesame events and emotions. How, for example,the quiet grace of the fables (and good fables areso rare in English!) would be brought back to usagain if we could read them side by side with theactual stories out of which they grew. There is awhole charming natural history here of beast andbird and insect and flower. The nightingale whichCowper heard on New Year's Day sings in aletter as well as in the poem; and here, to nameno others, are the incidents of the serpent and thekittens, and of that walk by the Ouse when thepoet's dog Beau brought him the water lily. Or,[Pg 3]to turn to more serious things, how much thepathetic stanzasTo Mary would gain in poignantrealism if we came upon them immediately afterreading the letters in which Cowper lays bare hisremorse for the strain his malady had imposedupon her.

A still more striking example would be thelines writtenOn the Receipt of My Mother's Picture.By a literary tradition these are reckoned amongthe most perfect examples of pathos in the language,and yet how often to-day are they readwith any deep emotion? I suspect no tears havefallen on that page for many a long year.

do you not feel the expression here, the verybalance of the rhymes, to stand like a barrier betweenthe poet's emotion and your own susceptibility?And thatconfectionary plum—somehowthe savour of it has long ago evaporated. Eventhe closing lines—

need some allowance to cover their artificial mode.And it is just this allowance that association withthe letters would afford; the mind would passwithout a shock from the simple recital in proseof Cowper's ruined days to these phrases at onceso metaphorical and so conventional, and wouldfind in them a new power to move the heart.Or compare with the sentiment of the poem thisparagraph from the letter to his cousin, Mrs. Bodham—allof it a model of simple beauty:

To read together the whole of this letter and ofthe poem is something more than a demonstrationof what might be accomplished by a skilful editor;it is a lesson, too, in that quality of restraineddignity, I had almost said of self-respect, whichwe find it so difficult to impress on our brokenmodern style.

Some day, no doubt, we shall have such aninterwoven edition of Cowper's prose and verse,to obtain which we would willingly sacrifice a fullthird of the letters if this were necessary. Meanwhile,let us be thankful for whatever fresh lightour Olney editor has thrown on the correspondence,and take the occasion to look a little moreclosely into one of the strangest and most tragicof literary lives. William Cowper was born atGreat Berkhampstead in 1731. His father, whowas rector of the parish, belonged to a family ofhigh connections, and his mother, Anne Donne,was also of noble lineage, claiming descentthrough four different lines from Henry III. Thefact is of some importance, for the son was verymuch the traditional gentleman, and showed thepride of race both in his language and manners.He himself affected to think more of his kinshipto John Donne, of poetical memory, than of hisother forefathers, and, half in play, traced theirritability of his temper and his verse-mongeringback to that "venerable ancestor, the Dean of St.[Pg 6]Paul's."[2] It is fanciful, but one is tempted to layupon the old poet's meddling with coffins andghastly thoughts some of the responsibility for theyounger man's nightly terrors. "That which wecall life is butHebdomada mortium, a week of death,seven days, seven periods of life spent in dying,"preached Donne in his last sermon, and an awfulecho of the words might seem to have troubled hisdescendant's nerves. But that is not yet. As a boyand young man Cowper appears to have been high-spiritedand natural. At Westminster School hepassed under the instruction of Vincent Bourne,so many of whose fables he was to translate inafter years, and who, with Milton and Prior, wasmost influential in forming his poetical manner.

After leaving Westminster he spent a fewmonths at Berkhampstead, and then came to Lon[Pg 7]donunder the pretext of studying law, living firstwith an attorney in Southampton Row and afterwardstaking chambers in the Middle Temple.Life went merrily for a while. He was a fellowstudent with Thurlow, and there he was, he "andthe future Lord Chancellor, constantly employedfrom morning to night in giggling and makinggiggle, instead of studying the law. Oh, fie,cousin!" he adds, "how could you do so?" Thispretty "Oh fie!" introduces us to one who was tobe his best and dearest correspondent, his cousinHarriet Cowper, afterwards Lady Hesketh, andwho was to befriend him and cheer him in a thousandways. It may introduce us also to Harriet'ssister, Theodora, with whom Cowper, after thefashion of idle students, fell thoughtlessly in love.He would have married her, too, bringing an incalculableelement into his writing which I do notlike to contemplate; for it is the way of poets todescribe most ideally what fortune has deniedthem in reality, and Cowper's task, we know,was to portray in prose and verse the quiet charmsof the family. But the lady's father, for reasonsvery common in such cases, put an end to thatdanger. Cowper took the separation easilyenough, if we may judge from the letters of theperiod; but to Theodora, one fancies, it meant alife of sad memories. They never exchangedletters, but in after years, when Lady Heskethrenewed correspondence with Cowper and broughthim into connection with his kinsfolk, Theodora,[Pg 8]as "Anonymous," sent money and other gifts toeke out his slender living. It is generally assumedthat the recipient never guessed the nameof his retiring benefactress, but I prefer to regardit rather as a part of his delicacy and taste toaffect ignorance where the donor did not wish tobe revealed, and think that his penetration of thesecret added a kind of wistful regret to his gratitude."On Friday I received a letter from dearAnonymous," he writes to Lady Hesketh, "apprisingme of a parcel that the coach would bringme on Saturday. Who is there in the world thathas, or thinks he has, reason to love me to thedegree that he does? But it is no matter. Hechooses to be unknown, and his choice is, andever shall be, so sacred to me, that if his namelay on the table before me reversed, I would notturn the paper about that I might read it. Muchas it would gratify me to thank him, I would turnmy eyes away from the forbidden discovery."Could there be a more tactful way of conveyinghis thanks and insinuating his knowledge whilerespecting Theodora's reserve?

But all this was to come after the great changein Cowper's life. As with Charles Lamb, a nameone likes to link with his, the terrible shadow ofmadness fell upon him one day, never wholly torise. The story of that calamity is too well knownto need retelling in detail. A first stroke seizedhim in his London days, but seems not to havebeen serious. He recovered, and took up again[Pg 9]the easy life that was in retrospect to appear tohim so criminally careless. In order to establishhim in the world, his cousin, Major Cowper,offered him the office of Clerk of the Journals tothe House of Lords. There was, however, somedispute as to the validity of the donor's powers,and it became necessary for Cowper to prove hiscompetency at the bar of the House. The resultwas pitiable. Anxiety and nervous dread completelyprostrated him. After trying futilely totake his own life, he was placed by his family ina private asylum at St. Albans, where he remainedabout a year and a half. His recovery took theform of religious conversion and a rapturous beliefin his eternal salvation. Instead of returningto London, he went to live in the town of Huntingdon,drawn thither both by the retirement ofthe place and its nearness to Cambridge, wherehis brother John resided. Here he became acquaintedwith the Unwins:

The intimacy ripened and Cowper was taken intothe family almost as one of its members. Buttrouble and change soon broke into this idyllichome. Mr. Unwin was thrown from his horseand killed; the son was called away to a charge;the daughter married. Meanwhile, Mrs. Unwinand Cowper had gone to live at Olney, a dulltown on the Ouse, where they might enjoy theevangelical preaching of that reformed sea-captainand slave-dealer, the Rev. John Newton.

The letters of this period are filled with a tremulousjoy; it was as if one of the timid animals heloved so well had found concealment in the rocksand heard the baying of the hounds, thrown fromthe scent and far off. "For my own part," hewrites to Lady Hesketh, "who am but as aThames wherry, in a world full of tempest andcommotion, I know so well the value of the creekI have put into, and the snugness it affords me,that I have a sensible sympathy with you in thepleasure you find in being once more blown toDroxford." Books he has in abundance, andhappy country walks; friends that are more thanfriends to occupy his heart, and quaint charactersto engage his wit. He finds an image of his daysin Rousseau's description of an English morning,and his evenings differ from them in nothing exceptthat they are still more snug and quieter.His talk is of the mercies and deliverance of God;[Pg 11]he is eager to convert the little world of his correspondentsto his own exultant peace; and, itmust be confessed, only the charm and breedingof his language save a number of these lettersfrom the wearisomeness of misplaced preaching.

Cowper removed with Mrs. Unwin to Olney in1767. Six years later came the miraculous eventwhich changed the whole tenor of his life andwhich gave the unique character to all the lettershe was to write thereafter. He was seized onenight with a frantic despondency, and again fora year and a half, during all which time Mr.Newton cared for him as for a brother, sufferedacute melancholia. He recovered his sanity inordinary matters, but the spring of joy and peacehad been dried up within him. Thenceforth henever, save for brief intervals, could shake off theconviction that he had been abandoned by God—ratherthat for some inscrutable reason God haddeliberately singled him out as a victim of omnipotentwrath and eternal damnation. No doubtthere was some physical origin, some lesion ofthe nerves, at the bottom of this disease, but thepeculiar form of his mania and its virulence canbe traced to causes quite within the range of literaryexplanation. He was a scapegoat of hisage; he accepted with perfect faith what othermen talked about, and it darkened his reason.Those were the days when a sharp and unwholesomeopposition had arisen between the compromiseof the Church with worldly forms and the[Pg 12]evangelical absolutism of Wesley and Whitefieldand John Newton. Cowper himself, on emergingfrom his melancholia at St. Albans, had adoptedthe extreme Calvinistic tenets in regard to thedivine omnipotence. Man was but a toy in thehands of an arbitrary Providence; conversion wasfirst a recognition of the utter nullity of the humanwill; and there was no true religion, nosalvation, until Grace had descended freely like afire from heaven and devoured this offering of aman's soul. To understand Cowper's faith oneshould read his letter of March 31, 1770, in whichhe relates the death-bed conversion of his brotherat Cambridge. Now John was a clergyman ingood standing, a man apparently of blameless lifeand Christian faith, yet to himself and to Williamhe was without hope until the miracle of regenerationhad been wrought upon him. After readingCowper's letter one should turn to Jonathan Edwards'streatise onThe Freedom of the Will, andfollow the inexorable logic by which the NewEngland divine proves that God must be thesource of all good and evil, of this man's salvationand that man's loss: "If once it should be allowedthat things may come to pass without a Cause,we should not only have no proof of the Being ofGod, but we should be without evidence of anythingwhatsoever but our own immediately presentideas and consciousness. For we have no way toprove anything else but by arguing from effectsto causes." Yet the responsibility of a man abides[Pg 13]through all his helplessness: "The Case of suchas are given up of God to Sin and of fallen Manin general, proves moral Necessity and Inabilityto be consistent with blameworthiness." GoodDr. Holmes has said somewhere in his jaunty waythat it was only decent for a man who believed inthis doctrine to go mad. Well, Cowper believedin it; there was no insulating pad of worldly indifferencebetween his faith and his nerves, andhe went mad.

And he was in another way the victim of hisage. We have heard him comparing his days atHuntingdon withRousseau's description of anEnglish morning. Unfortunately, the maladyalso which came into the world with Rousseau,the morbid exaggeration of personal consciousness,had laid hold of Cowper. Even whensuffering from the earlier stroke he had writtenthese words to his cousin: "I am of a very singulartemper, and very unlike all the men that Ihave ever conversed with"; and this sense of hissingularity follows him through life. During theHuntingdon days it takes the form of a magnifiedconfidence that Heaven is peculiarly concerned inhis rescue from the fires of affliction; after the overthrowat Olney it is reversed, and fills him with thecertainty that God has marked him out among allmankind for the special display of vengeance:

Writing to his mentor, John Newton (who hadleft Olney), he declares that there is a mystery inhis destruction; and again to Lady Hesketh:"Mine has been a life of wonders for many years,and a life of wonders I in my heart believe it willbe to the end." More than once in reply to thosewho would console him he avers that there is asingularity in his case which marks it off from thatof all other men, that Providence has chosen himas a special object of its hostility. In Rousseau,whose mission was to preach the essential goodnessof mankind, the union of aggravated egotismwith his humanitarian doctrine brought about theconviction that the whole human race was plottinghis ruin. In Cowper, whose mind dwelt on thepower and mercies of Providence, this self-consciousnessunited with his Calvinism to producethe belief that God had determined to ensnare anddestroy his soul. Such was the strange twist thataccompanied the birth of romanticism in Franceand in England.

The conviction came upon Cowper through theagency of dreams and imaginary voices. Thedepression first seized him on the 24th of January,1773. About a month later a vision of the nighttroubled his sleep, so distinct and terrible that theeffect on his brain could never be wholly dispelled.Years afterwards he wrote to a friend:

That apparently was the sentence which soundedhis doom on the night of dreams:Actum est de te;periisti—it is done with thee, thou hast perished!and no domestic happiness, or worldly success, orwise counsel could ever, save for a little while,lull him to forgetfulness. He might have said tohis friends, as Socrates replied to one who cameto offer him deliverance from jail: "Such words Iseem to hear, as the mystic worshippers seem tohear the piping of flutes; and the sound of thisvoice so murmurs in my ears that I can hear noother."

But it must not be supposed from all this thatCowper's letters are morbid in tone or filled withthe dejection of melancholia. Their merit, on thecontrary, lies primarily in their dignity and restraint,in a certain high-bred ease, which isequally manifest in the language and the thought.[Pg 16]Curiously enough, after the fatal visitation religionbecomes entirely subordinate in his correspondence,and only at rare intervals does he alludeto his peculiar experience. He writes for themost part like a man of the world who has seenthe fashions of life and has sought refuge fromtheir vanity. If I were seeking for a comparisonto relieve the quality of these Olney letters (andit is these that form the real charm of Cowper'scorrespondence), I would turn to Charles Lamb.The fact that both men wrote under the shadowof insanity brings them together immediately,and there are other points of resemblance. Bothare notable among English letter-writers for theexquisite grace of their language, but if I had tochoose between the two the one whose style possessedthe most enduring charm, a charm thatappealed to the heart most equally at all seasonsand left the reader always in that state of quietsatisfaction which is the office of the purest taste,I should name Cowper. The wit is keener inLamb and above all more artful; there is a certainpetulance of humour in him which surprises usoftener into laughter, the pathos at times is morepoignant; but the effort to be entertaining is alsomore apparent, and the continual holding up ofthe mind by the unexpected word or phrase becomesa little wearisome in the end. The attractionof Cowper's style is in the perfect balance ofthe members, an art which has become almostlost since the eighteenth century, and in the spirit[Pg 17]of repose which awakens in the reader such a feelingof easy elevation as remains for a while afterthe book is laid down. Lamb is of the city,Cowper of the fields. Both were admirers ofVincent Bourne; Lamb chose naturally for translationthe poems of city life—The Ballad Singers,The Rival Bells, theEpitaph on a Dog:

Cowper just as inevitably selected the fables andcountry-pieces—The Glowworm,The Jackdaw,The Cricket:

There is in the blind beggar something of thequality of Lamb's own life, with its inherent lonelinessimposed by an ever-present grief in themidst of London's noisy streets; and in the versesto the cricket it is scarcely fanciful to find animage of Cowper's "domestic life in rural leisurepassed." Lamb was twenty-five when Cowperdied, in the year 1800. One is tempted to continuein the language of fable and ask whatwould have happened had the city mouse alluredthe country mouse to visit his chambers in Holbornor Southampton buildings. To be surethere was no luxury of purple robe and mightyfeast in that abode; but I think the revelry andthe wit, and that hound of intemperance whichalways pursued poor Lamb, would have fright[Pg 19]enedhis guest back to his hiding-place in thewilderness:

Cowper, in fact, was the first writer to introducethat intimate union of the home affectionswith the love of country which, in the works ofMiss Austen and a host of others, was to becomeone of the unique charms and consolations ofEnglish literature. And the element of austeregloom in his character, rarely exposed, but always,we know, in the background, is what mostof all relieves his letters from insipidity. Lambstrove deliberately by a kind of crackling mirthto drown the sound of the grave inner voice;Cowper listened reverently to its admonitions,even to its threatenings; he spoke little of whathe heard, but it tempered his wit and the snugcomfort of his life with that profounder consciousnessof what, disguise it as we will, lies at thebottom of the world's experience. We call himmad because he believed himself abandoned ofGod, and shuddered with remorseless conviction.Put aside for a moment the language of themarket place, and be honest with ourselves: isthere not a little of our fate, of the fate of mankind,in Cowper's desolation? After all, was hismelancholy radically different from the state ofthat great Frenchman, a lover of his letters withal,Sainte-Beuve, who dared not for a day rest from[Pg 20]benumbing labour lest the questionings of his ownheart should make themselves heard, and whowrote to a friend that no consolation could reachthat settled sadness which was rooted inla grandeabsence de Dieu?

It is not strange that the society from whichCowper fled should have seemed to him whimsicaland a little mad. "A line of Bourne's," he says,"is very expressive of the spectacle which thisworld exhibits, tragi-comical as the incidents ofit are, absurd in themselves, but terrible in theirconsequences:

Nor is it strange that he wondered sometimes atthe gayety of his own letters: "It is as if Harlequinshould intrude himself into the gloomychamber, where a corpse is deposited in state.His antic gesticulations would be unseasonable,at any rate, but more especially so if they shoulddistort the features of the mournful attendantsinto laughter." But it is not the humour of theletters that attracts us so much as their picture ofquiet home delights in the midst of a stormyworld. We linger most over the account of thosestill evenings by the fireside, while Mrs. Unwin,and perhaps their friend Lady Austen, was busywith her needles—

and while Cowper read aloud from some book oftravels and mingled his comments with the storyof the wanderer:

And here I cannot but regret again that wehave not an edition of these letters interspersedwith the passages ofThe Task, which describe thesame scenes. I confess that two-thirds at leastof that poem is indeed a task to-day. The longtirades against vice, and the equally long preachingof virtue, all in blank verse, lack, to my ear,the vivacity and the sustaining power of theearlier rhymed poems, such asHope (that superbmoralising on the poet's own life) andRetirement,to name the best of the series. But the fourthbook ofThe Task, and, indeed, all the exquisitegenre pictures of the poem:

all this intimate correspondence with the worldin verse is not only interesting in itself, but gains[Pg 22]a double charm by association with the letters."We were just sitting down to supper," writesCowper to Mrs. Unwin's son, "when a hasty rapalarmed us. I ran to the hall window, for thehares being loose, it was impossible to open thedoor." It is fortunate for the reader if hismemory at these words calls up those lines ofThe Task:

How much of the letters could be illustrated inthis way—the walks about Olney, the gardening,the greenhouse, the lamentations over the AmericanRebellion, the tirades against fickle fashions,and a thousand other matters that go to makeup their quiet yet variegated substance. For it[Pg 23]must not be supposed that Cowper, in these Olneydays at least, was ever dull. I will quote theopening paragraph of one other letter—to hisfriend the Rev. William Bull, great preacherof Newport Pagnell, and, alas! great smoker,[3]"smoke-inhaling Bull," "Dear Taureau"—as achange from the more serious theme, and thenpass on:

Might not that have been written by Lamb to oneof his cronies—by a Lamb still of the eighteenthcentury?

But the Olney days must come to a close. Afternineteen years of residence there Cowper and hiscompanion (was ever love like theirs, that was yetnot love!) were induced to move to Weston Lodge,a more convenient house in the village of WestonUnderwood, not far away. Somehow, with thechange, the letters lose the freshness of theirpeculiar interest. We shall never again find himwriting of his home as he had written before ofOlney:

Often while reading the letters from Weston onewishes he had never turned the key in the lockof that beloved enclosure. Fame had come tohim now. His correspondence is distributedamong more people; he is neither quite of theworld, nor of the cloister. Above all, he is busy—endlessly,wearisomely busy—with his translationof Homer. I have often wondered whatthe result would have been had his good friendsand neighbours the Throckmortons converted himfrom his rigid Calvinism to their own milderCatholic faith, and set him in spiritual comfort towriting anotherTask. Idle conjecture! For therest of his life he toiled resolutely at a translationwhich the world did not want and which broughtits own tedium into his letters. And then comesthe pitiful collapse of Mrs. Unwin, broken at lastby the long vigil over her sick companion:

The end is tragic, terrible. In 1794, Cowpersank into a state of melancholia, in which forhours he would walk backward and forward inhis study like a caged tiger. Mrs. Unwin wasdying. At last a cousin, the Rev. John Johnson,took charge of the invalids and carried them awayinto Norfolk. The last few letters, written inCowper's ever-dwindling moments of sanity, arewithout a parallel in English. The contrast ofthe wild images with the stately and restrainedlanguage leaves an impression of awe, almost offear, on the mind. "My thoughts," he writes toLady Hesketh, "are like loose and dry sand,which the closer it is grasped slips the sooneraway"; and again to the same faithful friendfrom Mundesley on the coast:

There is in this that sheer physical horror whichit is not good to write or to read. Somewhere in[Pg 27]his earlier letters he quotes the well-known lineof Horace: "We and all ours are but a debt todeath." How the commonplace words come backwith frightfully intensified meaning as we readthis story of decay! It is not good, I say, to seethe nakedness of human fate so ruthlessly revealed.The mind reverts instinctively from thisscene to the homely life at Olney. Might it notbe that if Cowper had remained in that spotwhere the very stones of the garden walls wereendeared to him, if he had never been torn fromhis natural connections—might it not be that hewould have passed from the world in the endsaddened but not frenzied by his dreams? Atleast in our thoughts let us leave him, not standingalone on the crumbling cliff over a hungrysea, but walking with his sympathetic companionarm in arm in the peaceful valley of the Ouse.

WHITTIER THE POET

Last month we took the new edition ofCowper's Letters as an occasion to consider thelife of the poet, who brought the quiet affectionsof the home into English literature, and that maybe our excuse for waiving the immediate pressureof the book-market and turning to the Americanpoet whose inspiration springs largely from thesame source. Different as the two writers are inso many respects, different above all in their educationand surroundings, yet it would not be difficultto find points of resemblance to justify such asequence. In both the spirit of religion wasbound up with the cult of seclusion; to both thehome was a refuge from the world; to both thiscomfort was sweetened by the care of a belovedcompanion, though neither of them ever married.But, after all, no apology is needed, I trust, forwriting about a poet who is very dear to me as tomany others, and who has suffered more thanmost at the hands of his biographers and critics.

It should seem that no one could go throughWhittier's poems even casually without remarkingthe peculiar beauty of the idyl calledThePennsylvania Pilgrim. It is one of the longestand, all things considered, quite the most char[Pg 29]acteristicof his works. Yet Mr. Pickard in hisofficial biography brings the poem into no relief;Professor Carpenter names it in passing withouta word of comment; and Colonel Higginson inhis volume in the English Men of Letters Seriesdoes not mention it at all—but then he has a habitof omitting the essential. Among those who havewritten critically of American literature the poemis not even named, so far as I am aware, by Mr.Stedman or by Professors Richardson, Lawton,Wendell, and Trent. I confess that this conspiracyof silence, as I hunted through one historianand critic after another, grew disconcerting,and I began to distrust my own judgment until Ichanced upon a confirmation in two passages ofWhittier's letters. Writing ofThe PennsylvaniaPilgrim to his publisher in May, 1872, he said:"I think honestly it is as good as (if not betterthan) any long poem I have written"; and a littlelater to Celia Thaxter: "It is as long asSnow-Bound,and better, but nobody will find it out."One suspects that all these gentlemen in treatingof Whittier have merely followed the line of leastresistance, without taking much care to form anindependent opinion; and the line of least resistancehas a miserable trick of leading us astray.In the first place, Whittier's share in the Abolitionand other reforming movements bulks so large inthe historians' eyes that sometimes they seemalmost to forget Whittier the poet. And thecritics have taken the same cue. "Whittier,"[Pg 30]says one of them, "will be remembered even moreas the trumpet-voice of Emancipation than as thepeaceful singer of rural New England."

The error, if it may be said with reverence, canbe traced even higher, and in Whittier we meetonly one more witness to the unconcern of Natureover the marring of her finer products. Thewonder is not that he turned out so much that isfaulty, but that now and then he attained suchexquisite grace. Whittier was born, December 17,1807, in East Haverhill, in the old homesteadwhich still stands, a museum now, hidden amongthe hills from any other human habitation. It isa country not without quiet charm, though thefamiliar lines ofSnow-Bound make us think of itfirst as beaten by storm and locked in by frost.And, notwithstanding the solace of an affectionatehome, life on the farm was unnecessarily hard.The habits of the grim pioneers had persisted andweighed heavily on their dwindled descendants.Thus the Whittiers, who used to drive regularlyto the Quaker meeting at Amesbury, eight milesdistant, are said to have taken no pains to protectthemselves from the bleakest weather. The poetsuffered in body all his life from the rigour of thisdiscipline; nor did he suffer less from insufficiencyof mental training. Not only was the familypoor, but it even appears that the sober traditionof his people looked askance at the limited meansof education at hand. Only at the earnest solicitationof outsiders was the boy allowed to attend[Pg 31]the academy at Haverhill. Meanwhile, he was alittle of everything: farm worker, shoemaker,teacher—he seems to have shifted about as chanceor necessity directed. There were few—he hastold us how few—books in the house, and littletime for reading those he could borrow. But ifhe read little, he wrote prodigiously. The storyof his first printed poem in theFree Press of Newburyportand of the encouragement given him bythe far-sighted editor, William Lloyd Garrison, isone of the best known and most picturesque incidentsin American letters. The young poet—hewas then nineteen—was launched; from that timehe became an assiduous writer for the press,and was at intervals editor of various country orpropagandist newspapers.

The great currents of literary tradition reachedhim vaguely from afar and troubled his dreams.Burns fell early into his hands, and the ambitionwas soon formed of transferring the braes andbyres of Scotland to the hills and folds of NewEngland. The rhythms of Thomas Moore rangseductively in his ears. Byron, too, by a spiritof contrast, appealed to the Quaker lad, and onemay read in Mr. Pickard's capital little book,Whittier-Land, verses and fragments of letterswhich show how deeply that poison of the agehad bitten into his heart. But the influence ofthose sons of fire was more than counteracted bythe gentle spirit of Mrs. Hemans—indeed, theworst to be said of Whittier is that never, to the[Pg 32]day of his death, did he quite throw off allegianceto the facile and innocent muse of that lady. Itis only right to add that in his later years, especiallyin the calm that followed the civil war,he became a pretty widely read man, a man of farmore culture than he is commonly supposed tohave been.

Such was the boy, then—thirsting for fame,scantily educated, totally without critical guidanceor environment, looking this way and that—whowas thrust under the two dominant influences ofhis time and place. To one of these, transcendentalism,we owe nearly all that is highest, andunfortunately much also that is most inchoate, inNew England literature. Its spirit of complacentself-dependence was dangerous at the best, althoughin Whittier I cannot see that it did morethan confirm his habit of uncritical prolixity; itcould offer no spiritual seduction to one who heldliberally the easy doctrine of the Friends. But tothe other influence he fell a natural prey. Thewhole tradition of the Quakers—the memory ofPastorius, whom he was to sing as the PennsylvaniaPilgrim; the inheritance of saintly JohnWoolman, whose Journal he was to edit—preparedhim to take part in the great battle of theAbolitionists. From that memorable hour whenhe met Garrison face to face on his Haverhillfarm to the ending of the war in 1865, he was nolonger free to develop intellectually, but was aservant of reform and politics. I am not, of[Pg 33]course, criticising that movement or its achievement;I regret only that one whose temper andgenius called for fostering in quiet fields shouldhave been dragged into that stormy arena. Ashe says in lines that are true if not elegant:

It is not merely that political interests absorbedthe energy which would otherwise have gone toletters; the knowledge of life acquired might havecompensated and more than compensated for lesswriting, and, indeed, he wrote too much as it was.The difficulty is rather that "the pledged philanthropyof earth" somehow militates against art,as Whittier himself felt. Not only the poemsactually written to forward the propaganda arefor the most part dismal reading, but somethingof their tone has crept into other poems, with aneffect to-day not far from cant. Twice the cry ofthe liberator in Whittier rose to noble writing.But in both cases it is not the mere pleading ofreform but a very human and personal indignationthat speaks. InMassachusetts to Virginiathis feeling of outrage calls forth one of the moststirring pieces of personification ever written, norcan I imagine a day when a man of Massachusettsshall be able to read it without a tingling of theblood, or a Virginian born hear it without a sense[Pg 34]of unacknowledged shame; inIchabod he uttereda word of individual scorn that will rise up forquotation whenever any strong leader misuses,or is thought to misuse, his powers. Every oneknows the lines in which Webster is pilloried forhis defection:

It is instructive that only when his note is thuspierced by individual emotion does the reformerattain to universality of appeal. Unfortunatelymost of Whittier's slave songs sink down to adreary level—down to the almost humorous pathosof the lines suggested byUncle Tom's Cabin:

What he needed above everything else, whathis surroundings were least of all able to give[Pg 35]him, was a canon of taste, which would havedriven him to stiffen his work, to purge away theflaccid and set the genuinely poetical in strongerrelief—a purely literary canon which would haveoffset the moralist and reformer in him, and madeit impossible for him (and his essays show that thecritical vein was not absent by nature) to writeof Longfellow'sPsalm of Life: "These ninesimple verses are worth more than all the dreamsof Shelley, and Keats, and Wordsworth. Theyare alive and vigorous with the spirit of the dayin which we live—the moral steam enginery of anage of action." While Tennyson and MatthewArnold were writing in England, the earlier traditionhad not entirely died out in America thatthe first proof of genius is an abandonment ofone's mind to temperament and "inspiration."Byron had written verse as vacillating and formlessas any of Whittier's; Shelley had pouredforth page after page of effusive vapourings; Keatslearned the lesson of self-restraint almost too late;Wordsworth indulged in platitudes as simperingas "holy Eva"; but none of these poets sufferedso deplorably from the lack of criticism as thefinest of our New England spirits. The verymagnificence of their rebellion, the depth andoriginality of their emotion, were a compensationfor their licence, were perhaps inevitably involvedin it. The humbler theme of Whittier's muse canoffer no such apology; he who sings the commonplacejoys and cares of the heart needs above all[Pg 36]to attain thatsimplex munditiis which is the lastrefinement of taste; lacking that, he becomes himselfcommonplace. And Whittier knew this. Inthe Proem to the first general collection of hispoems, he wrote:

But at this point we must part company withhis confession. His reward is not that he showed"a hate of tyranny intense" or laid his gifts onthe shrine of Freedom, but that more completelythan any other poet he developed the peculiarlyEnglishideal of the home which Cowper firstbrought intimately into letters, and added to itthosehomely comforts of the spirit which Cowpernever felt. With Longfellow he was destined tothrow the glamour of the imagination over "ourcommon world of joy and woe."

Perhaps something in his American surroundingsfitted him peculiarly for this humbler rôle.The fact that the men who had made the newcolony belonged to the middle class of society[Pg 37]tended to raise the idea of home into undisputedhonour, and the isolation and perils of their situationin the earlier years had enhanced this feelinginto something akin to a cult. America is stillthe land of homes. That may be a lowly themefor a poet; to admire such poetry may, indeed itdoes, seem to many to smack of a bourgeois taste.And yet there is an implication here that carriesa grave injustice. For myself, I admit thatWhittier is one of the authors of my choice, andthat I read him with ever fresh delight; I eventhink there must be something spurious in thatman's culture whose appreciation of Milton orShelley dulls his ear to the paler but very refinedcharm of Whittier. If truth be told, there issometimes a kind of exquisite content in turningfrom the pretentious poets who exact so much ofthe reader to the more immediate appeal of oursweet Quaker. In comparison with those moreexalted muses his nymph is like the nut-brownlass of the old song—

And often, after fatiguing the brain with thesearchings and inquisitive flight of the Masters,we are ready to say with Whittier:

There, to me at least, and not in the balladswhich are more generally praised, lies the rareexcellence of Whittier. True enough, some ofthese narrative poems are spirited and admirablycomposed. Now and then, as inCassandraSouthwick, they strike a note which reminds onesingularly of the real ballads of the people; infact, it would not be fanciful to discover a certainresemblance between the manner of their productionand of the old popular songs. Theirpublication in obscure newspapers, from whichthey were copied and gradually sent the roundsof the country, is not essentially different fromthe way in which many of the ballads wereprobably spread abroad. The very atmospherethat surrounded the boy in a land where thetraditions of border warfare and miraculousevents still ran from mouth to mouth preparedhim for such balladry. Take, for example, thisaccount of his youth from the Introduction toSnow-Bound:

No doubt this legendary training helped togive more life to Whittier's ballads and bordertales than ordinarily enters into that rather factitiousform of composition; and for a while hemade a deliberate attempt to create out of it anative literature. But the effect was still deeper,by a kind of contrast, on his poetry of the home.After several incursions into the world as editorand agitator, he was compelled by ill health tosettle down finally in the Amesbury house, whichhe had bought in 1836; and there with little interruptionhe lived from his thirty-third to hiseighty-fifth year, the year of his death. InSnow-Boundhis memory called up a picture of the oldHaverhill homestead, unsurpassed in its kind forsincerity and picturesqueness; in poem after poemhe celebrated directly or indirectly "the riverhemmed with leaning trees," the hills and ponds,the very roads and bridges of the land about thesesheltered towns. On the one hand, the recollectionof the wilder life through which his parentshad come added to the snugness and intimacy ofthese peaceful scenes, and, on the other hand, theencroachment of trade and factories into theirmidst lent a poignancy of regret for a grace thatwas passing away. Mr. Pickard's little guide-book,to which I have already referred, bringstogether happily the innumerable allusions oflocal interest; there is no spot in America, not[Pg 40]even Concord, where the light of fancy lies soentrancingly:

For it must be seen that the crudeness ofWhittier's education, and the thorny ways intowhich he was drawn, marred a large part, but byno means all, of his work. There are a fewpoems in his collection of an admirable craftsmanshipin that genre which is none the lessdifficult—which I sometimes think is almost moredifficult—because it lies so perilously near thetrivial and mean. There are others which needonly a little pruning, perhaps a little heighteninghere and there, to approach the same perfectionof charm. Especially they have that harmonyof tone which arises from the unspoiled sincerity ofthe writer and ends by subduing the reader to arestful sympathy with their mood. No one canread much in Whittier without feeling that thesehills and valleys about the Merrimac have becomeone of the inalienable domiciles of the spirit—afamiliar place where the imagination dwells withuntroubled delight. Even the little things, theflowers and birds of the country, are made to contributeto the sense of homely content. There isone poem in particular which has always seemedto me significant of Whittier's manner, and acomparison of it with the famous flower poemsof Wordsworth will show the difference between[Pg 41]what I call the poetry of the hearth and the poetryof intimate nature. It was written to celebrate agift ofPressed Gentian that hung at the poet'swindow, presenting to wayside travellers only a"grey disk of clouded glass":

There is not a little of self-portraiture in this imageof the flower, and it may be that some who havewritten of Whittier patronisingly are like thehasty passer-by—they see only thegrey disk ofclouded glass.

And the emotion that furnishes the loudestnote to most poets is subdued in Whittier to thesame gentle tone. To be sure, there is evidenceenough that his heart in youth was touched almostto a Byronic melancholy, and he himselfsomewhere remarks that "Few guessed beneathhis aspect grave, What passions strove in chains."But was there not a remnant of self-deception[Pg 42]here? Do not the calmest and wisest of us liketo believe we are calm and wise by virtue ofvigorous self-repression? Wordsworth, we remember,explained the absence of love from hispoetry on the ground that his passions were tooviolent to allow any safe expression of them.Possibly they were. Certainly, in Whittier'sverse we have no reflection of those tropic heats,but only "the Indian summer of the heart." Thevery title,Memories, of his best-known love poem(based on a real experience, the details of whichhave recently been revealed) suggests the mood inwhich he approaches this subject. It is not thequest of desire he sings, but the home-coming afterthe frustrate search and the dreaming recollectionby the hearth of an ancient loss. In the sameway, his balladMaud Muller, which is supposedto appeal only to the unsophisticated, is attunedto that shamelessly provincial rhyme,

It is a little so with us all, perhaps, as it waswith the judge and the maiden; only, as welearn the lesson of years, the disillusion is likelyto be mingled strangely with relief, and thesadness to take on a most comfortable and flatteringQuaker drab—as it did with our "hermit ofAmesbury."

If love was a memory, religion was for Whittiera hope and an ever-present consolation—peculiarly[Pg 43]a consolation, because he brought into it the samethought of home-coming that marks his treatmentof nature and the passions. Partly, this was dueto his inherited creed, which was tolerant enoughto soften theological dispute: "Quakerism," heonce wrote to Lucy Larcom, "has no Church ofits own—it belongs to the Church Universal andInvisible." In great part the spirit of his faithwas private to him; it even called for a note ofapology to the sterner of his brethren:

Not a strenuous mood it may be, or very exalted—notthe mood of the battling saints, but onefamiliar to many a troubled man in his hours ofsimpler trust. We have been led to Whittierthrough the familiar poetry of Cowper; considerwhat it would have been to that tormented soulif for one day he could have forgotten the awe ofhis divinity andleaned his human heart on God.It is not good for any but the strongest to dwelltoo much with abstractions of the mind. And,after all, change the phrasing a little, substituteif you choose some other intuitive belief for thepoet's childlike faith, and you will be surprised tofind how many of the world's philosophers wouldaccept the response of Whittier:

Such a rout of the intellect may seem ignominious,but is it any more so than the petulance ofRenan because all his learning had only broughthim to the same state of skepticism as that of thegamin in the streets of Paris? Our tether is shortenough, whichever way we seek escape. It isworth noting that in his essay on Baxter (he whoconceived of the saints' rest in a very differentspirit) Whittier blames that worthy just for theexaltation of his character. "In our view," hesays, "this was its radical defect. He had toolittle of humanity, he felt too little of the attractionof this world, and lived too exclusively in thespiritual and the unearthly."

And if Whittler's faith was simple and human,his vision of the other world was strangely likethe remembrance of a home that we have left inyouth. There is a striking expression of this inone of his prose tales, now almost forgotten despitetheir elements of pale but very genuinehumour and pathos, as if written by an attenuatedHawthorne. The good physician, Dr. Singletary,and his friends are discussing the future life,and says one of them:

It was eminently proper that, as the poet layawaiting death, with his kinsfolk gathered abouthim, one of them should have recited the stanzasof his psalmAt Last:

I would not call this the highest religiouspoetry, pure and sweet as it may be. Something[Pg 47]still is lacking, but to see that want fulfilled onemust travel out of Whittier's age, back throughall the eighteenth century, back into the seventeenth.There you will find it in Vaughan andHerbert and sometimes in Marvell—poets whomWhittier read and admired. Take two poemsfrom these two ages, place them side by side, andthe one thing needed fairly strikes the eyes. Thefirst poem Whittier wrote after the death of hissister Elizabeth (who had been to him what Mrs.Unwin had been to Cowper) wasThe Vanishers,founded on a pretty superstition he had read inSchoolcraft:

It is not a fair comparison to set one of Whittier'sinferior productions beside this superbest hymnof an eloquent age; but would any religious poemof the nineteenth century, even the best of them,fare much better? There is indeed one thinglacking, and that isecstasy. But ecstasy demandsa different kind of faith from that of Whittier'sday or ours, and, missing that, I do not see whywe should begrudge our praise to a genius of pureand quiet charm.

I have already intimated that too complete apreoccupation with the reforming and politicalside of Whittier's life has kept the biographersfrom recognising that charm in what he himselfregarded as his best poem. In 1872, in the fullmaturity of his powers and when the nationalpeace had allowed him to indulge the peace inhis own heart, he wrote his exquisite idyl,ThePennsylvania Pilgrim. Perhaps the mere nameof the poem may suggest another cause why ithas been overlooked. Whittier has always stoodpre-eminently as the exponent of New Englandlife, and for very natural reasons. And yet it[Pg 49]would not be difficult to show from passages inhis prose works that his heart was never quite atease in that Puritan land. The recollection ofthe sufferings which his people had undergone fortheir faith' sake rankled a little in his breast,and he was never in perfect sympathy with theausterity of New England traditions. We catcha tone of relief as he turns in imagination to thepeace that dwelt "within the land of Penn":

It was no doubt during his early residence inPhiladelphia that he learned the story of the goodPastorius, who, in 1683, left the fatherland andthe society of the mystics he loved to lead a colonyof Friends to Germantown. The Pilgrim's life inthat bountiful valley between the Schuylkill andthe Delaware—

offered to Whittier a subject admirably adaptedto his powers. Here the faults of taste that elsewhereso often offend us are sunk in the harmonyof the whole and in the singular unity of impression;and the lack of elevation that so often stints[Pg 50]our praise becomes a suave and mellow beauty.All the better elements of his genius are displayedhere in opulent freedom. The affections of theheart unfold in unembittered serenity. The senseof home seclusion is heightened by the presenceof the enveloping wilderness, but not disturbedby any harsher contrast. Within is familiar joyand retirement unassailed—not without a touchof humour, as when in the evening, "while hiswife put on her look of love's endurance," Pastoriustook down his tremendous manuscript—

(The manuscript still exists; pray heaven it benever published!) Now and then the winterevenings were broken by the coming of some welcomeguest—some traveller from the Old Worldbringing news of fair Von Merlau and the otherbeloved mystics; some magistrate from the youngcity,

or some neighbour of the country, the learnedSwedish pastor who, like Pastorius, "could baffleBabel's lingual curse,"

Such was the life within, and out of doors werethe labours of the gardener and botanist, while

The scene calls forth some of Whittier's mostperfect lines of description. Could anything bemore harmonious than this, with its economy ofsimple grace,

No poem would be thoroughly characteristic ofWhittier without some echo of the slavery dispute,and our first introduction to Pastorius is, indeed,as to a baffled forerunner of John Woolman. Butthe question here takes on its most human andleast political form; it lets in just enough of theoutside world of action to save the idyl from unreality.Nor could religion well be absent; rather,the whole poem may be called an illustrationthrough the Pilgrim's life of that Inner Guide,speaking to him not with loud and controversialtones, as it spoke to George Fox, but with thestill, small voice of comfortable persuasion:

The account of the grave Friends, unsummonedby bells, walking meeting-ward, and of thegathered stillness of the room into which onlythe songs of the birds penetrated from without,is one of the happiest passages of the poem. Howdear those hours of common worship were toWhittier may be understood from another poem,addressed to a visitor who asked him why he didnot seek rather the grander temple of nature:

For the dinner given to Whittier on his seventiethbirthday Longfellow wrote a sonnet on[Pg 53]The Three Silences of Molinos—the silence of speech,of desire, and of thought, through which areheard "mysterious sounds from realms beyondour reach." Perhaps only one who at some timein his life has caught, or seemed to catch, thosevoices and melodies is quite able to appreciate thecharm of Whittier through the absence of somuch that calls to us in other poets.

THE CENTENARY OF SAINTE-BEUVE

It is a hundred years since Sainte-Beuve wasborn in the Norman city that looks over towardEngland, and more than a generation has passedsince his death just before the war with Germany.[4]Yesterday three countries—France, Belgium, andSwitzerland—were celebrating his centenary withspeeches and essays and dinners, and the singingof hymns. At Lausanne, where he had given hislectures onPort-Royal, and had undergone not alittle chagrin for his pains, the University unveileda bronze medallion of his head,—a Sainte-Beuvedisillusioned and complex, writes a Parisian journalist,with immoderate forehead radiating a coldserenity, while the lips are contracted into a smileat once voluptuous and sarcastic, as it were anErasmus grown fat, with a reminiscence of Baudelairein the ironic mask of the face. It is evidentlythe "Père Beuve" as we know him in the portraits,and it is not hard to imagine the lips curlinga little more sardonically at the thought ofthe change that has come since he was a poverty-[Pg 55]strickenhack and his foibles were the ridicule ofParis.

Yet through all these honours I cannot helpobserving a strain of reluctance, as so often happenswith a critic who has made himself feared bythe rectitude of his judgments. There has, forone thing, been a good deal of rather foolishscandal-mongering and raking up of old anecdotesabout his gross habits. Well, Sainte-Beuvewas sensual. "Je suis du peuple ainsi que mesamours," he was wont to hum over his work; andwhen that work was finished, his secretary tellsus how he used to draw a hat down over his face(that facedont le front démesurément haut rayonnede sérénité froide), and go out on the street for anychance liaison. There is something too much ofthese stories in what is written of Sainte-Beuveto-day; and in the estimate of his intellectualcareer too little emphasis is laid on what wasstable in his opinions, and too much emphasis onthe changes of his religious and literary creed.To be sure, these mutations of belief are commonlycited as his preparation for the art of critic,and in a certain sense this is right. But eventhen, if by critic is meant one who merely decidesthe value of this or that book, the essential wordis left unsaid. He was a critic, and somethingmore; he was, if any man may claim such a title,themaître universel of the century, as, indeed, hehas been called.

And the time of his life contributed as much to[Pg 56]this position of Doctor Universalis as did his ownintelligence. France, during those years from theRevolution of 1830 to the fall of the Second Empire,was the seething-pot of modern ideas, andthe impression left by the history of the period isnot unlike that of watching the witch scenes inMacbeth. The eighteenth century had been earnest,mad in part, but its intention was comparativelysingle,—to tear down the fabric ofauthority, whether political or religious, andallow human nature, which was fundamentallygood, though depraved by custom, to assert itself.And human nature did assert itself pretty vigorouslyin the French Revolution, proving, onemight suppose, if it proved anything, that itsfoundation, like its origin, is with the beasts. Tothe men who came afterward that tremendousevent stood like a great prism between themselvesand the preceding age; the pillar of light towardwhich they looked for guidance was distorted byit and shattered into a thousand coloured rays.For many of them, as for Sainte-Beuve, it meantthat the old humanitarian passion remained sideby side with a profound distrust of the popularheart; for all, the path of reform took the directionof some individual caprice or ideal. There weredemocrats and monarchists and imperialists; therewas the rigid Catholic reaction led by Bonald andde Maistre, and the liberal Catholicism of Lamennais;there was the socialism of Saint-Simon,mixed with notions of a religious hierarchy, and[Pg 57]other schemes of socialism innumerable; whileskepticism took every form of condescension orantagonism. Literature also had its serious mission,and the battle of the romanticists shookParis almost as violently as a political revolution.Through it all science was marching with steadygaze, waiting for the hour when it should lay itscold hand on the heart of society.

And with all these movements Sainte-Beuvewas more or less intimately concerned. As a boyhe brought with him to Paris the pietistic sentimentsof his mother and an aunt on whom, hisfather being dead, his training had devolved.Upon these sentiments he soon imposed the philosophyof the eighteenth century, followed by aclose study of the Revolution. It is noteworthythat his first journalistic work on theGlobe wasa literary description of the places in Greece towhich the war for independence was calling attention,and the reviewing of various memoirs of theFrench Revolution. From these influences hepassed to thecénacle of Victor Hugo, and becameone of the champions of the new romantic school.Meanwhile literature was mingled with romanceof another sort, and the story of the critic's friendshipfor the haughty poet and of his love for thepoet's wife is of a kind almost incomprehensibleto the Anglo-Saxon mind. It may be said inpassing that the letters of Sainte-Beuve to M. andMme. Hugo, which have only to-day been recoveredand published in theRevue de Paris,[Pg 58]throw rather a new light on this whole affair.They do not exculpate Sainte-Beuve, but they atleast free him from ridicule. His successful passionfor Mme. Hugo, with its abrupt close whenMme. Hugo's daughter came to her first confession,and his tormented courtship of Mme. d'Arbouvillein later years, were the chief elements inthatéducation sentimentale which made him socunning in the secrets of the feminine breast.

But this is a digression. Personal and criticalcauses carried him out of the camp of Victor Hugointo the ranks of the Saint-Simonians, whom hefollowed for a while with a kind of half-detachedenthusiasm. Probably he was less attracted bythe hopes of a mystically regenerated society, withEnfantin as its supreme pontiff, than by the desireof finding some rest for the imagination inthis religion of universal love. At least he perceivedin the new brotherhood a relief from thestrained individualism of the romantic poets, andthe same instinct, no doubt, followed him fromSaint-Simonism into the fold of Lamennais.There at last he thought to see united the idealsof religion and democracy, and some of the bitterestwords he ever wrote were in memory ofthe final defalcation of Lamennais, who, as Sainte-Beuvesaid, saved himself but left his disciplesstranded in the mire. Meanwhile this particulardisciple had met new friends in Switzerland, andthrough their aid was brought at a critical momentto Lausanne to lecture onPort-Royal. There he[Pg 59]learned to know and respect Vinet, the Protestanttheologian and critic, who, with the help of hisgood friends the Oliviers, undertook to convertthe wily Parisian to Calvinism. Saint-Beuve himselfseems to have gone into the discussion quiteearnestly, but for one who knows the past experiencesof that subtle twister there is somethingalmost ludicrous in the way these anxious missionariesreported each accession and retrogressionof his faith. He came back to Paris a confirmedand satisfied doubter, willing to sacrifice to thegoddess Chance as the blind deity of this world,convinced of materialism and of the essential basenessof human nature, yet equally convinced thatwithin man there rules some ultimate principle ofgenius or individual authority which no rationalismcan explain, and above all things determinedto keep his mind open to whatever currents oftruth may blow through our murky human atmosphere.He ended where he began, in what maybe called a subtilised and refined philosophy ofthe eighteenth century, with a strain of melancholyquite peculiar to the baffled experience ofthe nineteenth. His aim henceforth was to applyto the study of mankind the analytical precisionof science, with a scientific method of groupingmen into spiritual families.

Much has been made of these varied twistingsof Sainte-Beuve's, both for his honour and dishonour.Certainly they enabled him to insinuatehimself into almost every kind of intelligence and[Pg 60]report of each author as if he were writing out aphase of his own character; they made him in theend the spokesman of that eager and troubled agewhose ferment is to-day just reaching America.France scarcely holds the place of intellectualsupremacy once universally accorded her, yet toher glory be it said that, if we look anywhere fora single man who summed up within himself thelife of the nineteenth century, we instinctivelyturn to that country. And more and more it appearsthat to Sainte-Beuve in particular thathonour must accrue. His understanding wasmore comprehensive than Taine's or Renan's,more subtle than that of the former, more uprightthan that of the latter, more single toward thetruth and more accurate than that of either.He never, as did Taine, allowed a preconceivedidea to warp his arrangement of facts, nor did heever, at least in his mature years, allow his sentimentality,as did Renan, to take the place ofjudgment. Both the past and the present are reflectedin his essays with equal clearness.

On the other hand, this versatility of experiencehas not seldom been laid to lightness and inconsistencyof character. I cannot see that thecharge holds good, unless it be directed alsoagainst the whole age through which he passed.If any one thing has been made clear by the publishingof Sainte-Beuve's letters and by the closerinvestigation of his life, it is that he was in theseearlier years a sincere seeker after religion, and[Pg 61]was only held back at the last moment by someinvincible impotence of faith from joining himselffinally with this or that sect. And he was thusan image of the times. What else is the meaningof all those abortive attempts to amalgamate religionwith the humanitarianism left over from theeighteenth century, but a searching for faith wherethe spiritual eye had been blinded? I shouldsuppose that Sainte-Beuve's refusal in the end tospeak the irrevocable word of adhesion indicatedrather the clearness of his self-knowledge thanany lightness of procedure. Nor is his inconsistency,whether religious or literary, quite sogreat as it is sometimes held up to be. The inheritanceof the eighteenth century was strongupon him, while at the same time he had a cravingfor the inner life of the spirit. Naturally hefelt a powerful attraction in the preaching of suchmen as Saint-Simon and Lamennais, who boastedto combine these two tendencies; but the mummeryof Saint-Simonism and the instability ofMennaisianism, when it came to the test, toosoon exposed the lack of spiritual substance inboth. With this revelation came a growing distrustof human nature, caused by the politicaldegeneracy of France, and by a kind of revulsionhe threw himself upon the Jansenism which containedthe spirituality the other creeds missed,and which based itself frankly on the total depravityof mankind. He was too much a childof the age to breathe in that thin air, and fell back[Pg 62]on all that remained to him,—inquisitive doubtand a scientific demand for positive truth. It isthe history of the century.

And in literature I find the same inconstancyon the surface, while at heart he suffered littlechange. Only here his experience ran counterto the times, and most of the opprobrium that hasbeen cast on him is due to the fact that he neverallowed the clamour of popular taste and thewarmth of his sympathy with present modes todrown that inner critical voice of doubt. As astandard-bearer of Victor Hugo and the romanticistshe still maintained his reserves, and, on theother hand, long after he had turned renegadefrom that camp he still spoke of himself as onlydemi-converti. The proportion changed with hisdevelopment, but from beginning to end he wasat bottom classical in his love of clarity and self-restraint,while intensely interested in the life andaspirations of his own day. There is in one ofthe recently published letters to Victor Hugo anoteworthy illustration of this steadfastness. Itwas, in fact, the second letter he wrote to thepoet, and goes back to 1827, the year ofCromwell.On the twelfth of February, Hugo read his newtragi-comedy aloud, and Sainte-Beuve was evidentlywarm in expressions of praise. But in theseclusion of his own room the critical instinct reawokein him, and he wrote the next day a longletter to the dramatist, not retracting what he hadsaid, but adding certain reservations and insinu[Pg 63]atingcertain admonitions. "Toutes ces critiquesrentrent dans une seule que je m'étais déjà permisd'adresser à votre talent, l'excès, l'abus de laforce, et passez-moi le mot, lacharge." Is notthe whole of his critical attitude toward the menof his age practically contained in this rebuke ofexcess, and over-emphasis, and self-indulgence?And Sainte-Beuve when he wrote the words wasjust twenty-three, was in the first ardour of hisattachment to the giant—the Cyclops, he seemedto Sainte-Beuve later—of the century.

But after all, it is not the elusive seeker of theseyears that we think of when Sainte-Beuve isnamed, nor the author of those many volumes,—thePortraits, theChateaubriand, even thePort-Royal,—butthe writer of the incomparableLundis.In 1849 he had returned from Liège after lecturingfor a year at the University, and found himselfabounding in ideas, keen for work, and withoutregular employment. He was asked to contributea critical essay to theConstitutionnel each Monday,and accepted the offer eagerly. "It is nowtwenty-five years," he said, "since I started inthis career; it is the third form in which I havebeen brought to give out my impressions andliterary judgments." These firstCauseries continueduntil 1860, and are published in fourteensolid volumes. There was a brief respite then,and in 1861 he began theNouveaux Lundis,which continued in theMoniteur and theTempsuntil his last illness in 1869, filling thirteen[Pg 64]similar volumes. Meanwhile his mother had died,leaving him a house in Paris and a small income,and in 1865 he had been created a senator byNapoleon III. at the instigation of the PrincesseMathilde.

In his earlier years he had been poor andanxious, living in a student's room, and toilingindefatigably to keep the wolf from the door. Atthe end he was rich, and had command of histime, yet the story of his labours while writingthe latestLundis is one of the heroic examples ofliterature. "Every Tuesday morning," he oncewrote to a friend, "I go down to the bottom of apit, not to reascend until Friday evening at someunknown hour." Those were the days of preparationand plotting. From his friend M. Chéron,who was librarian of the Bibliothèque Impériale,came memoirs and histories and manuscripts,—whatevermight serve him in getting up his subject.Late in the week he wrote a rough draft ofthe essay, commonly about six thousand wordslong, in a hand which no one but himself coulddecipher. This task was ordinarily finished in asingle day, and the essay was then dictated offrapidly to a secretary to take down in a fair copy.That must have been a strenuous season for thecopyist, for Sainte-Beuve read at a prodigious rate,showing impatience at any delay, and still greaterimpatience at any proposed alteration. Indeed,during the whole week of preparation he wasso absorbed in his theme as to ruffle up at the[Pg 65]slightest opposition. In the evening he wouldeat a hearty dinner, and then walk out with hissecretary to the outer Boulevards, the Luxembourg,or the Place Saint-Sulpice, for his digestion,talking all the while on the comingLundiwith intense absorption. And woe to the poorcompanion if he expressed any contradiction, orhinted that the subject was trivial,—as indeed itoften was, until the critic had clothed it with thelife of his own thought. "In a word," Sainte-Beuvewould cry out savagely, "you wish tohinder me in writing my article. The subjecthas not the honour of your sympathy. Reallyit is too bad." Whereupon he would turn angrilyon his heel and stride home. The story explainsthe nature of Sainte-Beuve's criticism. For aweek he lived with his author; "he belongedbody and soul to his model! He embraced it,espoused it, exalted it!"—with the result thatsome of this enthusiasm is transmitted to thereader, and the essays are instinct with life as noother critic's work has ever been. The strain ofliving thus passionately in a new subject weekafter week was tremendous, and it is not strangethat his letters are filled with complaints of fatigue,and that his health suffered in spite of his robustconstitution. Nor was the task ended with thedictation late Friday night. Most of Saturdayand Sunday was given up to proofreading, andat this time he invited every suggestion, evencontradiction, often practically rewriting an essay[Pg 66]before it reached the press. Monday he was free,and it was on that day occurred the famous Magnydinners, when Sainte-Beuve, Flaubert, Renan, theGoncourts, and a few other chosen spirits, met andtalked as only Frenchmen can talk. Every conceivablesubject was passed under the fire ofcriticism; nothing was held sacred. Only oneday a luckless guest, after faith in religion andpolitics and morals had been laughed away, venturedto intimate that Homer as a canon of tastewas merely a superstition like another; whereuponsuch a hubbub arose as threatened to bringthe dinners to an end at once and for all. Thestory is told in theJournal of the Goncourts, andit was one of the brothers, I believe, who madethe perilous insinuation. Imagine, if you can, aparty of Englishmen taking Homer, or any otherquestion of literary faith, with tragic seriousness.Such an incident explains many things; it explainswhy English literature has never been, likethe French, an integral part of the national life.

And the integrity of mind displayed in theLundis is as notable as the industry. From thebeginning Sainte-Beuve had possessed that inquisitivepassion for the truth, without which allother critical gifts are as brass and tinkling cymbals.Nevertheless, it is evident that he did notalways in his earlier writings find it expedient toexpress his whole thought. He was, for example,at one time the recognised herald of the romanticrevolt, and naturally, while writing about Victor[Pg 67]Hugo, he did not feel it necessary to make in publicsuch frank reservations as his letters to thatpoet contain. His whole thought is there, perhaps,but one has to read between the lines to getit. And so it was with the other men and movementswith which he for a while allied himself.With theLundis came a change; he was free ofall entanglements, and could make the precisetruth his single aim. No doubt a remnant of personaljealousy toward those who had passed himin the race of popularity embittered the criticalreservations which he felt, but which might otherwisehave been uttered more genially. But quiteas often this seeming rancour was due to the feelingthat he had hitherto been compelled to suppresshis full convictions, to a genuine regret forthe corrupt ways into which French literaturewas deviating. How nearly the exigencies of ahack writer had touched him is shown by a passagein a letter to the Oliviers written in 1838.His Swiss friend was debating whether he shouldtry his fortunes in Paris as a contributor to themagazines, and had asked for advice. "Butwhere to write? what to write?" replied Sainte-Beuve;"if one could only choose for himself!You must wait on opportunity, and in the longrun this becomes a transaction in which consciencemay be saved, but every ideal perishes,"—danslaquelle la conscience peut toujours êtresauve mais où tout idéal périt. Just about this timehe was thinking seriously of migrating with the[Pg 68]Oliviers to this country. It would be curious tohear what he might have written from New Yorkto one who contemplated coming there as a hackwriter. As for the loss of ideals, his meaning, ifit needs any elucidation, may be gathered from awell-known passage in one of his books:

Those were the words with which he had closedhis chapters onChateaubriand; yet through allhis deviations he had borne steadily toward onepoint. In after years he could write without presumptionto a friend: "If I had a device, it wouldbe thetrue, thetrue alone; and the beautiful andthe good might come out as best they could."There are a number of anecdotes which show howprecious he held this integrity of mind. The bestknown is the fact that, in the days before he wasappointed senator, and despite the pressure that[Pg 69]was brought to bear on him, he still refused towrite a review of the Emperor'sHistory of Cæsar.

Both the sense of disillusion, which was reallyinherent in him from his youth, and the passionfor truth hindered him in his "creative" work,while they increased his powers as a critic. Hegrew up, it must be remembered, in the midst ofthe full romantic tide, and as a writer of versethere was really no path of great achievementopen to him save that of Victor Hugo and Lamartineand the others of whose glory he was sojealous. Whatever may have been the differencesof those poets, in one respect they were alike:they all disregarded the subtlenuance whereinthe truth resides, and based their emotions onsome grandiose conception, half true and halffalse; nor was this mingling of the false and trueany less predominant in one of Hugo's politicalodes than in Lamartine's personal and religiousmeditations. Now, the whole bent of Sainte-Beuve'sintellect was toward the subtle drawingof distinctions, and even to-day a reader somewhatromantically and emotionally inclined resentsthe manner in which his scalpel cuts intothe work of these poets and severs what is morbidfrom what is sound. That is criticism; but itmay easily be seen that such a habit of mind whencarried to excess would paralyse the poetic impulse.The finest poetry, perhaps, is writtenwhen this discriminating principle works inthe writer strongly but unconsciously; when a[Pg 70]certain critical atmosphere about him controls histaste, while not compelling him to dull the edgeof impulse by too much deliberation. Boileauhad created such an atmosphere about Molièreand Racine; Sainte-Beuve had attempted, butunsuccessfully, to do the same for the poets of theromantic renaissance. His failure was due inpart to a certain lack of impressiveness in his ownpersonality, but still more to the notions of individuallicence which lay at the very foundation ofthat movement. There is a touch of real pathosin his superb tribute to Boileau:

Nobler tribute to a great predecessor has notoften been uttered, and in contrast one remembersthe outrage that has been poured on Boileau'sname by the later poets of France and England.One recalls the scorn of the young Keats, in thosedays when he took licence upon himself to abusethe King's English as only a wilful genius can:

I am not one to fling abuse on the school ofDryden and Pope, yet the eighteenth centurymay to some minds justify the charge of Keatsand the romanticists. Certainly the critical restraintof French rules, passing to England at atime when the tide of inspiration had run low, induceda certain aridity of manner. But considerfor a moment what might have been the result inEnglish letters if the court of Elizabeth had harboureda man of authority such as Boileau, or, toput it the other way, if the large inspiration ofthose poets and playwrights had not come beforethe critical sense of the land was out of its swaddlingclothes. What might it have been for us if[Pg 72]a Boileau and an Elizabeth together had taughtShakespeare to prune his redundancies, to disentanglehis language at times, to eliminate therelics of barbarism in his dénouements; if theyhad compelled the lesser dramatists to simplifytheir plots and render their characters conceivablemoral agents; if they had instructed the sonneteersin common sense and in the laws of the sonnet;if they had constrained Spenser to tell astory,—consider what this might have meant, notonly to the writers of that day, but to the traditionthey formed for those that were to come after.We should have had our own classics, and notbeen forced to turn to Athens for our canons oftaste. There would not have been for our confusionthe miserable contrast between the "correctness"of Queen Anne's day and the creativegenius of Elizabeth's, but the two together wouldhave made a literature incomparable for richnessand judgment. It is not too much to say that theabsence of such a controlling influence at thegreat expansive moment of England is a loss forwhich nothing can ever entirely compensate inour literature.

Such was the office which Sainte-Beuve soughtto fulfil in the France of his own day. Thatconscious principle of restraint might, he thought,when applied to his own poetical work, introduceinto French literature a style like that of Cowper'sor Wordsworth's in England; and to a certainextent he was successful in this attempt. But in[Pg 73]the end he found the Democritean maxim toostrong for him:Excludit sanos Helicone poetas;and, indeed, the difference between the poet andthe critic may scarcely be better defined than inthis, that in the former the principle of restraintworks unconsciously and from without, whereasin the latter it proceeds consciously and fromwithin. And finding himself debarred fromHelicon (not by impotence, as some would say,but by excess of self-knowledge), he deliberatelyundertook to introduce a little more sanity intothe notions of his contemporaries. I have shownhow at the very beginning of his career he tookupon himself privately such a task with Hugo.It might almost be said that the history of hisintellect is summed up in his growth toward thesane and the simple; that, like Goethe, fromwhom so much of his critical method derives, hislife was a long endeavour to supplant the romanticelements of his taste by the classical. What elseis the meaning of his attack on the excesses ofBalzac? or his defence of Erasmus (le droit, je nedis des tièdes, mais des neutres), and of all thoseothers who sought for themselves a governancein the law of proportion? In one of his latestvolumes he took the occasion of Taine'sHistoryof English Literature to speak out strongly for theadmirable qualities of Pope:

And this love of the golden mean, joined withthe long wanderings of his heart and his loneliness,produced in him a preference for scenes nearat hand and for the quiet joys of the hearth. Soit was that the idyllic tales of George Sand touchedhim quickly with their strange romance of thefamiliar. Chateaubriand and the others of thatschool had sought out the nature of India, thesavannahs of America, the forests of Canada."Here," he says, "are discoveries for you,[Pg 75]—deserts,mountains, the large horizons of Italy;what remained to discover? That which wasnearest to us, here in the centre of our ownFrance. As happens always, what is most simplecomes at the last." In the same way he praisedthe refined charm of a poet like Cowper, andsought to throw into relief the purer and morehomely verses of a Parny: "If a little knowledgeremoves us, yet greater knowledge brings us backto the sentiment of the beauties and graces of thehearth." Indeed, there is something almostpathetic in the contrast between the life of thislaborious recluse, with his sinister distrust ofhuman nature, and the way in which he fondlesthis image of a sheltered and affectionate home.

But the nineteenth century was not the seventeenth,neither was Sainte-Beuve a Boileau, tostem the current of exaggeration and egotism.His innate sense of proportion brought him to seethe dangerous tendencies of the day, and, failingto correct them, he sank deeper into that disillusionfrom which his weekly task was a long andvain labour of deliverance. He took to himself thesaying of the Abbé Galiani: "Continue yourworks; it is a proof of attachment to life to compose books."Yet it may be that this very disillusionwas one of the elements of his success;for after all, the real passion of literature, thatperfect flower of the contemplative intellect,hardly comes to a man until the allurement of lifehas been dispelled by many experiences, each[Pg 76]bringing its share of disappointment. Only, perhaps,when the hope of love (thespes animicredula mutui) and the visions of ambition, thebelief in pleasure and the luxury of grief, havelost their sting, do we turn to books with thecontented understanding that the shadow is thereality, and the seeming reality of things is theshadow. At least for the critic, however it maybe for the "creative" writer, this final deliverancefrom self-deception would seem to be necessary.Nor do I mean any invidious distinction when Iseparate the critic from the creative writer in thisrespect. I know there is a kind of hostility betweenthe two classes. The poet feels that thecritic by the very possession of this self-knowledgesets himself above the writer who accepts the inspirationof his emotions unquestioningly, whilethe critic resents the fact that the world at largelooks upon his work as subordinate, if not superfluous.And yet, in the case of criticism, such asSainte-Beuve conceived it, this distinction almostceases to exist. No stigma attaches to the workof the historian who recreates the political activitiesof an age, to a Gibbon who raises a vastbridge between the past and the present. Yet,certainly, the best and most durable acts of mankindare the ideals and emotions that go to makeup its books, and to describe and judge the literatureof a country, to pass under review a thousandsystems and reveries, to point out the meaning ofeach, and so write the annals of the human spirit,[Pg 77]to pluck out the heart of each man's mystery andset it before the mind's eye quivering with life,—ifthis be not a labour of immense creative energythe word has no sense to my ears. We read andenjoy, and the past slips unceasingly from ourmemory. We are like the foolish peasant: theriver of history rolls at our feet, and for ever willroll, while we stand and wait. And then comesthis magician, who speaks a word, and suddenlythe current is stopped; who has power like thewizards of old to bid the tide turn back uponitself, and the past becomes to us as the present,and we are made the lords of time. I do notknow how it affects others, but for me, as I lookat the long row of volumes which hold the interpretationof French literature, I am almost overwhelmedat the magnitude of this man'sachievement.

Nor is it to be supposed that Sainte-Beuve, becausehe was primarily a critic, drew his knowledgeof life from books only, and wrote, as itwere, at second hand. The very contrary is true.As a younger man, he had mixed much withsociety, and even in his later years, when, as hesays, he lived at the bottom of a well, he still,through his friendship with the Princesse Mathildeand others of the great world, kept inclose touch with the active forces of the Empire.As a matter of fact, every one knows, who hasread at all in his essays, that he was first of alla psychologist, and that his knowledge of the[Pg 78]human breast was quite as sure as his acquaintancewith libraries. He might almost be accused ofslighting the written word in order to get at thesecret of the writer. What attracted him chieflywas that middle ground where life and literaturemeet, where life becomes self-conscious throughexpression, and literature retains the reality ofassociation with facts. "A little poesy," hethought, "separates us from history and thereality of things; much of poesy brings us back."Literature to him was one of the arts of society.Hence he was never more at his ease, his touchwas never surer and his eloquence more communicable,than when he was dealing with thegreat ladies who guided the society of the eighteenthcentury and retold its events in their lettersand memoirs,—Mme. du Deffand, Mme. deGrafigny, Mlle. de Lespinasse, and those whopreceded and followed. Nowhere does one getcloser to the critic's own disappointment thanwhen he says with a sigh, thinking of those irrecoverabledays: "Happy time! all of life then wasturned to sociability." And he was describinghis own method as a critic, no less than the characterof Mlle. de Lespinasse, when he wrote:"Her great art in society, one of the secrets ofher success, was to feel the intelligence(l'esprit)of others, to make it prevail, and to seem to forgether own. Her conversation was never eitherabove or below those with whom she spoke; shepossessed measure, proportion, rightness of mind.[Pg 79]She reflected so well the impressions of others,and received so visibly the influence of their intelligence,that they loved her for the success shehelped them to attain. She raised this dispositionto an art. 'Ah!' she cried one day, 'how I longto know the foible of every one!'" And this loveof the social side of literature, this hankeringafterla bella scuola when men wrote under thesway of some central governance, explains Sainte-Beuve'sfeeling of desolation amidst the scattered,individualistic tendencies of his own day.

There lie the springs of Sainte-Beuve's criticalart,—his treatment of literature as a function ofsocial life, and his search in all things for thegolden mean. There we find his strength, andthere, too, his limitation. If he fails anywhere, itis when he comes into the presence of those greatand imperious souls who stand apart from thecommon concerns of men, and who rise above ourhomely mediocrities, not by extravagance or egotism,but by the lifting wings of inspiration. Hecould, indeed, comprehend the ascetic grandeur ofa Pascal or the rolling eloquence of a Bossuet, buthe was distrustful of that fervid breath of poesythat comes and goes unsummoned and uncontrolled.It is a common charge against him thathe was cold to the sublime, and he himself wasaware of this defect, and sought to justify it. "Ilne faut donner dans le sublime," he said, "qu'àla dernière extrémité et à son corps défendant."Something of this, too, must be held to account[Pg 80]for the haunting melancholy that he could forget,but never overcome. He might have lived witha kind of content in the society of those refinedand worldly women of the eighteenth century,but, missing the solace of that support, he wasunable amid the dissipated energies of his ownage to rise to that surer peace that needs no communionwith others for its fulfilment. Like theroyal friend of Voltaire, he still lacked the highestdegree of culture, which is religion. Hestrove for that during many years, but alone hecould not attain to it. As early as 1839 he wrote,while staying at Aigues-Mortes: "My soul is likethis beach, where it is said Saint Louis embarked:the sea and faith, alas! have long since drawnaway." One may excuse these limitations as the"defect of his quality," as indeed they are. Butmore than that, they belong to him as a Frenchcritic, as they are to a certain degree inherent inFrench literature. That literature and language,we have been told by no less an authority thanM. Brunetière, are pre-eminently social in theirstrength and their weakness. And Sainte-Beuvewas indirectly justifying his own method whenhe pointed to the example of Voltaire, Molière,La Fontaine, and Rabelais and Villon, the greatancestors. "They have all," he said, "a cornerfrom which they mock at the sublime." I ameven inclined to think that these qualities explainwhy England has never had, and may possiblynever have, a critic in any way comparable to[Pg 81]Sainte-Beuve; for the chief glory of English literaturelies in the very field where French is weakest,in the lonely and unsociable life of the spirit, justas the faults of English are due to its lack of disciplineand uncertainty of taste. And after all,the critical temperament consists primarily in justthis linking together of literature and life, and inthe levelling application of common sense.

Yet if Sainte-Beuve is essentially French, indeedalmost inconceivable in English, he is stillimmensely valuable, perhaps even more valuable,to us for that very reason. There is nothingmore wholesome than to dip into this strong andsteady current of wise judgment. It is good forus to catch the glow of his masterful knowledgeof letters and his faith in their supreme interest.His long row of volumes are the scholar's SummaTheologiæ. As John Cotton loved to sweeten hismouth with a piece of Calvin before he went tosleep, so the scholar may turn to Sainte-Beuve,sure of his never-failing abundance and his ripeintelligence.

THE SCOTCH NOVELS AND SCOTCH
HISTORY

Like many another innocent, no doubt, I wasseduced not long ago by the potent spell of Mr.Andrew Lang's name into reading his voluminousHistory of Scotland. Being too, like Mr.Lang, sealed of the tribe of Sir Walter, andknowing in a general way some of the romanticfeatures of Scotch annals, I was led to supposethat these bulky volumes would be crammed fromcover to cover with the pageantry of fair Romance.Alas, I soon learned, as I have so often learnedbefore, that a little knowledge is a dangerousthing; and I was taught, moreover, a new applicationof several well-worn lines of Milton. Amidthe inextricable feuds of Britons, Scots, Picts, andEnglish; amid the incomprehensible medley ofBruces, Balliols, Stuarts, Douglases, Plantagenets,and Tudors; amid the horrid tumult of Roberts,Davids, Jameses, Malcolms (may their tribes decrease!),Mr. Lang's reader, if he be of alien bloodand foreign shores, wanders helpless and utterlybewildered. On leaving thatselva oscura I feltnot unlike Milton's courageous hero (in courageonly, I trust) before the realm of Chaos and eldestNight, where naught was perceptible but eternal[Pg 83]anarchy and noise of endless wars. Yet with thisbold adventurer it might be said by me:

For throughout the labyrinth of all this anfractuousnarrative there was indeed one guiding rayof light. As often as the author by way of anecdoteor allusion—and happily this occurred prettyfrequently—mentioned the works of Scott, a newand powerful interest was given to the page. Thevery name of Scott seemed providentially symbolicalof his office in literature, and through himScots history has become a theme of significanceto all the world.

On the other hand, one is equally impressed bythe fact that the novels owe much of their vitalityto the manner in which they voice the spirit ofthe national life; and we recognise the truth,often maintained and as often disputed, that thefinal verdict on a novelist's work is generally determinedby the authenticity of his portraiture,not of individuals, but of a people, and consequentlyby the lasting significance of the phaseof society or national life portrayed.

The conditions of the novel should seem in thisrespect to be quite different from those of thepoem. We are conscious within ourselves of some[Pg 84]principle of isolation and exclusion—theprincipiumindividuationis, as the old schoolmen calledit—that obstructs the completion of our being, ofsome contracting force of nature that dwarfs oursympathies with our fellow-men, that hinders thedevelopment of our full humanity, and denies thevalidity of our hopes; and the office of the imaginationand of the imaginative arts is for a whileto break down the walls of this narrowing individualityand to bestow on us the illusion ofunconfined liberty.

But if the end of the arts is the same, theirmethods are various, and this variety extendseven to the different genres of literature. Themanner of the epic, and in a still higher degreeof the tragedy, is so to arouse the will and understandingthat their clogging limitations seem tobe swept away, until through our sympathy withthe hero we feel ourselves to be acting and speakingthe great passions of humanity in their fullestand freest scope; for this reason we call the charactersof the poem types, and we believe that thepoet under the impulse of his inspiration is carriedinto a region above our vision, where, like theexalted souls in Plato's dream, he beholds face toface the great ideas of which our worldly life andcircumstances are but faulty copies. In this wayAchilles stands as the perfect warrior, and Odysseusas the enduring man of wiles; Hamlet is theman of doubts, and Satan the creature of rebelliouspride. It may be that this effort or inspira[Pg 85]tionof the poet to represent mankind in idealisedform will account in part for the peculiar tinge ofmelancholy that is commonly an attribute of theartistic temperament,—for the brooding uncertaintyof Shakespeare, if as many think Hamlet isthe true voice of his heart, for the feeling ofbaffled despair which led Goethe to create Faust,and for the self-tormenting of Childe Harold. Itis because the dissolving power of genius and thepersonality of the man can never be quite reconciled;he is detached from nature and attached toher at the same time. On the one hand his geniusdraws him to contemplate life with the disinterestednessof a mind free from the attachments ofthe individual, while on the other hand his ownpersonality, often of the most ardent character,drags him irresistibly to seek the satisfaction ofindividual emotions. Like the Empedocles ofMatthew Arnold, baffled in the ineffable longingto escape themselves, these bearers of the divinelight are haled unwillingly

What to the reader is merely a pleasant and momentaryillusion, or a salutary excitation fromwithout, is in the creative poet a partial dissolutionof his own personality. Shakespeare was notdealing in empty words when he likened the poetto the lover and the lunatic as being of imaginationall compact; nor was Plato speaking mere[Pg 86]metaphor when he said that "the poet is a lightand winged and holy thing, and there is no inventionin him until he has been inspired and isout of his senses and the mind is no longer inhim." In the hour of inspiration some darkenedwindow is opened on the horizon to eyes that areordinarily confined within the four walls of hismeagre self, a door is thrown open to the heaven-sweepinggales, he hears for a brief while thevoice of the Over-soul speaking a language thatwith all his toil he can barely render into humanspeech;—and when at last the door is closed, thevision gone, and the voice hushed, he sits in thedarkened chamber of his own person, silent andforlorn.

I would not presume to describe absolutely theinner state of the poet when life appears to himin its ideal form, but the means by which he conveyshis illusion to the reader is quite clear. Therhythm of his verse produces on the mind somethingof the stimulating effect of music and thiseffect is enhanced by the use of language andmetaphor lifted out of the common mould. Prose,however, has no such resources to impose on thefancy a creation of its own, in which the individualwill is raised above itself. On the contrary,the office of the novel—and this we seemore clearly as fiction grows regularly more realistic—isto represent life as controlled by environmentand to portray human beings as the servantsof the flesh. This, I take it, was the meaning of[Pg 87]Goethe in his definition of the genres: "In thenovel sentiments and events chiefly are exhibited,in the drama characters and deeds." The procedureof the novel must be, so to speak, a passiveone. It depicts man as a creature of circumstance,and its only method of escape is so to encompassthe individual in circumstance as to lend to hisseparate life something of the pomp of universality.It effects its purpose by breadth ratherthan by exaltation. Its truest aim is not to representthe actions of a single man as noteworthyin themselves, but to represent the life of a peopleor a phase of society; in the great sweep of humanactivity something of the same largeness andfreedom is produced as in the poetic idealisationof the individual will in the drama. Thus it happensthat the artistic validity of a novel dependsfirst of all on the power of the author to portraybroadly and veraciously some aspect of this widerexistence.

Balzac, in some respects the master novelist,was clearly conscious of this aim of his art; andhisComédie Humaine is a supreme effort to graspthe whole range of French society. Nor would itbe difficult in the case of the greater Englishnovelists to show that unwittingly—an Englishmanrarely if ever has the same knowledge of hisart as a Frenchman—they obeyed the same law.We admire Fielding and Smollett not so much fortheir individual characterisations as for the joywe feel in escaping our conventional timidity in[Pg 88]the old-time tumultuous country life of England,with all its rude strength and even its vulgarity.By a natural contrast we read Jane Austen for herpicture of rural security and stability, and areglad to forget the vexations and uncertainties oflife's warfare in that gentle round of society,where greed and passion are reduced to pettyfoibles, and where the errors of mankind onlyfurnish material for malicious but innocent satire.With Thackeray we put on the veneer of artificialsociety which was the true idealism inherited byhim from the eighteenth century; and we movemore freely amidst thatgai monde because thereruns through the story of it such a biting satireof worldliness and snobbishness as flatters us withthe feeling of our own superiority. In Dickenswe are carried into the very opposite field of life,and for a while we move with those who are thecreatures of grotesque whims and emotions: caricatureswe call his people, but deep in our heartswe know that each of us longs at times to be ashumanity is in Dickens's world, the perfect andunreflecting creature of his dearest whim—forthis too is liberty. Thus it is that the interest ofthe novel depends as much, or almost as much, onthe intrinsic value of the national life or phase ofsociety reproduced as on the skill of the writer.The prose author is in this respect far less a freeagent than the poet and far more the subject ofhis environment; for he deals less with the unchanginglaws of character and more with what[Pg 89]he perceives outwardly about him. It is this factwhich leads many readers to prefer the Englishnovelists to the French, although the latterare unquestionably the greater masters of theircraft.

Now the peculiar good fortune of Scott in thismatter was most strongly brought home to me inreading the narrative work of Mr. Lang. Fineand entertaining as are Scott's more professedlyhistorical novels, such asIvanhoe andQuentinDurward, I do not believe they could ever haveresisted the invasion of time were they not bolsteredup by the stories that deal more directlywith the realities of Scotch life. There is, to besure, in the foreign tales a wonderfully pure veinof romance; but romantic writing in prose cannotendure unless firmly grounded in realism, or unless,like Hawthorne's work, it is surcharged withspiritual meanings. Not having the power possessedby verse to convey illusion, it lacks alsothe vitality of verse. Younger readers may takenaturally toIvanhoe orThe Talisman, becausevery little is required to evoke illusion with them.More mature readers turn oftenest toGuy Manneringand those tales in which the romance isthe realism of Scotch life, finding here a fulnessof interest that is more than a compensation forthe frequent slovenliness of Scott's language andfor the haphazard construction of his plots.

These negligences of the indifferent craftsmanmight, perhaps, need no such compensation, for[Pg 90]we have grown hardened at last to slovenlinessin fiction. But there are other limitations toScott's powers that show more clearly how muchof his fame rests on the substratum of national lifeon which he builds. An infinite variety of characters,from kings in the council hall down tostrolling half-witted gaberlunzies, move throughthe pages of his novels; but, and the fact is notorious,the great Scotchman was little better atpainting the purple light of young desire than wasour own Cooper. There is something like love-makinginRob Roy, and Di Vernon has beensignalised by Mr. Saintsbury as one of his fivechosen heroines; but in general the scenes thatform the ecstasy of most romance are dead andperfunctory in Scott. And this is the more remarkablesince we know that he himself was alover—and a disappointed lover, which is vastlymore to the point in art, as all the world knows.But in fact this inability to portray the softer emotionsis not an isolated phenomenon in Scott; heskims very lightly over most of the deeper passionsof the heart, seeming to avoid them exceptin so far as they express themselves in action.His novels contain no adequate picture of remorseor hatred, love or jealousy; neither do they containany such psychological analysis of the emotionsas has made the fame of subsequent writers.But there is an infinite variety of characters inaction, and a perfect understanding of that formof the imagination which displays itself in whim[Pg 91]sicalitiescorresponding to the "originals" or"humourists" of the Elizabethan comedy.

The numberless quotations from "old plays"at the head of Scott's chapters are not withoutsignificance. At times he approaches closer toShakespeare than any other writer, whether ofprose or verse. In one scene at least inThe Brideof Lammermoor, where he describes the "singularand gloomy delight" of the three old cummersabout the body of their contemporary, he lets usknow that he has in mind the meeting of thewitches inMacbeth, and I think on the whole heexcels the dramatist in his own field. After allis said, the Shakespearian witch-scene is an arbitraryexercise of the fancy, which fails to carrywith it a complete sense of reality: the illusion isnot fully maintained. The dialogue in the novelist,on the contrary, is instinct with thrilling suggestiveness,for the very reason that it is based onthe groundwork of national character. The superstitiousawe is here simple realism, from thebeginning of the scene down to the warning cryof the paralytic hag from the cottage:

But more often Scott approaches the lesserlights of the Elizabethan comedians, whose workis in general subject to the same laws as thenovel, and who filled their plays with whimsicalcreatures—

You cannot read through thedramatis personæ ofone of these plays (Witgood, Lucre, Hoard,Limber, Kix, Lamprey, Spichcock, Dampit, etc.)[Pg 93]without being reminded of the long list of originalsthat figure in the Scotch novels; and in onecase at least, Baron Bradwardine ofWaverley,Scott goes out of his way to compare him with acharacter of Ben Jonson's. And you cannot butfeel that Scott has surpassed his models on theirown ground, partly because his genius was greaterand partly because the novel is a wider and freerfield for such characters than the drama—at leastwhen the drama is deprived of its stage setting.But Scott's greatest advantage is due to the factthat what in England was mainly an exaggerationof the more unsociable traits of character seems inScotland to reach down to the very foundation ofthe popular life. His characters are not the creationof individual eccentricities only, but springfrom an inexhaustible quaintness of the nationaltemper. From every standpoint we are led backto consider the greatness of the author as dependingon his happy genius in finding a voice for arare and noteworthy phase of society.

Much of the Scotch temperament, its self-dependence,clan attachments, cunning, its gloomyexaltations relieved at times by a wide and sereneprospect, may be traced, as Buckle has so admirablyshown, to the physical conditions of theland; and in reading the history of Scotland,with its stories of the adventures of Wallaceand Bruce and its battles of Bannockburn andPrestonpans, it seems quite fitting that thewild scenery of the country should be constantly[Pg 94]associated with the deeds of its heroes. Thereis something of charm in the very names of thelandscape—in the haughs, corries, straths, friths,burns, and braes. The fascination of the Scotchlakes and valleys was one of the first to awakenthe world to an admiration of savage nature, aswe may read in Gray's letters; and Scott, fromWaverley's excursion into the wild fastnesses ofhighland robbers and chiefs to the lonely sea-scenesof Zetland inThe Pirate, has carried usthrough a succession of natural pictures such asno other novelist ever conceived. And he hasmaintained always that most difficult art of describingminutely enough to convey the illusionof a particular scene and broadly enough to evokethose general emotions which alone justify descriptivewriting. Perhaps his most notable successis the visit of Guy Mannering to Ellangowan,where sea, sky, and land unite to form a pictureof strangely luminous beauty. He not only succeededin exciting a new romantic interest inScotch scenery, but he has actually added to themarket price of properties. It is said that hisdescriptions are mentioned in the title deeds ofvarious estates as forming a part of their transmittedvalue.

But the scenery depicted by Scott is only thesetting of a curious and paradoxical life, and it isthe light thrown on this life that lends the chiefinterest to Mr. Lang's History. Owing in partto the peculiar position and formation of the land,[Pg 95]and in part to the strain of Celtic blood in theHighland tribes, there was bred in the Scotchpeople an unusual mingling of romance and realism,of imagination and worldly cunning, that setsthem quite apart from other races; and this paradoxicalmingling of opposite tendencies showsitself in the quality of their politics, their religion,and in all their social manners.

Not the least interesting of Mr. Lang's chaptersis that in which he analyses the feudal chivalry ofScotland, and explains how it rested on a moreimaginative basis than in other countries; howthe power of the chief hung on unwritten rightsinstead of formal charters, and how the loyaltyof the clansmen was exalted to the highest pitchof personal enthusiasm. But to complete the pictureone should read Buckle's scathing arraignmentof a loyalty which was ready to sell its kingand was no purer than the faith that holds togethera band of murderous brigands. So, too, inreligion the Scotch were perhaps more given tosuperstition, and were more ready to sacrifice lifeand all else for their belief than any other peopleof Europe, except the Spaniards, while at the sametime their bigotry never interfered with a vein ofcaution and shrewd worldliness. There is inWaverley an admirable example at once of thisparadoxical nature, and of the true basis of Scott'sstrength. In the loyalism of Flora MacIvor hehas attempted to embody an ideal of the imaginationnot based on this national mingling of[Pg 96]qualities—though, of course, isolated individualsof that heroic type may have existed in the land;and as a result he has produced a character thatleaves the reader perfectly cold and unconvinced.But the moment Waverley comes from the MacIvorsand descends to the real life of Scotland,mark the change. We are immediately put onterra firma by the cautious reply of Waverley'sguide when asked if it is Sunday: "Could na sayjust preceesely; Sunday seldom cam aboon thepass of Bally-Brough." Consider the mixture ofbigotry and worldly greed in Mr. Ebenezer Cruikshanks,the innkeeper, who compounds for thesin of receiving a traveller on fastday by doublingthe tariff. In any other land Mr. EbenezerCruikshank would have been a hypocrite and ascoundrel; in Scotland his religious fervour isquite as genuine as his cunning; and the veryaudacity of the combination carries with it theconviction of realism.

The same contrast of qualities will be found tomark the lesser traits of character. Consider thelong list of servants and retainers with their stiff-neckeddevotion and their incorrigible self-seeking.In one of his notes Scott relates the storyof a retainer who when ordered to leave his master'sservice replied: "In troth, and that will Inot; if your honour disna ken when ye hae a gudeservant, I ken when I hae a gude master, and goaway I will not." At another time, when hismaster cried out in vexation: "John, you and I[Pg 97]shall never sleep under the same roof again!"the fellow calmly retorted, "Where the deil canyour honour be ganging?" In like manner themixture of devotion and self-seeking in thatquaintest of followers, Richie Moniplies, is wortha thousand false idealisations. To read almost onthe same page his immovable loyalty to Nigel andhis brazen treachery in presenting his own petitionfirst to the King, is to gain at once an entranceinto a new region of psychology and toacquire a truer understanding of Scotch history.At another time, when catechised about the allegedspirit in Master Heriot's house, the goodMoniplies gives an example of combined superstition,scepticism, and cunning, which must beread at length—and all the world has read it—tobe appreciated. Perhaps the most useful illustrationto be gained from this same Moniplies is thestrange contrast of solemnity and humour, of reverenceand familiarity, exhibited by him. I neednot repeat the description of that "half-pedant,half-bully," nor quote the whole of his accountof meeting with the King; let it be enough to callattention to the curious mingling of mirth andsolemnity in the way he apostrophises the royalJames: "My certie, lad, times are changed sinceye came fleeing down the backstairs of auld HolyroodHouse, in grit fear, having your breeks inyour hand without time to put them on, andFrank Stewart, the wild Earl of Bothwell, hardat your haunches." There is in the temper of[Pg 98]worthy Moniplies something wholly differentfrom the boisterous humour of England and fromthe dry laughter of America; and this is due tothe continually upcropping substratum of imaginationand romance in his character. Hewould resemble the grotesque seriousness of DonQuixote, were it not for a strain of sourness andsuspicion that are quite foreign to the generousHidalgo.

So we might follow the paradox of Scotch characterthrough its union of gloomy morosenesswith homely affections, of unrestrained emotionalismwith cold calculation, of awesome second-sightwith the cheapest charlatanry. In the end, perhaps,all these contradictions would resolve themselvesinto the one peculiar anomaly of seeing thefree romance of enthusiasm rising like a flower—aflower often enough of sinister aspect—out of themost prosaic grossness. Certainly it is the chiefinterest of Scotch history—by showing that thesecontradictions actually exist in the national temperamentand by explaining so far as may be theirorigin—to confirm for us our belief in what maybe called the realism of Scott's romance. This isthat guiding thread which leads the weary voyagerthrough the mists and chaotic confusions ofCaledonian annals up to light. And in that regionof light what wonderful cheer for the soul! Here,if anywhere in prose, the illusions of the imaginationmay take pleasant possession of our heart,for they come with the authority of a great na[Pg 99]tionalexperience and walk hand in hand with thesoberest realities. Even the wild enthusiasm ofa Meg Merrilies barely awakens the voice of slumberingscepticism in the midst of our secure conviction.And sojourning for a while in that worldof strange enchantment we seem to feel the limitationsthat vex our larger hopes and hem in ourwills broken down at the command of a magicvoice. It is as if that incompleteness of our nature,which the schoolmen called in their fantasticjargon theprincipium individuationis and ascribedto the bondage of these material bodies, were fora time forgotten, while we form a part of that freeand complex existence so faithfully portrayed inthe Scotch novels.

SWINBURNE

It is no more than fair to confess at the outsetthat my knowledge of Swinburne's work until recentlywas of the scantiest. The patent faults ofhis style were of a kind to warn me away, and itmight be equally true that I was not sufficientlyopen to his peculiar excellences. Gladly, therefore,I accepted the occasion offered by the newedition of his Collected Poems [5] to enlarge my acquaintancewith one of the much-bruited namesof the age. Nor did it seem right to trust to ahasty impression. The six volumes of his poems,together with the plays and critical essays, havelain on my table for several months, the companionsof many a long day of leisure and therelish thrown in between other readings of pleasureand necessity. Yet even now I must admitsomething alien to me in the man and his work;I am not sure that I always distinguish betweenwhat is spoken with the lips only and what springsfrom the poet's heart. Possibly the lack of biographicalinformation is the partial cause of thisuncertainty, for by a curious anomaly Swinburne,one of the most egotistical writers of the century,[Pg 101]has shown a fine reticence in keeping the detailsof his life from the public. He was, we know,born in London, in 1837, of an ancient and noblefamily, his father, as befitted one whose son wasto sing of the sea so lustily, being an admiral inthe navy. His early years were passed either athis grandfather's estate in Northumbria or at thehome of his parents in the Isle of Wight. FromEton he went, after an interval of two years, toBalliol College, Oxford, leaving in 1860 withouta degree. The story runs that he knew moreGreek than his examiners, but failed to show aproper knowledge of Scripture. If the tale istrue, he made up well in after years for the deficiency,for few of our poets have been moresteeped in the language of the Bible. In Londonhe came under the influence of many of the currentsmoving below the surface; the spell of thatmaster of souls, Rossetti, touched him, and thedominance of the ardent Mazzini. Since 1879 hehas lived at "The Pines," on the edge of WimbledonCommon, with Mr. Watts-Dunton, inwhat appears to be an ideal atmosphere of sympatheticfriendship. Mr. Douglas's recent indiscretiononTheodore Watts-Dunton tells nothing ofthe life in this scholarly retreat, but it does containmany photogravures of the works of art, thehandicraft of Rossetti largely, which adorn thedwelling with beautiful memories.

Such is the meagre outline of Swinburne's life,nor do the few other events recorded or the[Pg 102]authentic anecdotes help us much to a more intimateknowledge of the man. Yet he has the ambiguousgift of awakening curiosity. Probablythe first question most people ask on laying downhisPoems and Ballads (thatpéché de jeunesse, as heafterwards called it) is to know how much of thebook is "true." Mr. Swinburne has expressed abecoming contempt for "the scornful or mournfulcensors who insisted on regarding all the studiesof passion or sensation attempted or achieved init as either confessions of positive fact or excursionsof absolute fancy." One does not like to beclassed among thescornful or mournful, and yet Ishould feel much easier in my appreciation of thePoems and Ballads if I knew how far they werebased on the actual experience of the author. Thereader of Swinburne feels constantly as if his feetwere swept from the earth and he were carriedinto a misty mid-region where blind currents ofair beat hither and thither; he longs for someanchor to reality. In the later books this sensationbecomes almost painful, and it is because theearlier publications, theAtalanta and the firstPoems and Ballads, contain more of definable humanemotion, whatever their relation to fact maybe, that they are likely to remain the most popularand significant of Swinburne's works.

The publication ofAtalanta at the age oftwenty-eight made him famous,Poems and Balladsthe next year made him almost infamous. Thealarm aroused in England byDolores andFaustine[Pg 103]still vibrates in our ears as we repeat the wonderfulrhythms. The impression is deepened by theremarkable unity of feeling that runs throughthese voluble songs—the feeling of infinite satiety.The satiety of the flesh hangs like a fatal webabout theLaus Veneris; the satiety of disappointmentclings "with sullen savour of poisonouspain" toThe Triumph of Time; satiety speaks intheHymn to Proserpine, with its regret for thepassing of the old heathen gods; it seeks relief inthe unnatural passion ofAnactoria—

turns to the abominations of cruelty inFaustine;sings enchantingly of rest inThe Garden ofProserpine—

Now the acquiescence of weariness may haveits inner compensations, even its sacred joys; butsatiety with its torturing impotence and itshungering for forbidden fruit, is perhaps the mostimmoral word in the language; its unashameddisplay causes a kind of physical revulsion in anywholesome mind. My own feeling is that Swinburne,when he wrote these poems, had littleknowledge or experience of the world, but, assometimes happens with unbalanced natures, hadsucked poison from his classical reading until hisbrain was in a kind of ferment. While in thisstate he fell under the spell of Baudelaire's deliberateperversion of the passions, with resultswhich threw the innocent Philistines of Englandinto a fine bewilderment of horror. That thepoet's own heart was sound at core, and that hissatiety was of the imagination and not of thebody, would seem evident from the abruptnesswith which he passed, under a more wholesomestimulus, to a very different mood. Unfortunately,his maturer productions are lacking inthe quality of human emotion which, howeverderived, pulsates in every line of thePoems andBallads. There is a certain contagion in such asong asDolores. Taking all things into consideration,and with all one's repulsion for its substance,that poem is still the most effective ofSwinburne's works, a magnificent lyric of blendedemotion and music. It is a personification of themood which produced the whole book, a cry of[Pg 105]the tormented heart to our Lady of Satiety. It isfilled with regret for a past of riotous pleasure; itpants with the lust of blood; it is gorgeous andheavily scented, and the rhythm of it is the swayingof bodies drunken with voluptuousness:

No doubt you will find here in germ all thatwas to mar the poet's later work. The rhythmlacks resistance; there is no definite vision evokedout of the rapid flux of images; the thought hasno sure control over the words. Dolores is almostin the same breath the queen of languorsand raptures; she is pallid and rosy, and a hostilecriticism might find in the stanzas a succession ofcontradictions. Compare the poem with the few[Pg 106]lines inJenny where Rossetti has expressed thesame idea of man's inveterate lust:

and the difference is immediately apparent betweenthat concentration of mind which sums upa thought in a single definite image and the fluctuating,impalpable vision of a poet carried awayby the intoxication of words. All that is true,and yet, somehow, out of this poem ofDoloresthere does arise in the end a very real and memorablemood—real after the fashion of a moodexcited by music rather than by painting orsculpture.

ThePoems and Ballads are splendid butmalsain;they are impressive and they have the strength,ambiguous it may be, of springing, directly orindirectly, from a genuine emotion of the body.The change on passing to theSongs Before Sunrise(published in 1871) is extraordinary. Duringthe five years that elapsed between these volumesthe two master passions of Swinburne's life laidhold on him with devastating effect—the passionof Liberty and the passion of the Sea. Henceforththe influence of Mazzini and Victor Hugowas to dominate him like an obsession. Now,heaven forbid that one should say or think anythingin despite of Liberty! The mere name con[Pg 107]juresup recollections of glory and pride, and in itthe hopes of the future are involved. And yetthe very magnitude of its content renders itpeculiarly liable to misuse. To this man it meansone thing, and to another another, and manymight cry out in the end, as Brutus did over virtue:"Thou art a naked word, and I followedthee as though thou hadst been a substance!"Certainly nothing is more dangerous for a poetthan to fall into the habit of mouthing thosegreat words of liberty, virtue, patriotism, andthe like, abstracted of very definite events andvery precise imagery. To Swinburne the soundof liberty was a charm to cast him into a kind offrothing mania. It is true that one or two of thepoems on this theme are lifted up with a superband genuine lyric enthusiasm. TheEve of Revolution,for instance, with which theSongs BeforeSunrise open, rings with the stirring noise oftrumpets:

But even here the reverberation of the words beginsto conceal their meaning, and such abstractionsas "the roar of the hours" lead into theworst of Swinburne's faults. Many of the longer[Pg 108]hymns to liberty are nearly unreadable—at leastif any one can endure to the end ofA Song ofItaly, it is not I. And as one goes through theserhapsodies that came out year after year, one beginsto feel that Swinburne's notion of liberty,when it is not empty of meaning, is somethingeven worse. Too often it is Kipling's grossidolatry of England uttered in a kind of hystericalfalsetto. It was not pretty at a time ofestrangement between England and France tospeak of "French hounds whose necks are achingStill from the chain they crave"; and one needednot to sympathise with the Boers in the SouthAfrican war to feel something like disgust atSwinburne's abuse:

Probably the poet thought he was giving voice toa righteous and Miltonic indignation. The bestcriticism of such a sonnet is to turn to Milton's"Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints."

I have read somewhere a story of Swinburne'sdriving up late to a dinner and entering into aviolent altercation with the cabman, to the vastamusement of the waiting guests within thehouse. That incorrigible wag and hanger-on ofgenius, Charles Augustus Howell, was of the partyand acted as chorus to the dialogue outside.[Pg 109]"The poet's got the best of it, as usual," drawlsthe chorus. "He lives at the British Hotel inCockspur Street, and never goes anywhere exceptin hansoms, which, whatever the distance, he invariablyremunerates with one shilling. Consequently,when, as to-day, it's a case of two milesbeyond the radius, there's the devil's own row;but in the matter of imprecation the poet is morethan a match for cabby, who, after five minutes ofit, gallops off as though he had been rated byBeelzebub himself." Really, 'tis a bit of gossipwhich may be taken as a comment on not a fewof Swinburne's dithyrambs of liberty.

Not less noble in significance is that other word,the sea, which Swinburne now uses with endlessreiteration. In his reverence for the welteringocean ways, the bulwark of England's freedom,he does of course only follow the best traditionsof English poetry fromBeowulf toThe Seven Seasof Kipling, who is again in this his imitator.Nor is it the world of water alone that dominateshis imagination, but with it the winds and thepanorama of the sky ever rolling above. Alreadyin thePoems and Ballads there is a hint of thesympathy between the poet and this realm ofwater and air. One of the finest passages inTheTriumph of Time is that which begins:

But for the most part the atmosphere of thosepoems was too sultry for the salt spray of ocean,and it is only with theSongs Before Sunrise, withthe obsession of the idea of liberty, that we arecarried to the wide sea "that makes immortalmotion to and fro," and to the "shrill, fierceclimes of inconsolable air." Thenceforth thereader is like some wave-tossed mariner whoshould take refuge in the cave of Æolus; at leasthe is forced to admire the genius that presidesover the gusty concourse:

The comparison is not so far-fetched as it mightseem. There is a picture of Swinburne in theRecollections of the late Henry Treffry Dunn whichalmost personifies him as the storm-king:

The scattered poems in his later books that riseabove thePoems and Ballads with a kind ofgrandiose suggestiveness are for the most partfilled with echoes of wind and water. Thathaunting picture of crumbling desolation,AForsaken Garden, lies "at the sea-down's edge betweenwindward and lee." One of the few poemsthat seem to contain the cry of a real experience,At a Month's End, combines this aspect of natureadmirably with human emotion:

And the sensation left from a reading ofTristramof Lyonesse is of a vast phantasmagoria, in whichthe beating of waves and the noise of winds, thelight of dawns breaking on the water, and thefloating web of stars, are jumbled together insplendid but inextricable confusion. So thecoming of love upon Iseult, as she sails over[Pg 112]the sea with Tristram, takes this magnificentcomparison:

Further on the long confession of her passion atTintagel, while Tristram has gone over-sea to thatother Iseult, will be broken by those thunderingcouplets:

But even to allude to all the passages of thiskind in the poem—the swimming of Tristram, hisrowing, and the other scenes—would fill an essay.In the end it must be confessed that this monotonyof tone grows fatiguing. The rhythmic grace ofthe metre is like a bubble blown into the air,floating before our eyes with gorgeous iridescence—butwhen it touches earth, it bursts. There liesthe fatal weakness of all this frenzy over libertyand this hymeneal chanting of sky and ocean; ithas no basis in the homely facts of the heart.Read the account of Tristram and Iseult in thewilderness bower; it is all very beautiful, but youwonder why it leaves you so cold. There is nota single detail to fix an image of the place in the[Pg 113]mind, not a word to denote that we are dealingwith the passion of individual human beings.Then turn to the same episode in the old poem ofGottfried von Strassburg; read the scene wherethe forsaken King Mark, through a window oftheir forest grotto, beholds the lovers lying asleepwith the sword of Tristram stretched betweenthem:

It is good to walk with head lifted to the stars,but it is good also to have the feet well planted onearth. If another example of Swinburne's abstractionfrom human interest were desired, onemight take that rhapsody of the wind-beatenwaters and "land that is lonelier than ruin,"calledBy the North Sea. The picture of desolateand barren waste is one of the most powerfulcreations in his later works (it was published in[Pg 114]1880), yet there is still something wanting tostamp the impression into the mind. You turnfrom it, perhaps, to Browning's similar descriptioninChilde Roland and the reason is at onceclear. You come upon the line: "One stiff, blindhorse, his every bone a-stare," and pause. Thereis in Swinburne's poem no single touch which arreststhe attention in this way, concentrating theeffect, as it were, to a burning point, and bringingout the symbolic relation to human life. Yet Icannot pass from this subject without noticingwhat may appear a paradoxical phase of Swinburne'scharacter. Only when he lowers his gazefrom the furies and ecstasies of man's ambition tothe instinctive ways of little children does his artbecome purely human. It would be easy to selecta full dozen of the poems dealing with child-lifeand the tender love inspired by a child that touchthe heart with their pure and chastened beauty.I should feel that an essential element of his artwere left unremarked if I failed to quote some suchexamples as these two roundels onFirst Footstepsand aA Baby's Death:

Despite the artificiality of the French form and akind of revolving dizziness of movement, onecatches in these child-lyrics a simplicity of feelingnot unlike Longfellow's cry, "O little feet! thatsuch long years." Swinburne himself might notrelish the comparison, which is none the less just.

It is not often safe to attempt to sum up a largebody of work in a phrase, yet with Swinburne weshall scarcely go astray if we seek such a characterisationin the one wordmotion. Both thebeauty and the fault of his extraordinary rhythmsare exposed in that term, and certainly his firstclaim to originality lies in his rhythmical innovations.There had been nothing in English comparableto the steady swell, like the waves of a[Pg 116]subsiding sea, in the lines ofAtalanta and thePoems and Ballads. They brought a new sensuouspleasure into our poetry. But with time thiscadenced movement developed into a kind ofgiddy race which too often left the reader belatedand breathless. Little tricks of composition, suchas a repeated cæsura after the seventh syllableof the pentameter, were employed to heighten thespeed. Moreover, the longer lines in many of thepoems are not organic, but consist of two or moreshort lines huddled together, the effect being toeliminate the natural resting-places afforded bythe sense. And occasionally his metre is merelywanton. He uses one verse, for example, whichwith its combination of gliding motion and internaljingles is uncommonly irritating:

And if Swinburne is one of the obscurest ofEnglish poets, it is due in large part to this sameelement of motion. A poem may move swiftlyand still be perfectly easy to follow, so long asthe thought is simple and concrete; witness theworks of Longfellow. Or, on the other hand, thethought may be tortuous and still invite reflection,[Pg 117]so long as the metre forces a continual pause inthe reading; witness Browning. Now, no onewill accuse Swinburne of overloading his pageswith thought; it is not there the obscurity lies.The difficulty is with the number and the peculiarlyvague quality of his metaphors. Let me illustratewhat I mean by this vagueness. I openone of the volumes at random and my eye restson this line inA Channel Passage:

If one were reading the poem and tried to evokethis image before his mind, he would certainlyneed to pause for a moment. Or I open toWalterSavage Landor and find this passage marked:

The sentiment is simple enough, and it might besufficient to feel the force of this in a general way,were it not that the metaphorical expression almostcompels one to pause and form an image ofthe whole before proceeding. Such an image is,no doubt, possible; but the mingling of abstractand concrete terms makes the act of visualisationslow and painful. At the same time the rhythmis swift and continuous, so that any pause in thereading demands a deliberate effort of the will.[Pg 118]The result is a form of obscurity which in manyof the poems is almost prohibitive for an indolentman—and are not the best readers always a littleindolent? And there is another habit—trick, onemight say—which increases this vagueness ofmetaphor in a curious manner. Constantly heuses a word in its ordinary, direct sense and thenrepeats it as an abstract personification. I findan example to hand in the stanzas writtenAt aDog's Grave:

It is only a mannerism such as another, but itrecurs with sufficient frequency to have an appreciableeffect on the mind.

Indeed, if this vagueness of imagery were onlyan occasional appearance, the difficulty would beslight. As a matter of fact, no inconsiderableportion of Swinburne's work is made up of astream of half-visualised abstractions that crowdupon one another with the motion of cloudsdriven below the moon. He is more like WaltWhitman in this respect than any other poet inthe language. Whitman is concrete and humanand very earthly, but, with this difference, thereis in both writers the same thronging processionof images which flit by without allowing thereader to concentrate his attention upon a singleimpression; they are both poets of vast and confusedmotion. Swinburne is notable for his want[Pg 119]of humour, yet he is keen enough to see howclose this flux of high-sounding words lies to theabsurd. In the present collected edition of hispoems he has includedThe Heptalogia, or Sevenagainst Sense, a series of parodies which does notspare his own mannerisms. Some scandalisedPhilistines, I doubt, might even need to be toldthatNephelidia was a parody:

Pretty much all the traits of Swinburne's styleare there—the long breathless lines with theirflowing dactyls or anapæsts, the unabashed alliteration,the stream of half-visualised images, thetrick of following an epithet with its own abstractsubstantive, the sense of motion, and above all theaccumulation of words. Of this last trait of verbosityI have said nothing, for the reason that itis too notorious to need mentioning. It may not,however, be superfluous to point out a little moreprecisely the special form his tautology assumes.He is never more graphic and nearer to naturethan when he describes the ecstasy of swimmingat sea. He is himself passionately fond of theexercise, and once at least was almost drowned in[Pg 120]the Channel. Let us take, then, a stanza fromA Swimmer's Dream:

Pass the fault of beginning with the abstraction"strength"—the first two lines are graphic andreproduce a real sensation; the second two linesare an explanatory repetition; the last four dissolveboth image and emotion into a flood ofwords. It is the common procedure in the laterpoems; it renders the regular dramas (with theexception of the earlierChastelard) almost intolerablytedious.

And what is the impression of the man himselfthat remains after living with his works forseveral months? The frankness with which heparodies his own eccentricities might seem toindicate a becoming modesty, and yet that isscarcely the word that rises first to the lips. Indeed,when I read in the very opening of theDedicatory Epistle that precedes the present editionof his poems such a statement as that "hefinds nothing that he could wish to cancel, toalter, or to unsay, in any page he has ever laidbefore his reader," I was prepared for a characterquite the contrary of modest, and as I turned page[Pg 121]after page, there became fixed in my mind a feelingthat I should hesitate to call personal repulsion—afeeling of annoyance at least, for whichno explanation was present. Only when IreachedAtalanta in Calydon, in the fourth volume,did the reason of this become evident. Thatpoem, exquisite in many ways, is filled with talkof time and gods, of love and hate, of life anddeath, of all high-sounding words that lend gravityto poetry, and yet in the end it is itself light andnot grave. The very needless reiteration of thesewords, their bandying from verse to verse, deprivesthem of impressiveness. No, a true poetwho respects the sacredness of noble ideas, whocherishes some awe for the mysteries, does notbuffet them about as a shuttlecock; he uses themsparingly and only when the thought rises ofnecessity to those heights. There is a lack ofemotional breeding, almost an indecency, in Swinburne'seasy familiarity with these great thingsof the spirit.

And this judgment is confirmed by turning tohis prose. I trust it is not prejudice, but after awhile the vociferous and endless praise of VictorHugo in his essays had a curious effect upon me.I began to ask: Is the critic really thinking ofHugo alone, or is half of this frenzied adulationmeant for his own artistic methods? "Malignityand meanness, platitude and perversity, decrepitudeof cankered intelligence and desperation ofuniversal rancor," he exclaims against Sainte-[Pg 122]Beuve;and over the other critics of his idol hecries out, "The lazy malignity of envious dullnessis as false and fatuous as it is common and easy."Can one avoid the surmise that he has more thanHugo to avenge in such tirades? It is the samewith every one who is opposed to his own notionsof art. Of Walt Whitman it is: "The dirty,clumsy paws of a harper whose plectrum is amuckrake." Of a French classicist: "It is thebusiness of a Nisard to pass judgment and tobray." And of those who intimate (he is ostensiblydefending Rossetti) that beauty and powerof expression can accord with emptiness or sterilityof matter: "This flattering unction the veryfoolishest of malignants will hardly in this case beable to lay upon the corrosive sore which he callshis soul." Sometimes, I admit, this manner ofinvective rises to a sublimity of fury that soundslike nothing so much as a combination of Carlyleand Shelley. For example: "The affection wasnever so serious as to make it possible for the mostmalignant imbecile to compare or to confound him[Jowett] with such morally and spiritually typicaland unmistakable apes of the Dead Sea as MarkPattison, or such renascent blossoms of theItalian renascence as the Platonic amorist ofblue-breeched gondoliers who is now in Aretino'sbosom." It's not criticism; it's not fair to MarkPattison or to John Addington Symonds, but it issublime. It is a storm of wind only, but it leavesa devastated track.[Pg 123]

Enough has been said to indicate the trait ofcharacter that prevails through these pages ofeulogy and vituperation. It is not nice to applyso crass a word asconceit to one who undoubtedlybelongs to the immortals of our pantheon, yet theexpression forces itself upon me. Listen to anotherof his outbursts, this time against MatthewArnold: "His inveterate and invincible Philistinism,his full community of spirit and faith, in certainthings of import, with the vulgarest Englishmind!" Does not the quality begin to defineitself more exactly? There is a phrase they usein France,épater le bourgeois, of those artisticsouls who contrast themselves by a kind of ineffablecontempt with commonplace humanity,and who take pleasure in tweaking the nose, soto speak, of the amiable plebeian. Have a care,gentlemen! The Philistine has a curious trick ofrevenging himself in the long run. For my ownpart, when it comes to a breach between the poeticaland the prosaic, I take my place submissivelywith the latter. There is at least a humble safetyin retaining one's pleasure in certain things ofimport with the vulgarest English mind, and if itwere obligatory to choose between them (as, happily,it is not) I would surrender the wind-sweptrhapsodies of Swinburne for the homely conversationof Whittier.[Pg 124]

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI

Probably the first impression one gets fromreading theComplete Poetical Works of ChristinaRossetti, now collected and edited by her brother,Mr. W. M. Rossetti,[6] is that she wrote altogethertoo much, and that it was a doubtful service toher memory to preserve so many poems purelyprivate in their nature. The editor, one thinks,might well have shown himself more "reverentof her strange simplicity." For page after pagewe are in the society of a spirit always refinedand exquisite in sentiment, but without anyguiding and restraining artistic impulse; shenever drew to the shutters of her soul, but layopen to every wandering breath of heaven. Incomparison with the works of the more creativepoets her song is like the continuous lisping of anæolian harp beside the music elicited by cunningfingers. And then, suddenly, out of this sweetmonotony, moved by some stronger, clearer breezeof inspiration, there sounds a strain of wonderfulbeauty and flawless perfection, unmatched in itsown kind in English letters. An anonymous[Pg 125]purveyor of anecdotes has recently told how oneof these more exquisite songs called forth theenthusiasm of Swinburne. It was just after thepublication ofGoblin Market and Other Poems,and in a little company of friends that erraticpoet and critic started to read aloud from thevolume. Turning first to the devotional paraphrasewhich begins with "Passing away, saiththe World, passing away," he chanted the linesin his own emphatic manner, then laid the bookdown with a vehement gesture. Presently hetook it up again, and a second time read the poemthrough, even more impressively. "By God!"he exclaimed at the end, "that's one of the finestthings ever written!"

And Swinburne, somewhat contrary to hiswont, was right. Purer inspiration, less troubledby worldly motives, than these verses cannot befound. Nor would it be difficult to discover intheir brief compass most of the qualities that lenddistinction to Christina Rossetti's work. Evenher monotone, which after long continuation becomesmonotony, affects one here as a subtle deviceheightening the note of subdued fervour andreligious resignation; the repetition of the rhymingvowel creates the feeling of a secret expectancycherished through the weariness of afrustrate life. If there is any excuse for publishingthe many poems that express the mereunlifted, unvaried prayer of her heart, it is becausetheir monotony may prepare the mind forthe strange artifice of this solemn chant. Butsuch a preparation demands more patience thana poet may justly claim from the ordinary reader.Better would be a volume of selections from herworks, including a number of poems of this character.It would stand, in its own way, supremein English literature,—as pure and fine an ex[Pg 127]pressionof the feminine genius as the world hasyet heard.

It is, indeed, as the flower of strictly femininegenius that Christina Rossetti should be read andjudged. She is one of a group of women whobrought this new note into Victorian poetry,—LouisaShore, Jean Ingelow, rarely Mrs. Browning,and, I may add, Mrs. Meynell. She is likethem, but of a higher, finer strain than they(ϰαλαὶ δέ τε πᾶσαι),and I always think of heras of her brother's Blessed Damozel, circled witha company of singers, yet holding herself aloof inchosen loneliness of passion. She, too, has notquite ceased to yearn toward earth:

I have likened the artlessness of much of herwriting to the sweet monotony of an æolian harp;the comparison returns as expressing also thepurely feminine spirit of her inspiration. Thereis in her a passive surrender to the powers of life,a religious acquiescence, which wavers between aplaintive pathos and a sublime exultation of faith.The great world, with its harsh indifference forthe weak, passes over her as a ruinous gale rushesover a sequestered wood-flower; she bows her[Pg 128]head, humbled but not broken, nor ever forgetfulof her gentle mission,—

She bends to the storm, yet no one, not the greatmystics nor the greater poets who cry out uponthe sound and fury of life, is more constantly impressedby the vanity and fleeting insignificance ofthe blustering power, or more persistently looksfor consolation and joy from another source. Butthere is a difference. Read the masculine poetswho have heard this mystic call of the spirit, andyou feel yourself in the presence of a strong willthat has grasped the world, and, finding it insufficient,deliberately casts it away; and there isno room for pathetic regret in their ruthless determinationto renounce. But this womanly poetdoes not properly renounce at all, she passivelyallows the world to glide away from her. Thestrength of her genius is endurance:

It is characteristic of her feminine dispositionthat the loss of the world should have come toher first of all in the personal relation of love.And here we must signalise the chief service of the[Pg 129]editor toward his sister. It was generally knownin a vague way, indeed it was easy to surmise asmuch from her published work, that ChristinaRossetti bore with her always the sadness of unfulfilledaffection. In the introductory Memoirher brother has now given a sufficiently detailedaccount of this matter to remove all ambiguity.I am not one to wish that the reserves and secretemotions of an author should be displayed for themere gratification of the curious; but in this casethe revelation would seem to be justified as aneeded explanation of poems which she herselfwas willing to publish. Twice, it appears, shegave her love, and both times drew back in akind of tremulous awe from the last step. Thefirst affair began in 1848, before she was eighteen,and ran its course in about two years. The manwas one James Collinson, an artist of mediocretalent who had connected himself with the Pre-raphaeliteBrotherhood. He was originally aProtestant, but had become a Roman Catholic.Then, as Christina refused to ally herself to oneof that faith, he compliantly abandoned Rome forthe Church of England. His conscience, however,which seems from all accounts to have beenof a flabby consistency, troubled him in the newfaith, and he soon reverted to Catholicism.Christina then drew back from him finally. It isnot so easy to understand why she refused thesecond suitor, with whom she became intimatelyacquainted about 1860, and whom she loved in[Pg 130]her own retiring fashion until the day of herdeath. This was Charles Bagot Cayley, a brotherof the famous Cambridge mathematician, himselfa scholar and in a small way a poet. Some ideaof the man may be obtained from a notice of himwritten by Mr. W. M. Rossetti for theAthenæumafter his death. "A more complete specimen thanMr. Charles Cayley," says Mr. Rossetti, "of theabstracted scholar in appearance and manner—thescholar who constantly lives an inward andunmaterial life, faintly perceptive of external factsand appearances—could hardly be conceived. Heunited great sweetness to great simplicity of character,and was not less polite than unworldly."One might suppose that such a temperament waspeculiarly fitted to join with that of the secludedpoetess, and so, to judge from her many lovepoems, it actually was. Of her own heart or ofhis there seems to have been no doubt in hermind. Even in her most rapturous visions ofheaven, like the yearning cry of the Blessed Damozel,the memory of that stilled passion oftenbreaks out:

She seems even not to have been unfamiliar withthe hope of joy, and I would persuade myself that[Pg 131]her best-known lyric of gladness, "My heart islike a singing-bird," was inspired by the earlydawning of this passion. But the hope and thejoy soon passed away and left her only the solemnrefrain of acquiescence: "Then I answered: Yea."Her brother can give no sufficient explanation ofthis refusal on her part to accept the happinessalmost within her hand, though he hints at lackof religious sympathy between the two. Someinner necessity of sorrow and resignation, onealmost thinks, drew her back in both cases, someperception that the real treasure of her heart laynot in this world:

It might seem that here was a spirit of renunciationakin to that of the more masculine mystics;indeed, a great many of her poems are,unconsciously I presume, almost a paraphrase ofthat recurring theme of the Imitation: "Nolle[Pg 132]consolari ab aliqua creatura," and again: "Amoreigitur Creatoris, amorem hominis superavit; etpro humano solatio, divinum beneplacitum magiselegit." She, too, was unwilling to find consolationin any creature, and turned from the love ofman to the love of the Creator; yet a little readingof her exquisite hymns will show that thisrenunciation has more the nature of surrenderthan of deliberate choice:

The world is withheld from her by a power aboveher will, and always this power stands before herin that peculiarly personal form which it is wontto assume in the feminine mind. Her faith is amere transference to heaven of a love that terrifiesher in its ruthless earthly manifestation; and thepassion of her life is henceforth a yearning expectationof the hour when the Bridegroom shallcome and she shall answer, Yea. Nor is theearthly source of this love forgotten; it abideswith her as a dream which often is not easilydistinguished from its celestial transmutation:

It is this perfectly passive attitude toward thepowers that command her heart and her soul—apassivity which by its completeness assumes themisguiding semblance of a deliberate determinationof life—that makes her to me the purest expressionin English of the feminine genius. Iknow that many would think this pre-eminencebelongs to Mrs. Browning. They would pointout the narrowness of Christina Rossetti's range,and the larger aspects of woman's nature, neglectedby her, which inspire some of her rival'sbest-known poems. To me, on the contrary, itis the very scope attempted by Mrs. Browningthat prevents her from holding the place I wouldgive to Christina Rossetti. So much of Mrs.Browning—her political ideas, her passion forreform, her scholarship—simply carries her intothe sphere of the masculine poets, where she suffersby an unfair comparison. She would be abetter and less irritating writer without theseexcursions into a field for which she was notentirely fitted. The uncouthness that so oftenmars her language is partly due to an unreconciledfeud between her intellect and her heart.She had neither a woman's wise passivity nor a[Pg 134]man's controlling will. Even within the rangeof strictly feminine powers her genius is notsimple and typical. And here I must take refugein a paradox which is like enough to carry butlittle conviction. Nevertheless, it is the truth. Imean to say that probably most women will regardMrs. Browning as the better type of theirsex, whereas to men the honour will seem to belongto Miss Rossetti; and that the judgment of aman in this matter is more conclusive than awoman's. This is a paradox, I admit, yet itssolution is simple. Women will judge a poetessby her inclusion of the larger human nature, andwill resent the limiting of her range to the qualitiesthat we look upon as peculiarly feminine.The passion of Mrs. Browning, her attempt tocontrol her inspiration to the demands of a shapingintellect, her questioning and answering, herlarger aims, in a word her effort to create,—allthese will be set down to her credit by womenwho are as appreciative of such qualities as men,and who will not be annoyed by the false tonerunning through them. Men, on the contrary,are apt, in accepting a woman's work or in creatinga female character, to be interested more inthe traits and limitations which distinguish herfrom her masculine complement. They caremore for theidea of woman, and less for womanas merely a human being. Thus, for example, Ishould not hesitate to say that in this ideal aspectThackeray's heroines are more womanly than[Pg 135]George Eliot's,—though I am aware of the ridiculeto which such an opinion lays me open; andfor the same reason I hold that Christina Rossettiis a more complete exemplar of feminine genius,and, as being more perfect in her own sphere, abetter poet than Mrs. Browning. That disconcertingsneer of Edward FitzGerald's, which soenraged Robert Browning, would never have occurredto him, I think, in the case of Miss Rossetti.

There is a curious comment on this contrast inthe introduction to Christina Rossetti'sMonnaInnominata, a sonnet-sequence in which she tellsher own story in the supposed person of an earlyItalian lady. "Had the great poetess of our ownday and nation," she says, "only been unhappyinstead of happy, her circumstances would haveinvited her to bequeath to us, in lieu of thePortugueseSonnets, an inimitable 'donna innominata'drawn not from fancy, but from feeling, andworthy to occupy, a niche beside Beatrice andLaura." Now this sonnet-sequence of Miss Rossetti'sis far from her best work, and holds a lowerrank in every way than that passionate self-revelationof Mrs. Browning's; yet to read theseconfessions of the two poets together is a goodway to get at the division between their spirits.In Miss Rossetti's sonnets all those feminine traitsI have dwelt on are present to a marked, almostan exaggerated, degree. They are harmoniouswithin themselves, and filled with a quiet ease;[Pg 136]only the higher inspiration is lacking to them incomparison with herPassing Away, and othergreat lyrics. In Mrs. Browning, on the contrary,one cannot but feel a disturbing element. Thevery tortuousness of her language, the strainingto render her emotion in terms of the intellect,introduces a quality which is out of harmony withthe ground theme of feminine surrender. Morethan that, this submission to love, if looked atmore closely, is itself in large part such as mightproceed from a man as well as from a woman, sothat there results an annoying confusion of masculineand feminine passion. Take, for instance,the twenty-second of thePortuguese Sonnets, oneof the most perfect in the series:

That is noble verse, undoubtedly. The point isthat it might just as well have been written by a[Pg 137]man to a woman as the contrary; it would, forexample, fit perfectly well into Dante GabrielRossetti'sHouse of Life. There is here no passivityof soul; the passion is not that of acquiescence,but of determination to press to the quickof love. Only, perhaps, a certain falsetto in thetone (if the meaning of that word may be so extended)shows that, after all, it was written by awoman, who in adopting the masculine pitchloses something of fineness and exquisiteness.

A single phrase of the sonnet, that "deep,dear silence," links it in my mind with one ofChristina Rossetti's not found in theMonnaInnominata, but expressing the same spirit ofresignation. It is entitled simplyRest:

Am I misguided in thinking that in this stillness,this silence more musical than any song, the[Pg 138]feminine heart speaks with a simplicity and consummatepurity such as I quite fail to hear in thePortuguese Sonnets, admired as those sonnets are?Nor could one, perhaps, find in all Christina Rossetti'spoems a single line that better expresses thecharacter of her genius than these magical words:"With stillness that is almost Paradise." Thatis the mood which, with the passing away of love,never leaves her; that is her religion; her acquiescentYea, to the world and the soul and to God.Into that region of rapt stillness it seems almosta sacrilege to penetrate with inquisitive, criticalmind; it is like tearing away the veil of modesty.I will not attempt to bring out the beauty ofher mood by comparing it with that of the moremasculine quietists, who reach out and take thekingdom of Heaven by storm, and whose prayeris, in the words of Tennyson:

It will be better to quote one other poem, perhapsher most perfect work artistically, and to pass on:

The culmination of her pathetic weariness isalways this cry for rest, a cry for supreme acquiescencein the will of Heaven, troubled by nopersonal volition, no desire, no emotion, saveonly love that waits for blessed absorption. Herlatter years became what St. Teresa called a long"prayer of quiet"; and her brother's record of hersecluded life in the refuge of his home, and laterin her own house on Torrington Square, reads likethe saintly story of a cloistered nun. It mightbe said of her, as of one of the fathers, that sheneeded not to pray, for her life was an unbrokencommunion with God. And yet that is not all.It is a sign of her utter womanliness that envy forthe common affections of life was never quitecrushed in her heart. Now and then throughthis monotony of resignation there wells up a sobof complaint, a note not easy, indeed, to distinguishfrom thatamari aliquid of jealousy, whichThackeray, cynically, as some think, always leftat the bottom of his gentlest feminine characters.The fullest expression of this feeling is in oneof her longer poems,The Lowest Room, which[Pg 140]contrasts the life of two sisters, one of whomchooses the ordinary lot of woman with homeand husband and children, while the other learns,year after tedious year, the consolation of lonelypatience. The spirit of the poem is not entirelypleasant. The resurgence of personal envy is alittle disconcerting; and the only comfort to bederived from it is the proof that under differentcircumstances Christina Rossetti might have givenexpression to the more ordinary lot of contentedwomanhood as perfectly as she sings the pathosand hope of the cloistered life. Had that firstvoice, which led her "where the bluest waterflows," suffered her also to quench the thirst ofher heart, had not that second voice summonedher to follow, this might have been. But literature,I think, would have lost in her gain. As itis, we must recognise that the vision of fulfilledaffection and of quiet home joys still troubled her,in her darker hours, with a feeling of embitteredregret. Two or three of the stanzas ofThe LowestRoom even evoke a reminiscence of that scene inThomson'sCity of Dreadful Night, where the"shrill and lamentable cry" breaks through thesilence of the shadowy congregation:

But if occasionally this residue of bitterness inChristina Rossetti recalls the more acrid genius[Pg 141]of James Thomson, yet a comparison of the twopoets (and such a comparison is not fantastic,however unexpected it may appear) would set thefeminine character of our subject in a peculiarlyvivid light. Both were profoundly moved by theevanescence of life, by the deceitfulness of pleasure,while both at times, Thomson almost continually,were troubled by the apparent contentof those who rested in these joys of the world.Both looked forward longingly to the consummationof peace. In his call toOur Lady of OblivionThomson might seem to be speaking for both,only in a more deliberately metaphorical style:

But the roads by which the two would reach this"silence more musical than any song" wereutterly different. With an intellect at oncemathematical and constructive, Thomson builtout of his personal bitterness and despair a universecorresponding to his own mood, a philosophyof atheistic revolt. Like Lucretius, "he denieddivinely the divine." In that tremendous conversationon the river-walk he represents one soulas protesting to another that not for all his miserywould he carry the guilt of creating such a[Pg 142]world; whereto the second replies, and it is thepoet himself who speaks:

There is the voluntary ecstasy of the saints, thereis also this stern and self-willed rebellion, and,contrasted with them both, as woman is contrastedwith man, there is the acquiescence ofChristina Rossetti and of the little group of writerswhom she leads in spirit:

WHY IS BROWNING POPULAR?

It has come to be a matter of course that somenew book on Browning shall appear with everyseason. Already the number of these manualshas grown so large that any one interested incritical literature finds he must devote a wholecorner of his library to them—where, the cynicalmay add, they are better lodged than in his brain.To name only a few of the more recent publications:there was Stopford Brooke's volume, whichpartitioned the poet's philosophy into convenientcompartments, labelled nature, human life, art,love, etc. Then came Mr. Chesterton, with hisbiting paradoxes and his bold justification ofBrowning's work, not as it ought to be, but as itis. Professor Dowden followed with what is, onthe whole, the bestvade mecum for those who wishto preserve their enthusiasm with a little salt ofcommon sense; and, latest of all, we have now acritical study [7] by Prof. C. H. Herford, of theUniversity of Manchester, which once more unrollsin all its gleaming aspects the poet's "joy insoul." Two things would seem to be clear fromthis succession of commentaries: Browning must[Pg 144]need a deal of exegesis, and he must be a subjectof wide curiosity. Now obscurity and popularitydo not commonly go together, and I fail to rememberthat any of the critics named has pausedlong enough in his own admiration to explainjust why Browning has caught the breath offavour; in a word, to answer the question: Whyis Browning popular?

There is, indeed, one response to such a question,so obvious and so simple that it might wellbe taken for granted. It would hardly seemworth while to say that despite his difficultyBrowning is esteemed because he has writtengreat poetry; and in the most primitive and unequivocalmanner this is to a certain extent true.At intervals the staccato of his lines, like thedrilling of a woodpecker, is interrupted by a burstof pure and liquid music, as if that vigorous andexploring bird were suddenly gifted with themelodious throat of the lark. It is not necessaryto hunt curiously for examples of this power;they are fairly frequent and the best known arethe most striking. Consider the first lines thatsing themselves in the memory:

there needs no cunning exegete to point out thebeauty of these. Their rhythm is of the singing,traditional kind that is familiar to us in all thetrue poets of the language; the harmony of the[Pg 145]vowel sounds and of the consonants, the verytrick of alliteration, are obvious to the least critical;yet withal there is that miraculous suggestionin their charm which may be felt but cannot beconverted into a prosaic equivalent. They standout from the lines that precede and follow theminThe Ring and the Book, as differing not somuch in degree as in kind; they are lyrical, poetical,in the midst of a passage which is neitherlyrical nor, precisely speaking, poetical. Elsewherethe surprise may be on the lower plane ofmere description. So, throughout the perorationofParacelsus, despite the glory and eloquence ofthe dying scholar's vision, one feels continuallyan alien element which just prevents a completeacquiescence in their magic, some residue of clogginganalysis which has not quite been subduedto poetry—and then suddenly, as if some discordantinstrument were silenced in an orchestraand unvexed music floated to the ear, the mannerchanges, thus:

And, take his works throughout, there is agood deal of this writing which has the ordinary,direct appeal to the emotions. Yet it is scattered,accidental so to speak; nor is it any pabulum ofthe soul as simple as this which converts the lover[Pg 146]of poetry into the Browningite. Even his common-senseadmirers are probably held by somethingmore recondite than this occasional charm.

says Bishop Blougram, and the attraction ofBrowning to many is just watching what maybe called his acrobatic psychology. Consider thissameBishop Blougram's Apology, in some respectsthe most characteristic, as it is certainly not theleast prodigious, of his poems. "Over his wineso smiled and talked his hour Sylvester Blougram"—talkedand smiled to a silent listenerconcerning the strange mixture of doubt andfaith which lie snugly side by side in the mind ofan ecclesiastic who is at once a hypocrite and asincere believer in the Church. The mental attitudeof the speaker is subtile enough in itself tobe fascinating, but the real suspense does not liethere. The very balancing of the priest's argumentmay at first work a kind of deception, butread more attentively and it begins to grow clearthat no man in the wily bishop's predicamentever talked in this way over his wine or anywhereelse. And here lies the real piquancy of the situation.His words are something more than aconfession; they are this and at the same time thepoet's, or if you will the bishop's own, commentto himself on that confession. He who talks is[Pg 147]never quite in the privacy of solitude, nor is heever quite conscious of his listener, who as a matterof fact is not so much a person as some half-personifiedopinion of the world or abstract notionset against the character of the speaker. Andthis is Browning's regular procedure not only inthose wonderful dramatic monologues,Men andWomen, that form the heart of his work, but inParacelsus, inThe Ring and the Book, even in thesongs and the formal dramas.

Perhaps the most remarkable and most obviousexample of this suspended psychology is to befound inThe Ring and the Book. Take the cantoin which Giuseppe Caponsacchi relates to thejudges his share in the tangled story. It is clearthat the interest here is not primarily in the eventitself, nor does it lie in that phase of the speaker'scharacter which would be revealed by his confessionbefore such a court as he is supposed to confront.The fact is, that Caponsacchi's languageis not such as under the circumstances he couldpossibly be conceived to use. As the situationforms itself in my mind, he might be in his cellawaiting the summons to appear. In that solitudeand uncertainty he goes over in memory thedays in Arezzo, when the temptation first came tohim, and once more takes the perilous ride withPompilia to Rome. He lives again through thegreat crisis, dissecting all his motives, balancingthe pros and cons of each step; yet all the timehe has in mind the opinion of the world as[Pg 148]personified in the judges he is to face. Thepsychology is suspended dexterously betweenself-examination and open confession, and thereader who accepts the actual dramatic situationas suggested by Browning loses the finest andsubtlest savour of the speech. In many places itwould be simply preposterous to suppose we arelistening to words really uttered by the priest.

no, those words were never spoken in the ears ofa sceptical, worldly tribunal; they belong to themost sacred recesses of memory; yet at the sametime that memory is coloured by a consciousnessof the world's clumsy judgment.

It would be exaggeration to say that all Browning'sgreater poems proceed in this involved manner,yet the method is so constant as to be the[Pg 149]most significant feature of his work. And itbestows on him the honour of having created anew genre which follows neither the fashion oflyric on the one hand nor that of drama or narrativeon the other, but is a curious and illusivehybrid of the two. The passions are not uttereddirectly as having validity and meaning in theheart of the speaker alone, nor are they revealedthrough action and reaction upon the emotionsof another. His dramas, if read attentively, willbe found really to fall into the same mixed genreas his monologues. And a comparison of hisSordello with such a poem as Goethe'sTasso(which is more the dialogue of a narrative poemthan a true drama) will show how far he fails tomake a character move visibly amid opposingcircumstances. In both poems we have a contrastof the poetical temperament with the practicalworld. In Browning it is difficult to distinguishthe poet's own thought from the wordsof the hero; the narrative is in reality a longconfession of Sordello to himself who is consciousof a hostile power without. In Goethe thishostile power stands out as distinctly as Tassohimself, and they act side by side each to hisown end.

There is even a certain significance in what isperhaps the most immediately personal poemBrowning ever wrote, thatOne Word More whichhe appended to hisMen and Women. Did hehimself quite understand this lament for Raphael's[Pg 150]lost sonnets and Dante's interrupted angel, thisdesire to find his love a language,

It would seem rather the uneasiness of his ownmind when brought face to face with strong feelingwhere no escape remains into his oblique modeof expression. And the man Browning of reallife, with his training in a dissenting Camberwellhome and later his somewhat dapper acceptanceof the London social season, accords with such aview of the writer. It is, too, worthy of note thatalmost invariably he impressed those who firstmet him as being a successful merchant, a banker,a diplomat—anything but a poet. There waspassion enough below the surface, as his outburstof rage against FitzGerald and other incidents ofthe kind declare; but the direct exhibition of itwas painful if not grotesque.

Yet in this matter, as in everything that touchesBrowning's psychology, it is well to proceedcautiously. Because he approached the emotionsthus obliquely, as it were in a style hybrid betweenthe lyric and the drama, it does not followthat his work is void of emotion or that he questionedthe validity of human passion. The verycontrary is true. I remember, indeed, once hearinga lady, whose taste was as frank as it wasmodern, say that she liked Browning better than[Pg 151]Shakespeare because he was more emotional andless intellectual than the older dramatist. Herdistinction was somewhat confused, but it leadsto an important consideration; I do not know butit points to the very heart of the question ofBrowning's popularity. He is not in reality moreemotional than Shakespeare, but his emotion isof a kind more readily felt by the reader of to-day;nor does he require less use of the intellect,but he does demand less of that peculiar translationof the intellect from the particular to thegeneral point of view which is necessary to raisethe reader into what may be called the poeticalmood. In one sense Browning is nearly the mostintellectual poet in the language. The action ofhis brain was so nimble, his seizure of every associatedidea was so quick and subtile, his ellipticalstyle is so supercilious of the reader's needs,that often to understand him is like following along mathematical demonstration in which manyof the intermediate equations are omitted. Andthen his very trick of approaching the emotionsindirectly, his suspended psychology as I havecalled it, requires a peculiar flexibility of thereader's mind. But in a way these roughnessesof the shell possess an attraction for theeducated public which has been sated with whatlies too accessibly on the surface. They hold outthe flattering promise of an initiation into mysteriesnot open to all the world. Our wits havebecome pretty well sharpened by the complexities[Pg 152]of modern life, and we are ready enough to proveour analytical powers on any riddle of poetry oreconomics. And once we have penetrated to theheart of these enigmas we are quite at our ease.His emotional content is of a sort that requires nofurther adjustment; it demands none of thatpoetical displacement of the person which is souncomfortable to the keen but prosaic intelligence.

And here that tenth Muse, who has been addedto the Pantheon for the guidance of the criticalwriter, trembles and starts back. She beholds tothe right and the left a quaking bog of abstractionsand metaphysical definitions, whereon if a criticso much as set his foot he is sucked down into thebottomless mire. She plucks me by the ear andbids me keep to the strait and beaten path,whispering the self-admonition of one who wasthe darling of her sisters:

Indeed, the question that arises is no less thanthe ultimate distinction between poetry and prose,and "ultimates" may well have an ugly soundto one who is content if he can comprehend whatis concrete and very near at hand. And, as forthat, those who would care to hear the matter debatedin terms ofIdee andBegriff,Objektivität andSubjektivität, must already be familiar with thoseextraordinary chapters in Schopenhauer whereinphilosophy and literature are married as theyhave seldom been elsewhere since the days of[Pg 153]Plato. And yet without any such formidable apparatusas that, it is not difficult to see that thepeculiar procedure of Browning's mind offers tothe reader a pleasure different more in kind thanin degree from what is commonly associated withthe word poetry. His very manner of approachingthe passions obliquely, his habit of holdinghis portrayal of character in suspense betweendirect exposition and dramatic reaction, tends tokeep the attention riveted on the individualspeaker or problem, and prevents that escape intothe larger and more general vision which marksjust the transition from prose to poetry.

It is not always so. Into that cry "O lyricLove" there breaks the note which from the beginninghas made lovers forget themselves in theirsong—the note that passes so easily from the lipsof Persian Omar to the mouth of British FitzGerald:

Is it not clear how, in these direct and lyricalexpressions, the passion of the individual is carriedup into some region where it is blended withcurrents of emotion broader than any one man'sloss or gain? and how, reading these words, we,too, feel that sudden enlargement of the heartwhich it is the special office of the poet to bestow?But it is equally true that Browning's treatment[Pg 154]of love, as inJames Lee's Wife andIn a Balcony,to name the poems nearest at hand, is for themost part so involved in his peculiar psychologicalmethod that we cannot for a moment forget ourselvesin this freer emotion.

And in his attitude towards nature it is thesame thing. I have not read Schopenhauer formany years, but I remember as if it were yesterdaymy sensation of joy as in the course of hisargument I came upon these two lines quotedfrom Horace:

How perfectly simple the words, and yet it wasas if the splendour of the heavens had brokenupon me—rather, in some strange way, withinme. And that, I suppose, is the real function ofdescriptive poetry—not to present a detailed sceneto the eye, but in its mysterious manner to sinkour sense of individual life in this larger sympathywith the world. Now and then, no doubt, Browning,too, strikes this universal note, as, for instance,in those lines fromParacelsus alreadyquoted. But for the most part, his description,like his lyrical passion, is adapted with remarkableskill towards individualising still further theproblem or character that he is analysing. Takethat famous passage inEaster-Day:

We are far enough from the "Nox erat" ofHorace or even the "trunks that glare like gratesof hell"; we are seeing the world with the eyeof a man whose mind is perplexed and whoseimagination is narrowed down by terror to asingle question: "How hard it is to be AChristian!"

And nothing, perhaps, confirms this impressionof a body of writing which is neither quite prosenor quite poetry more than the rhythm of Browning'sverse. Lady Burne-Jones in the Memorialsof her husband tells of meeting the poet at DenmarkHill, when some talk went on about therate at which the pulse of different people beat.Browning suddenly leaned toward her, saying,[Pg 156]"Do me the honour to feel my pulse"—but toher surprise there was none to feel. His pulsewas, in fact, never perceptible to touch. The notionmay seem fantastic, but, in view of certain recentinvestigations of psychology into the relationbetween our pulse and our sense of rhythm, I havewondered whether the lack of any regular systoleand diastole in Browning's verse may not rest ona physical basis. There is undoubtedly a kind ofproper motion in his language, but it is neitherthe regular rise and fall of verse nor the moreloosely balanced cadences of prose; or, rather, itvacillates from one movement to the other, in away which keeps the rhythmically trained ear ina state of acute tension. But it has at least theinterest of corresponding curiously to the writer'strick of steering between the elevation of poetryand the analysis of prose. It rounds out completelyour impression of watching the most expertfunambulist in English letters. Nor is thereanything strange in this intimate relation betweenthe content of his writing and the mechanism ofhis metre. "The purpose of rhythm," says Mr.Yeats in a striking passage of one of his essays,"it has always seemed to me, is to prolong themoment of contemplation, the moment when weare both asleep and awake, which is the one momentof creation, by hushing us with an alluringmonotony, while it holds us waking by variety."That is the neo-Celt's mystical way of putting atruth that all have felt—the fact that the regular[Pg 157]sing-song of verse exerts a species of enchantmenton the senses, lulling to sleep the individual withinus and translating our thoughts and emotions intosomething significant of the larger experience ofmankind.

But I would not leave this aspect of Browning'swork without making a reservation which mayseem to some (though wrongly, I think) to invalidateall that has been said. For it does happennow and again that he somehow produces theunmistakable exaltation of poetry through thevery exaggeration of his unpoetical method.Nothing could be more indirect, more oblique,than his way of approaching the climax inCleon. The ancient Greek poet, writing "fromthe sprinkled isles, Lily on lily, that o'erlace thesea," answers certain queries of Protus the Tyrant.He contrasts the insufficiency of the artisticlife with that of his master, and laments bitterlythe vanity of pursuing ideal beauty when the goalat the end is only death:

The poem, one begins to suspect, is a specimenof Browning's peculiar manner of indirection; in[Pg 158]reality, through this monologue, suspended delicatelybetween self-examination and dramaticconfession, he is focussing in one individual heartthe doom of the great civilisation that is passingaway and the splendid triumph of the new. Andthen follows the climax, as it were an accidentalafterthought:

It is not revoking what has been said to admitthat the superb audacity of the indirection inthese underscored lines touches on the sublime;the individual is involuntarily rapt into communionwith the great currents that sweepthrough human affairs, and the interest of psychologyis lost in the elevation of poetry. At thesame time it ought to be added that this effect[Pg 159]would scarcely have been possible were not therhythm and the mechanism of the verse unusuallyfree of Browning's prosaic mannerism.

It might seem that enough had been said toexplain why Browning is popular. The attitudeof the ordinary intelligent reader toward him is, Ipresume, easily stated. A good many of Browning'smystifications,Sordello, for one, he simplyrefuses to bother himself with.Le jeu, he sayscandidly,ne vaut pas les chandelles. Other workshe goes through with some impatience, but withan amount of exhilarating surprise sufficient tocompensate for the annoyances. If he is trainedin literary distinctions, he will be likely to laydown the book with the exclamation:C'est magnifique,mais ce n'est pas la poésie! And probablysuch a distinction will not lessen his admiration;for it cannot be asserted too often that the readingpublic to-day is ready to accede to any legitimatedemand on its analytical understanding, but thatit responds sluggishly, or only spasmodically, tothat readjustment of the emotions necessary forthe sustained enjoyment of such a poem asParadiseLost. But I suspect that we have not yettouched the real heart of the problem. All thisdoes not explain that other phase of Browning'spopularity, which depends upon anything butthe common sense of the average reader; and,least of all, does it account for the library ofbooks, of which Professor Herford's is the latestexample. There is another public which craves[Pg 160]a different food from the mere display of humannature; it is recruited largely by the women'sclubs and by men who are unwilling or afraid tohold their minds in a state of self-centred expectancytoward the meaning of a civilisation shotthrough by threads of many ages and confusedcolours; it is kept in a state of excitation bycritics who write lengthily and systematically of"joy in soul." Now there is a certain philosophywhich is in a particular way adapted to suchreaders and writers. Its beginnings, no doubt,are rooted in the naturalism of Rousseau andthe eighteenth century, but the flower of it belongswholly to our own age. It is the philosophywhose purest essence may be found distilled inBrowning's magical alembic, and a single dropof it will affect the brain of some people witha strange giddiness.

And here again I am tempted to abscond behindthose blessed wordsPlatonische Ideen andBegriffe, universalia ante rem anduniversalia postrem, which offer so convenient an escape from thedifficulty of meaning what one says. It wouldbe so easy with those counters of German metaphysiciansand the schoolmen to explain how itis that Browning has a philosophy of generalisednotions, and yet so often misses the form of generalisationspecial to the poet. The fact is hisphilosophy is not so much inherent in his writingas imposed on it from the outside. His theoryof love does not expand like Dante's into a great[Pg 161]vision of life wherein symbol and reality are fusedtogether, but is added as a commentary on theaction or situation. And on the other hand hedoes not accept the simple and pathetic incompletenessof life as a humbler poet might, butmust try with his reason to reconcile it with anideal system:

Yet "ideal" and "reconcilement" are scarcelythe words; for Browning's philosophy, when detached,as it may be, from its context, teachesjust the acceptance of life in itself as needing noconversion into something beyond its own impulsivedesires:

Passion to Shakespeare was the source of tragedy;there is no tragedy, properly speaking, inBrowning, for the reason that passion is to him[Pg 162]essentially good. By sheer bravado of humanemotion we justify our existence, nay—

His notion of "moral strength," as Professor Santayanaso forcibly says, "is a blind and miscellaneousvehemence."

But if all the passions have their own validity,one of them in particular is the power that movesthrough all and renders them all good:

It is the power that reaches up from earth toheaven, and the divine nature is no more than ahigher, more vehement manifestation of its energy:

And in the closing vision ofSaul this thought ofthe identity of man's love and God's love is utteredby David in a kind of delirious ecstasy:

But there is no need to multiply quotations.The point is that in all Browning's rhapsodythere is nowhere a hint of any break between thelower and the higher nature of man, or betweenthe human and the celestial character. Not thathis philosophy is pantheistic, for it is Hebraic inits vivid sense of God's distinct personality; butthat man's love is itself divine, only lesser in degree.There is nothing that corresponds to thetremendous words of Beatrice to Dante when hemeets her face to face in the Terrestrial Paradise:

nothing that corresponds to the "scot of penitence,"the tears, and the plunge into the river ofLethe before the new, transcendent love begins.Indeed, the point of the matter is not that Browningmagnifies human love in its own sphere ofbeauty, but that he speaks of it with the voice ofa prophet of spiritual things and proclaims it as acomplete doctrine of salvation. Often, as I readthe books on Browning's gospel of human passion,my mind recurs to that scene in the Gospelof St. John, wherein it is told how a certain Nicodemusof the Pharisees came to Jesus by night andwas puzzled by the hard saying: "Except a man[Pg 164]be born again, he cannot see the kingdom ofGod." There is no lack of confessions from thatday to this of men to whom it has seemed thatthey were born again, and always, I believe, thenew birth, like the birth of the body, was consummatedwith wailing and anguish, and afterwardsthe great peace. This is a mystery intowhich it is no business of mine to enter, but withthe singularly uniform record of these confessionsin my memory, I cannot but wonder at the lightmessage of the new prophet: "If you desire faith—thenyou've faith enough," and "For God isglorified in man." I am even sceptical enoughto believe that the vaunted conclusion ofFifine atthe Fair, "I end with—Love is all and Death isnaught," sounds like the wisdom of a schoolgirl.There is an element in Browning's popularitywhich springs from those readers who are contentto look upon the world as it is; they feel thepower of his lyric song when at rare intervals itflows in pure and untroubled grace, and they enjoythe intellectual legerdemain of his suspendedpsychology. But there is another element in thatpopularity (and this, unhappily, is the inspirationof the clubs and of the formulating critics) whichis concerned too much with this flattering substitutefor spirituality. Undoubtedly, a good dealof restiveness exists under what is called thematerialism of modern life, and many are lookingin this way and that for an escape into the purerjoy which they hear has passed from the world.[Pg 165]It used to be believed that Calderon was a bearerof the message, Calderon who expressed the doctrineof the saints and the poets:

(since the greatest transgression of man is tohave been born). It was believed that the spirituallife was bought with a price, and that thedesires of this world must first suffer permutationinto something not themselves. I am notholding a brief for that austere doctrine; I am noteven sure that I quite understand it, although itis written at large in many books. But I doknow that those who think they have found itsequivalent in the poetry of Browning are misledby wandering and futile lights. The secret of hismore esoteric fame is just this, that he dresses aworldly and easy philosophy in the forms of spiritualfaith and so deceives the troubled seekers afterthe higher life.

It is not pleasant to be convicted of throwingstones at the prophets, as I shall appear to manyto have done. My only consolation is that, if theprophet is a true teacher, these stones of the casualpasser-by merely raise a more conspicuous monumentto his honour; but if he turns out in the endto be a false prophet (as I believe Browning tohave been)—why, then, let his disciples look to it.

A NOTE ON BYRON'S "DON JUAN"

It has often been a source of wonder to me thatI was able to read and enjoy Byron'sDon Juanunder the peculiar circumstances attending myintroduction to that poem. I had been walkingin the Alps, and after a day of unusual exertionfound myself in the village of Chamouni, fatiguedand craving rest. A copy of the Tauchnitz editionfell into my hands, and there, in a little room,through a summer's day, by a window whichlooked full upon the unshadowed splendour ofMont Blanc, I sat and read, and only arose whenJuan faded out of sight with "the phantom of herfrolic Grace—Fitz-Fulke." I have often wondered,I say, why the incongruity of that solemnAlpine scene with the mockery of Byron's wit didnot cause me to shut the book and thrust it away,for in general I am highly sensitive to the natureof my surroundings while reading. Only recently,on taking up the poem again for the purpose ofediting it, did the answer to that riddle occur tome, and with it a better understanding of theplace ofDon Juan among the great epics whichmight have seemed in finer accord with the sublimityand peace of that memorable day.

In one respect, at least, it needed no return to[Pg 167]Byron's work to show how closely it is related inspirit to the accepted canons of the past. Thesepoets, who have filled the world with theirrumour, all looked upon life with some curiousobliquity of vision. We, who have approachedthe consummation of the world's hope, know thathappiness and peace and the fulfilment of desiresare about to settle down and brood for ever moreover the lot of mankind, but with them it seemsto have been otherwise. Who can forget the recurringminynthadion of Homer, in which hesummed up for the men of his day the vanity oflong aspirations? So if we were asked to pointout the lines of Shakespeare that express mostcompletely his attitude toward life, we shouldprobably quote that soliloquy of Hamlet whereinhe catalogues the evils of existence, and only inthe fear of future dreams finds a reason for continuance;or we should cite that sonnet of disillusion:"Tired with all these for restful death Icry." And as for the lyric poets, sooner or laterthe lament of Shelley was wrung from the lips ofeach:

This, I repeat, is a strange fact, for it appearsthat these poets, prophets who spoke in the[Pg 168]language of beauty and who have held the world'sreverence so long—it appears now that these interpretersof the fates were all misled. Possibly,as Aristotle intimated, genius is allied to somevice of the secretions which produces a melancholiaof the brain; something like this, indeed,only expressed in more recondite terms, may befound in the most modern theory of science. Butmore probably they wrote merely from insufficientexperience, not having perceived how the humanrace with increase of knowledge grows in happiness.Thus, at least, it seems to one who observesthe tides of thought. Next year, or thenext, some divine invention shall come which willprove this melancholy of the poets to have beenonly a childish ignorance of man's sublimer destiny;some discovery of a new element morewonderful than radium will render the ancientbrooding over human feebleness a matter oflaughter and astonishment; some acceptance ofthe larger brotherhood of the race will wipe awayall tears and bring down upon earth the fairdream of heaven, a reality and a possession forever; some new philosophy of the soul will convertthe old poems of conflict into meaninglessfables, stale and unprofitable. Already we seethe change at hand. To how many persons to-daydoes Browning appeal—though they wouldnot always confess it—more powerfully thanHomer or Milton or any other of the great namesof antiquity? And the reason of this closer appeal[Pg 169]of Browning is chiefly the unflagging optimism ofhis philosophy, his full-blooded knowledge andsympathy which make the wailings of the pastsomewhat silly in our ears, if truth must be told.I never read Browning but those extraordinarylines of Euripides recur to my mind: "Notnow for the first time do I regard mortal thingsas a shadow, nor would I fear to charge withsupreme folly those artificers of words who arereckoned the sages of mankind, for no man amongmortals is happy."Θνητῶν γὰρ οὐδείςἐστιν εὐδαίμων,indeed!—would any one be shamelessenough to utter such words under the new dispensationof official optimism?

It is necessary to think of these things beforewe attempt to criticise Byron, forDon Juan, too,despite its marvellous vivacity, looks upon lifefrom the old point of view. Already, for thisreason in part, it seems a little antiquated to us,and in a few years it may be read only as a curiosity.Meanwhile for the few who lag behind inthe urgent march of progress the poem will possessa special interest just because it presents theancient thesis of the poets and prophets in a novelform. Of course, in many lesser matters it makesa wider and more lasting appeal. Part of theHaidée episode, for instance, is so exquisitelylovely, so radiant with the golden haze of youth,that even in the wiser happiness of our maturitywe may still turn to it with a kind of complacentdelight. Briefer passages scattered here and[Pg 170]there, such as the "'T is sweet to hear," and the"Ave Maria," need only a little abridgment atthe close to fit them perfectly for any futureanthology devoted to the satisfaction and theultimate significance of human emotions. But,strangely enough, these disturbing climaxes,which will demand to be forgotten, or to be rearrangedas we restore old mutilated statues, do,indeed, point to those very qualities which renderthe poem so extraordinary a complement to thegreat and accepted epics of the past. For thepresent it may yet be sufficient to considerDonJuan as it is—with all its enormities upon it.

And, first of all, we shall make a sad mistakeif we regard the poem as a mere work of satire.Occasionally Byron pretends to lash himself intoa righteous fury over the vices of the age, but weknow that this is all put on, and that the realsavageness of his nature comes out only when hethinks of his own personal wrongs. Now this isa very different thing from the deliberate andsustained denunciation of a vicious age such aswe find in Juvenal, a different thing utterly fromthesæva indignatio that devoured the heart andbrain of poor Swift. There is inDon Juan somethingof the personal satire of Pope, and somethingof the whimsical mockery of Lucilius andhis imitators. But it needs but a little discernmentto see that Byron's poem has vastly greaterscope and significance than theEpistle to Dr.Arbuthnot, or the spasmodic gaiety of the Menip[Pg 171]peansatire. It does in its own way present aview of life as a whole, with the good and the evil,and so passes beyond the category of the merelysatirical. The very scope of its subject, if nothingmore, classes it with the more universalepics of literature rather than with the poems thatportray only a single aspect of life.

Byron himself was conscious of this, and morethan once alludes to the larger aspect of his work."If you must have an epic," he once said toMedwin, "there'sDon Juan for you; it is anepic as much in the spirit of our day as theIliadwas in that of Homer." And in one of the asidesin the poem itself he avows the same design:

Hardly the style of those stately writers, to besure, but an epic after its own fashion the poemcertainly is. That Byron's way is not the way ofthe older poets requires no emphasis; they

Being cut off from the heroic subjects of theestablished school, he still sought to obtain somethingof the same large and liberating effectthrough the use of a frankly modern theme.[Pg 172]The task was not less difficult than his successwas singular and marked; and that is why itseemed in no way inappropriate, despite its occasionallapse of licentiousness, to readDon Juanwith the white reflection of Mont Blanc streamingthrough the window. Homer might have beenso read, or Virgil, or any of those poets who presentedlife solemnly and magniloquently; I do notthink I could have held my mind to Juvenal orPope or even Horace beneath the calm radianceof that Alpine light.

I have said that the great poets all took asombre view of the world. Man is butthe dreamof a shadow, said Pindar, speaking for the race ofgenius, and Byron is conscious of the same insightinto the illusive spectacle. He has lookedwith like vision upon

and will not in his turn refrain "from holdingup the nothingness of life." So in the introductionto the seventh canto he runs through the listof those who have preached and sung this solemn,but happily to us outworn, theme:

It must not be supposed, however, because theheroic poems of old were touched with the pettinessand sadness of human destiny, that theirinfluence on the reader was supposed to be narrow[Pg 173]ingor depressing; the name "heroic" impliesthe contrary of that. Indeed their very inspirationwas derived from the fortitude of a spiritstruggling to rise above the league of little thingsand foiling despairs. It may seem paradoxical tous, yet it is true that these morbid poets believedin the association of men with gods and in thegrandeur of mortal passions. So Achilles andHector, both with the knowledge of their briefdestiny upon them, both filled with foreboding offrustrate hopes, strive nobly to the end of magnanimousdefeat. There lay the greatness of theheroic epos for readers of old,—the sense of humanlittleness, the melancholy of broken aspirations,swallowed up in the transcending sublimity ofman's endurance and daring. And men of lessermould, who knew so well the limitations of theirsphere, took courage and were taught to lookdown unmoved upon their harassed fate.

Now Byron came at a time of transition fromthe old to the new. The triumphs of materialdiscovery, "Le magnifiche sorti e progressive,"had not yet cast a reproach on the earlier senseof life's futility, while at the same time the faithin heroic passions had passed away. An attemptto create an epic in the old spirit would havebeen doomed, was indeed doomed in the hands ofthose who undertook it. The very language inwhich Byron presents the ancient universal beliefof Plato and those others

shows how far he was from the loftier mode ofimagination. In place of heroic passion he mustseek another outlet of relief, another mode ofpurging away melancholy; and the spirit of theburlesque came lightly to his use as the onlyavailablevis medica. The feeling was commonto his age, but he alone was able to adapt themotive to epic needs. How often the melancholysentimentality of Heine corrects itself by a burlesqueconclusion! Or, if we regard the novel,how often does Thackeray in like manner replacethe old heroic relief of passion by a kindly smileat the brief and busy cares of men. But neitherHeine nor Thackeray carries the principle of theburlesque to its artistic completion, or makes itthe avowed motive of a complicated action, asByron does inDon Juan. That poem is indeed"prolific of melancholy merriment." It is notnecessary to point out at length the persistence ofthis mock-heroic spirit. Love, ambition, home-attachments,are all burlesqued; battle ardour,the special theme of epic sublimity, is subjectedto the same quizzical mockery:

In the gruesome shipwreck scene the tale of sufferingwhich leads to cannibalism is interrupted thus:

The description of London town as seen fromShooter's Hill ends with this absurd metaphor:

Even Death laughs,—death that "hiatus maximedefiendus," "the dunnest of all duns," etc. And,last of all, the poet turns the same weapon againsthis own art. Do the lines for a little while growserious, he suddenly pulls himself up with asneer:

I trust, however, it has been made sufficientlyclear thatDon Juan is something quite differentfrom the mere mock-heroic—from Pulci, for instance,"sire of the half-serious rhyme," whomByron professed to imitate. The poem is in asense not half but wholly serious, for the veryreason that it takes so broad a view of humanactivity, and because of its persistent moral sense.(Which is nowise contradicted by the immoralscenes in several of the cantos.) It is not, forexample, possible to think of finding in Pulcisuch a couplet as this:

He who could write such lines as those was not[Pg 176]merely indulging his humour.Don Juan issomething more than

Out of the bitterness of his soul, out of the wreckof his passions which, though heroic in intensity,had ended in quailing of the heart, he soughtwhat the great makers of epic had sought,—asolace and a sense of uplifted freedom. Theheroic ideal was gone, the refuge of religion wasgone; but, passing to the opposite extreme, byshowing the power of the human heart to mock atall things, he would still set forth the possibilityof standing above and apart from all things.He, too, went beyond the limitations of destinyby laughter, as Homer and Virgil and Miltonhad risen by the imagination. And, in doingthis, he wrote the modern epic.

We are learning a new significance of humanlife, as I said; and the sublime audacities of theelder poets in attempting to transcend the melancholiaof their day are growing antiquated, just asByron's heroic mockery is turning stale. In afew years we shall have come so much closer tothe mysteries over which the poets bungled helplessly,that we can afford to forget their rhapsodies.Meanwhile it may not be amiss to makeclear to ourselves the purpose and character of oneof the few, the very few, great poems in ourliterature.

LAURENCE STERNE

A number of excellent editions of our standardauthors have been put forth during the last twoor three years, but none of them, perhaps, hasbeen of such real service to letters as the newSterne edited by Professor Wilbur L. Cross.[8]

Ordinarily the fresh material advertised inthese editions is in large measure rubbish whichhad been deliberately discarded by the author andwhose resuscitation is an impertinence to hismemory. Certainly this is true of Murray's newByron; it is in part true of the great editions ofHazlitt and Lamb recently published, to go nofurther afield. But with Sterne the case is different.TheJournal to Eliza and the letters nowfirst printed in full from the "Gibbs manuscript"are a genuine aid in getting at the heart of Sterne'selusive character. Even more important is thereadjustment of dates for the older correspondence,which the present editor has accomplishedat the cost of considerable pains, for the settingback of a letter two years may make all the differ[Pg 178]encebetween a lying knave and an unstablesentimentalist. In the spring of 1767, just ayear before his death, Sterne was inditing thoserather sickly letters and the newly publishedJournal to Eliza, a susceptible young woman whowas about to sail for India. "The coward," saysThackeray, "was writing gay letters to his friendsthis while, with sneering allusions to his poorfoolishBrahmine. Her ship was not out ofthe Downs, and the charming Sterne was atthe 'Mount Coffee-House,' with a sheet of gilt-edgedpaper before him, offering that precioustreasure, his heart, to Lady P——." It is anugly charge, and indeed Thackeray's whole portraitof the humourist is harshly painted. ButSterne was not sneering in other letters at his"Brahmine," as he called the rather spoiled EastIndia lady, and it turns out from some very prettycalculations of Professor Cross that the particularnote to Lady P[ercy] must have been written atthe Mount Coffee-House two years before he everknew Eliza. "Coward," "wicked," "false,""wretched worn-out old scamp," "mountebank,""foul Satyr," "the last words the famous authorwrote were bad and wicked, the last lines the poorstricken wretch penned were for pity and pardon"—forshame, Mr. Thackeray! Sterne was a weakman, one may admit; wretched and worn-out hewas when the final blow struck him in his lonelyhired room; but is there no pity and pardon onyour pen for the wayward penitent? You had[Pg 179]sympathy enough and facile tears enough for thegenial Costigans and the others who followedtheir hearts too readily; have you noAlas, poorYorick! for the author who gave you these characters?You could smile at Pendennis when heused the old songs for a second love; was it aterrible thing that Yorick should have taken passagesfrom his early letters (copies of which werethriftily preserved after the fashion of the day)and sent them as the bubblings of fresh emotionat the end of his life? "One solitary plate, oneknife, one fork, one glass!—I gave a thousandpensive, penetrating looks at the chair thou hadstso often graced, in those quiet and sentimentalrepasts—then laid down my knife and fork, andtook out my handkerchief, and clapped it acrossmy face, and wept like a child"—he wrote toMiss Lumley who afterwards became Mrs. Sterne;and in theJournal kept for Eliza when he wasbroken in spirit and near to death, you may readthe same words, as Thackeray read them inmanuscript, and you may call them false andlying; but I am inclined to believe they werequite as genuine as most of the pathos of thatlachrymose age. The want of sympathy inThackeray's case is the harder to understand forthe reason that to Sterne more than to any otherof the eighteenth-century wits he would seem toowe his style and his turn of thought. On manya page his peculiar sentiment reads like a directimitation ofTristram Shandy; add but a touch[Pg 180]of caprice to Colonel Newcome and you mightalmost imagine my Uncle Toby parading in thenineteenth century; and I think it is just the lackof this whimsical touch that makes the goodcolonel a little mawkish to many readers. Andif one is to look for an antetype of Thackeray'sexquisite English, whither shall one turn unlessto theSermons of Mr. Yorick? There is a taintof ingratitude in his affectation of being shocked atthe irregularities of one to whom he was so muchindebted, and I fear Mr. Thackeray was too consciouslyappealing to the Philistine prejudices ofthe good folk who were listening to his lectures.Afterwards, when the mischief was done, he sufferedwhat looks like a qualm of conscience. Inone of theRoundabout Papers he tells how heslept in Sterne's old hotel at Calais: "When Iwent to bed in the room, inhis room, when Ithink how I admire, dislike, and have abusedhim, a certain dim feeling of apprehension filledmy mind at the midnight hour. What if I shouldsee his lean figure in the black-satin breeches, hissinister smile, his long thin finger pointing to mein the moonlight!" Unfortunately the popularnotion of Sterne is still based almost exclusivelyon the picture of him in theEnglish Humourists.

It is to be hoped that at last this carefully preparededition will do something toward dispellingthat false impression. Certainly, the various introductionsfurnished by Professor Cross are admirablefor their fairness and insight. He does[Pg 181]not attempt a panegyric of Sterne, as did Mr.Fitzgerald in the first edition of theLife, nor doeshe awkwardly overlay panegyric with censure, asthese are found in the present revised form of thatnarrative; he recognises the errors of the sentimentalist,but he does not call them by exaggeratednames. And he sees, too, the fundamentalsincerity of the man, knowing that no great bookwas ever penned without that quality, whateverelse might be missing. I think he will account itfor service in a good cause if, as an essayist takingmy material where it may be found, I try to drawa little closer still to the sly follower of Rabelaiswhom he has honoured by so elaborate a study.

Possibly Professor Cross does not recognisefully enough the influence of Sterne's early yearson his character. It is indeed a vagrant andShandean childhood to which the Rev. Mr.Laurence Sterne introduces us in theMemoirwritten late in life for the benefit of his daughterLydia. The father, a lieutenant in Handaside'sregiment, passed from engagement to idleness,and from barrack to barrack, more than was thecustom even in those unsettled days. At Clonmel,in the south of Ireland, November 24, 1713,Laurence was born, a few days after the arrival ofhis mother from Dunkirk. Other children hadbeen given to the luckless couple, and were yet tobe added, but here and there they were droppedon the wayside in pathetic graves, leaving in theend only two, the future novelist and his sister[Pg 182]Catherine, who married a publican in Londonand became estranged from her brother by her"uncle's wickedness and her own folly"—saysLaurence. Of the mother it is not necessary tosay much. The difficulties of her life as a hanger-onin camps seem to have hardened her, and hertemper ("clamorous and rapacious," he called it)was in all points unlike her son's. That Sterneneglected her brutally is a charge as old as Walpole'sscandalous tongue, and Byron, taking hiscue from thence, gave piquancy to the accusationby saying that "he preferred whining over a deadass to relieving a living mother." Sterne's minuterefutation of the slander may now be read at fulllength in a letter to the very uncle who set thetale agoing. The boy would seem to have takenthe father's mercurial temperament, though nothis physique:

Lieutenant Sterne died in 1731, and it wouldrequire but a few changes in the son's record tomake it read like a page fromHenry Esmond;the very texture of the language, the turn of thequizzical pathos, are Thackeray's.

Laurence at this time was at school near Halifax,where he got into a characteristic scrape.The ceiling of the schoolroom had been newlywhitewashed; the ladder was standing, and theboy mounted it and wrote in large letters,Lau.Sterne. The usher whipped him severely, but,says theMemoir, "my master was very muchhurt at this, and said, before me, that nevershould that name be effaced, for I was a boy ofgenius, and he was sure I should come to preferment."From Halifax Sterne went to Jesus College,Cambridge, at the expense of a cousin. Anuncle at York next took charge of him and gothim the living of Sutton, and afterwards thePrebendary of York. Just how he came toquarrel with this patron we shall probably neverknow. Sterne himself declares that his unclewished him to write political paragraphs for theWhigs, that he detested such "dirty work," andgot his uncle's hatred in return for his independence.According to the writer of theYorkshire[Pg 184]Anecdotes, the two fell out over a woman—whichsounds more like the truth. Meanwhile, Laurencehad been successfully courting Miss ElizabethLumley at York, and, during her absence,had been writing those love-letters which hisdaughter published after the death of her parents,to the immense increase of sentimentalismthroughout the United Kingdom. They are, insooth, but a sickly, hothouse production, thoughhonestly enough meant, no doubt. The writer,too, kept a copy of them, and thriftily made useof select passages at a later date, as we have seen.Miss Lumley became Mrs. Sterne in due time,and brought to her husband a modest jointure,and another living at Stillington, so that he wasnow a pluralist, although far from rich. Themarriage was not particularly happy. Madam,one gathers, was pragmatic and contentious andunreasonable, her reverend spouse was volatileand pleasure-loving; and when, in the years ofYorick's fame, they went over to France, she decidedto stay there with her daughter. Sterneseems to have been fond of her always, in a way,and in money matters was never anything butgenerous and tactfully considerate. A bad-heartedman is not so thoughtful of his wife'scomfort after she has left him, as Sterne's lettersshow him to have been; and even Thackeray admitsthat his affection for the girl was "artless,kind, affectionate, andnot sentimental."

But the lawful Mrs. Sterne was not the only[Pg 185]woman at whose feet the parson of Sutton andStillington was sighing. There was that Mlle.de Fourmantelle, a Huguenot refugee, the "dear,dear Kitty" (or "Jenny" as she becomes inTristramShandy), to whom he sends presents of wineand honey (with notes asking, "What is honeyto the sweetness of thee?"), and who followedhim to London in the heyday of his fame, wheresomehow she fades mysteriously out of view. "Imyself must ever have some Dulcinea in myhead," he said; "it harmonises the soul." And,in truth, the soul of Yorick was mewed in thecage of his breast very near his heart, and neverstretched her wings out of that close atmosphere.Charity was his creed in the pulpit, and his loveof woman had a curious and childlike way offortifying the Christian love of his neighbour.Most famous of all was his passion—it seems almostto have been a passion in this case—for thefamous "Eliza." Towards the end of his life hehad become warmly attached to a certain WilliamJames, a retired Indian commodore, and his wife,who were the best and most wholesome of hisfriends. At their London home he met Mrs.Elizabeth Draper, and soon became romanticallyattached to her. When the time drew near forher to sail to India to rejoin her husband, hewrote a succession of notes in a kind of paroxysmof grief for himself and anxiety for her, and forseveral months afterwards he kept a journal of hisemotions for her benefit some day. He was dead[Pg 186]in less than a year. The letters she kept, and indue time printed, because it was rumoured thatLydia was to publish them from copies—a prettybit of wrangling among all these women therewas, over the sentimental relics of poor Yorick!TheJournal is now for the first time included inthe author's works—a singular document, as eccentricin spelling and grammar as the sentimentis hard to define, a wild and hysterical record.But it rings true on the whole, and confirms thebelief that Sterne's feelings were genuine, howevershort-lived they may have been. The lastletter to Eliza is pitiful with its tale of a brokenbody and a sick heart: "In ten minutes after Idispatched my letter, this poor, fine-spun frameof Yorick's gave way, and I broke a vessel in mybreast, and could not stop the loss of blood tillfour this morning. I have filled all thy Indiahandkerchiefs with it.—It came, I think, frommy heart! I fell asleep through weakness. Atsix I awoke, with the bosom of my shirt steepedin tears." All through theJournal that followsare indications of wasted health and of the perplexitiesof life that were closing in upon him.Only at rare intervals the worries are forgotten,and we get a picture of serener moments. Oneday, July 2nd, he grows genuinely idyllic, and itmay not be amiss to copy out his note just as hepenned it:

But Eliza never came until Yorick had gone ona longer journey than Bombay. In England oncemore, she traded on her relation to the famouswriter, and then reviled him. She associatedwith John Wilkes, and afterwards with the AbbéRaynal, who writ an absurd, pompous eulogy on"the Lady who has been so celebrated as theCorrespondent of Mr. Sterne." It is engraved onher tomb in Bristol Cathedral that "genius and benevolencewere united in her"; but the long lettercomposed in the vein of Mrs. Montagu and nowprinted from her manuscript belies the first, andher behaviour after Sterne's death makes amockery of the second.

All this new material throws light on a phaseof this matter which cannot be avoided in any[Pg 188]discussion of Sterne's character: How far did hisimmorality actually extend? To Thackeray hewas a "foul Satyr"; Bagehot thought he wasmerely an "old flirt," and others have seen variousdegrees of guilt in his philanderings. Nowhis relation to Eliza would seem to be pretty decisiveof his character in this respect, and fortunatelythe evidence here published in full byProfessor Cross leaves little room for doubt.There is, for one thing, an extraordinary letterwhich is given in facsimile from the rough draft,with all its erasures and corrections. It wasaddressed to Daniel Draper, but was never sent,apparently never completed. The substance of itis, to say the least, unusual:

Now it is easy to say that such a letter was[Pg 189]written with the hypocritical intention of allayingMr. Draper's possible suspicions, and certainlythe last sentence overshoots the mark. Againstthe general innocence of Sterne's life there exist,in particular, two damaging bits of evidence—thatinfamous thing in dog-Latin addressed to themaster of the "Demoniacs," whose meaning musthave been quite lost upon the daughter who publishedit, and a pair of brief notes to a womannamed Hannah. Of the Latin letter one may saythat it was probably written in the exaggeratedtone of bravado suitable to its recipient; of boththis and the notes one may add that they do notincriminate the later years of Sterne's life. Asan offset we now have that extraordinary memorandumin theJournal to Eliza, dated April 24,1767, which states explicitly, and convincingly,that he had led an entirely chaste life for the pastfifteen years. It is not requisite, or indeed possible,to enter into the evidence further in this place,but the general inference may be stated withsomething like assurance: Sterne's relation toEliza was purely sentimental, as was the casewith most of his philandering; at the same timein his earlier years he had probably indulged in alife of pleasure such as was by no means uncommonamong the clergy of his day. He was neitherquite the lying scoundrel of Thackeray nor the"old flirt" of Bagehot, but a man led into manyfollies, and many kindnesses also, by an impulsiveheart and a worldly philosophy. It is not his[Pg 190]immorality that one has to complain of, and thetalk in the books on that score is mostly foolishness;it is rather his bad taste. He cannot be muchblamed for his estrangement from his wife, andhis care for her comfort is not a little to his credit;but he might have refrained from writing to Elizaon the happiness they were to enjoy when thepoor woman was dead—as he had already doneto Mlle. Fourmantelle, and others, too, it may be.Mrs. Sterne, not long after the departure of Eliza,had written that she was coming over to England,and theJournal for a time is filled with forebodingsof the confusion she was to bring with her.One hardly knows whether to smile or drop atear over the Postscript added after the last regularentry:

So ends the famousJournal, which at last weare permitted to read with all its sins upon it.And I think the first observation that will occurto every reader is surprise that a master of stylecould write such slipshod, almost illiterate, English.The fact is a good many of the writers ofthe day were content to leave all minor mattersof grammar and orthography to their printer,whom it was then the fashion to abuse. Morethan one page of stately English out of that formalage would look as queer as Sterne's hectic scribblings,could we see the original manuscript. Butthe ill taste of it all is quite as apparent, and unfortunatelyno printer could expunge that fault,along with his haphazard punctuation, fromSterne's published works. In another wayhis incongruous calling as a priest may be responsiblefor a note that particularly jars upon usto-day. Too often in the midst of very earthlysentiments he breaks forth with a bit of religiousclaptrap, as when in theJournal he criesout, "Great God of Mercy! shorten the Space betwixtus—Shorten the space of our miseries!"—oras when, in that letter to Lady Percy which so[Pg 192]disgusted Thackeray, he dandles his temptations,and in the same breath tells how he has repeatedthe Lord's Prayer for the sake of deliverance fromthem. Again, I say, it is a matter of taste, forthere is no reason to believe that Yorick's religiousfeelings were not just as sincere, and as volatile,too, as his love-making. They sometimes cameto him at an inopportune moment.

"Un prêtre corrumpu ne l'est jamais à demi"—apriest is never only half corrupt—said Massillon,and there are times when such a saying istrue. It is also true, and Sterne's life is witnessthereof, that in certain ages, when compassionand tenderness of heart have taken the place ofreligion's austerer virtues, a man may preach withconviction on Sunday, and on Monday join withoutmuch disquiet of conscience in the revelriesof a "Crazy" Castle. There is not a great dealfor the moralist to say on such a life; it is a matterfor the historian to explain. At CambridgeSterne had made the acquaintance of John HallStevenson, the owner of Skelton, or "Crazy,"Castle, which lay at Guisborough, within convenientreach of Sterne's Yorkshire homes. Anexcellent engraving in the present edition gives afair notion of this fantastic dwelling before itsrestoration. On a fringe of land between theedge of what seems a stagnant pool and the footof some barren hills, the old pile of stone sits dulland lowering. First comes a double terrace risingsheer from the water, and above that a rambling,[Pg 193]comfortless-looking structure, pierced in the upperstory by a few solemn windows. Terraces andbuilding alike are braced with outstanding buttresses,as if, like the House of Usher, the ancientedifice might some day split and crumble awayinto the lake. At one end of the pile is a heavysquare tower erected long ago for defence; at theother stands a slender octagonal turret with itsfamous weathercock, by whose direction the ownerregulated his mood for the day. The whole bearsan aspect of bleakness and solitude, in startlingcontrast with the wild doings of host and guests.A study yet to be made is a history of the clubsor associations of the eighteenth century, which,in imitation, no doubt, of the newly institutedMasonic rites, were formed for the purpose ofadding the sting of a fraternal secrecy to thecommonplace pleasures of dissipation. Famousamong these were the "Monks of MedmenhamAbbey," and the "Hell-Fire Club," and to a lessdegree the "Demoniacs" whom Hall Stevensongathered into his notorious abode. If Sternefound his amusement in this boisterous assembly,it is charitable (and the evidence points this way)to suppose that he enjoyed the jovial wit and grotesquepranks of such a company rather than itsviciousness. It is at least remarkable that HallStevenson, or "Eugenius," as Sterne called him,seems to have tried to steady the eccentric divineby more than one piece of practical advice. Aboveall, there lay at Skelton a great collection of[Pg 194]Rabelaisian books, brought together by theowner during his tours on the Continent; and tothis Sterne owed his eccentric reading and that acquaintancewith the world's humours and whimsicalitieswhich were to make his fortune.

Here, then, in the library of his compromisingfriend, he gathered the material for his greatwork,Tristram Shandy; and, indeed, if we creditsome scholars, he gathered so successfully thatlittle was left for his own creative talents. It isdemonstrably true that he made extraordinaryuse of certain old French books, including Rabelais,whom he counted with Cervantes as hismaster; and from Burton'sAnatomy of Melancholyhe borrowed unblushingly, not to mention otherEnglish authors. We are shocked at first tolearn that some of his choicest passages are stolengoods; the recording angel's tear was shed, itappears, and my Uncle Toby's fly was releasedlong before that gentleman was born to sweetenthe world; so too the wind was tempered to theshorn lamb in proverb before Sterne ever addedthat text to the stock of biblical quotations. Butafter all, there is little to be gained by unearthingthese plagiarisms.Tristram Shandy and theSentimental Journey still remain among the mostoriginal productions in the language, and we areonly taught once more that genius has a high-handedway of taking its own where it finds it.

The fact is that this trick of borrowing scarcelydoes more than affect a few of those set pieces or[Pg 195]purple patches by which an author like Sternegradually comes to be known and judged. Theseare admirably adapted for use in anthologies, forthey may be severed from their context withoutcutting a single artery or nerve; but let no onesuppose that from reading them he gets anythingbut a distorted view of Sterne's work. They areall marked by a peculiar kind of artificial pathos—therecording angel's tear, Uncle Toby's fly,the dead ass, the caged starling, Maria ofMoulines (I name them as they occur to me)—andthey give a very imperfect notion of thetrue Shandean flavour. In their own genrethey are no doubt masterpieces, but it is a genrewhich gives pleasure from the perception of theart, and not from the kindling touch of nature,in their execution. They are ostensibly pathetic,yet they make no appeal to the heart, and Idoubt if a tear was ever shed over any of them—evenby the lachrymose Yorick himself. To enjoythem properly one must key his mind to thatstate in which the emotions cease to have validityin themselves, and are changed into a kind of exquisiteconvention. Now, it is easier by far todetect the inherent insubstantiality of such a conventionthan to appreciate its delicately balancedbeauty, and thus it happens that we hear so muchof Sterne's false sentiment from those who basetheir criticism primarily on these famous episodes.For my part I am almost inclined to place thestory of Le Fevre in this class, and to wonder[Pg 196]if those who call it pathetic really mean that ithas touched their heart; I am sure it never costme a sigh.

No, the highest mastery of Sterne does not liein these anthological patches, but first of all inhis power of creating characters. There are notmany persons engaged in the little drama ofShandy Hall, and their range of action is narrow,but they are drawn with a skill and a memorabledistinctness which have never been surpassed.Not the bustling people of Shakespeare's stageare more real and individual than Mr. Shandy,my Uncle Toby, Corporal Trim, and Dr. Slop.Even the minor characters of the servants' hallare sketched in with wonderful vividness; and ifthere is a single failure in all that gallery of portraits,it is Yorick himself, who was drawn fromthe author and is foisted upon the company somewhatunceremoniously, if truth be told. Nor isthe secret of their lifelikeness hard to discern.One of the constant creeds of the age, handeddown from the old comedy of humours, was thebelief in the "ruling passion" as the source of alla man's acts. The persons who figure in mostof the contemporary letters and novels are a successionof originals or grotesques, moved by asingle motive. They are all mad in England,said Hamlet, and Walpole enforces the sentencewith a thousand burlesque anecdotes. Now inSterne this ruling passion, both in his own characterand in that of his creations, was softened[Pg 197]down to what may be called a whimsical egotism,which does not repel by its exaggeration, yet bestowsa marvellous unity and relief. It is hishobbyhorsical philosophy, as he calls it. At thehead of all are Tristram's father and uncle, withtheir cunningly contrasted humours—Mr. Shandy,who would regulate all the affairs of life by abstracttheorems of the mind, and my Uncle Toby,who is guided solely by the impulses of the heart.Between them Sterne would seem to have set overagainst each other the two divided sources of humanactivity; and the minor characters, each withhis cherished hobby, are ranged under them inproper subordination. The art of the narrative—andin this Sterne is without master or rival—isto bring these characters into a group by somecommon motive, and then to show how each ofthem is thinking all the while of his own dearcrotchet. Take, for example, the tremendouscurse of Ernulphus in the third book. Mr.Shandy had "the greatest veneration in theworld for that gentleman, who, in distrust of hisown discretion in this point, sat down and composed(that is, at his leisure) fit forms of swearingsuitable to all cases, from the lowest to the highestprovocation which could possibly happen to him."That is Mr. Shandy's theorising hobby, and accordingly,when his man Obadiah is the cause ofan annoying mishap, Mr. Shandy reaches downthe formal curse of Bishop Ernulphus and handsit to Dr. Slop to read. It might seem tedious to[Pg 198]have seven pages of excommunicative wraththrust upon you, with the Latin text duly writtenout on the opposite page. On the contrary, thisis one of the more entertaining scenes of the book,for at every step one or another of the listenersthrows in an exclamation which intimates howthe words are falling in with his own peculiartrain of thought. The result is a delightful cross-sectionof human nature, as it actually exists."Our armies swore terribly inFlanders, cried myUncleToby—but nothing to this.—For my ownpart, I could not have a heart to curse my dogso."

But it is not this persistent and very humanegotism alone which makes the good people ofShandy Hall so real to us. Sterne is the originatorand master of the gesture and the attitude. Likea skilful player of puppets, he both puts wordsinto the mouths of his creatures and pulls thewires that move them. No one has ever approachedhim in the art with which he carriesout every mood of the heart and every fancy of thebrain into the most minute and precise posturing.Before Corporal Trim reads the sermon his exactattitude is described so that, as the author says,"a statuary might have modelled from it."Throughout all the dialogue between the twocontrasted brothers we follow every movement ofthe speakers, as if we sat with them in the flesh,and when Mr. Shandy breaks his pipe the momentis tense with expectation. But the supreme ex[Pg 199]hibitionof this art occurs at the announcement ofBobby's death. Let us leave Mr. Shandy and myUncle Toby discoursing over this sad event, andturn to the kitchen. Those who know the scenemay pass on:

There is the true Sterne. A common happeningunites a half-dozen people in a sympatheticgroup, yet all the while each of them is living hisindividual life. You may look far and wide, butyou will find nothing quite comparable to that fat,foolish scullion. And withal there is no touch ofcynical satire in this display of egotism, but akindly, quizzical sense of the way in which ourhuman personalities are jumbled together in thisstrange world. And in the end the feeling thatlies covered up in the heart of each, the feelingthat all of us carry dumbly in the inevitable presenceof death, is conveyed in that supreme gestureof Corporal Trim's, whose force in the book is[Pg 201]magnified by the author's fantastic disquisition onits precise nature and significance.

It begins to grow clear, I think, that we havehere something more than an ordinary tale inwhich a few individuals are set apart to enact theirrôles. Somehow, this quaint household in thecountry, where nothing more important is happeningthan the birth of a child, becomes a symbolof the great world with all its tangle of cross-purposes.There is a philosophy, a new and distinctvision of the meaning of life, in these scenes,which makes of Sterne something larger than amere novelist. He was not indulging his author'svanity when he thought of himself as a followerof Rabelais and Cervantes and Swift, for he belongswith them rather than with his great contemporaries,Fielding and Smollet, or his greatersuccessors, Thackeray and Dickens. Nor is hisexact parentage hard to discover. In Rabelais Iseem to see the embryonic humour of a worldcoming to the birth and not yet fully formed.Through the crust of the old mediæval ideals thenew humanism was struggling to emerge, and inits first lusty liberty mankind, with the clog of theold civilisation still hanging upon it, was likethose monsters that Nature threw off when shewas preparing her hand for a higher creation.There is something unshaped, as of Milton'sbeast wallowing unwieldy, in the creatures ofRabelais's brain; yet withal one perceives thepride of the design that is foreshadowed and will[Pg 202]some day come to its own. Cervantes arose in thefull tide of humanism, and there is about hishumour the pathetic regret for an ideal that hasbeen swept aside by the new forms. For thisyoung civilisation, which spurned so haughtilythe ancient law of humiliation and which was tobe satisfied with the full and unconfined developmentof pure human nature, had a pitiful incompletenessto all but a few of Fortune's minions,and the memory of the past haunted the brain ofCervantes like a ghost vanquished and maderidiculous, but unwilling to depart. He foundtherein the tragic humour of man's ideal life.Then came Swift. Into his heart he sucked thebitterness of a thousand disappointments. Eventhe semblance of the old ideals had passed away,and for the fair promise of the new world he sawonly corruption and folly and a gigantic egotismstalking in the disguise of liberty. Savage indignationlaid hold of him and he vented his ragein that mocking laughter which stings the earslike a buffet. His was the sardonic humour.But time that takes away brings also its compensation.To Sterne, living among smaller men,these passionate egotisms are dwindled to merecaprices, and a jest becomes more appropriatethan a sneer. And after all, one good thing isleft. There is the kindly heart and the humbleacknowledgment that we too are seeking our ownpetty ends. It is a world of homely chance intowhich Sterne introduces us, and there is no room[Pg 203]in it for the boisterous mirth or the tragedy orwrath of his predecessors. His humour is merelywhimsical; his smile is almost a caress.

I can never look at that portrait of Sterne bySir Joshua Reynolds, with the head thrown forwardand the index finger of the right hand laidupon the forehead, but an extraordinary fantasyenters my mind. I seem to see one of those picturesof the Renaissance, in which the face of theAlmighty beams benevolently out of the sky, butas I gaze, the features gradually change into thoseof Yorick. The mouth assumes the sly smile,and the eyes twinkle with conscious merriment,as if they were saying, "We know, you andI, but we won't tell!" Possibly it is something inthe pose of Sir Joshua's picture which lends itselfto this transformation, helped by a feeling that theShandean world, over which Sterne presides, is attimes as real as the actualities that surround us.That portrait at the head of his works is, so tospeak, an image of His Sacred Majesty, Chance,whom a witty Frenchman reverenced as the geniusof this world.

It may be that we do not always in our impatiencerecognise how artfully the caprices ofSterne's manner are adapted to creating this atmosphereof illusion. Now and then his trick ofreaching a point by the longest way round, hiswanton interruptions, the absurdity of his blankpages, and other cheap devices to appear original,grow a trifle wearisome, and we call the author a[Pg 204]mountebank for his pains. Yet was there ever agreat book without its tedious flats? They wouldseem to be necessary to procure the proper perspective.Certainly all these whimsicalities ofSterne's manner fall in admirably with the centraltheme ofTristram Shandy, which is nothing elsebut an exposition of the way in which the blindgoddess Chance, whose hobby-horse is this worlditself, makes her plaything of the lesser capricesof mankind. "I have been the continual sportof what the world calls Fortune," cries Tristramat the beginning of his narrative, and indeed thatdeity laid her designs early against our hero,whose troubles date from the very day of conception."I see it plainly," says Mr. Shandy, in hischapter of Lamentation, when calamity had succeededcalamity—"I see it plainly, that either formy own sins, brotherToby, or the sins and folliesof theShandy family, Heaven has thought fit todraw forth the heaviest of its artillery against me;and the prosperity of my child is the point uponwhich the whole force of it is directed to play."—"Sucha thing would batter the whole universeabout our ears," replies my Uncle Toby, thinkingno doubt of the terrible work of the artillery inFlanders. Mr. Shandy was a man of ideas, andTristram was to be the embodiment of a theory.But alas,—"with all my precautions how was mysystem turned topside-turvy in the womb with mychild!" There is something inimitably droll inthis combat between the solemn, pedantic notions[Pg 205]of Mr. Shandy and the blunders of Chance. Theinterrupted conception of poor Tristram, his unfortunatebirth, the crushing of his nose, the grotesquemistake in naming him,—all are scenes inthis ludicrous and prolonged warfare. Nor is myUncle Toby any the less a subject of Fortune'ssport. There is, to begin with, a comical inconsistencybetween the feminine tenderness of hisheart and his absorption in the memories of war.His hobby of living through in miniature thecampaign of the army in Flanders is one of thekindliest satires on human ambition ever penned.And it was inevitable that my Uncle Toby, withhis "most extreme and unparalleled modesty ofnature," should in the end have fallen a victimto the designs of a woman like the Widow Wadman.It is, as I have said, this underlying philosophyworked out in every detail of the book whichmakes ofTristram Shandy something more thana mere comedy of manners. It shatters the wholeworld of convention before our eyes and rebuildsit according to the humour of a mad Yorkshireparson. And all of us at times, I think, mayfind our pleasure and a lesson of human frailty,too, by entering for a while into the concerns ofthat Shandean society.

Sterne, on one side of his character, was a sentimentalist.That, and little more than that, wesee in his letters andJournal. And in a form,subtilised no doubt to a kind of exquisite felicity,that is the essence of hisSentimental Journey, as[Pg 206]the name implies. He was indeed the first authorto use the word "sentimental" in its modern significance,and for one reason and another this wasthe trait of his writing that was able, as theFrench would say, tofaire école. It flooded Englishliterature with tearful trash like Mackenzie'sMan of Feeling, and, in a happier manner, it influencedeven Thackeray more than he wouldhave been willing to admit. It is present inTristram Shandy, but only as a milder and half-concealedflavour, subduing the satire of thattravesty to the uses of a genial and sympathetichumour.

Probably, however, the imputation of sentimentalismrepels fewer readers from Sterne to-daythan that of immorality. It is a charge easilyflung, and in part deserved. And yet, in allhonesty, are we not prone to fall into cant wheneverthis topic is broached? I was reading in afamily edition of Rabelais the other day and cameacross this sentence in the introduction: "Afterwading through the worst of Rabelais's work, oneneeds a thorough bath and a change of raiment,but after Sterne one needs strychnine and ironand a complete change of blood." It does notseem to me that the case with Sterne is quite sobad as that. Rabelais wrote when the humanpassions were emerging from restraint, and it waspart of his humour to paint the lusty youth of theworld in colours of grotesque exaggeration.Sterne, coming in an age of conventional man[Pg 207]ners,pointed slyly to the gross and untamedthoughts that lurked in the minds of men beneathall their stiffened decorum. It was the purposeof his "topside-turvydom," as it was of Rabelais's,to turn the under side of human nature upto the light, and to show how Fortune smiles atthe social proprieties; but his instrument wasnecessarily innuendo instead of boisterous ribaldry,Shandeism in place of Pantagruelism. Deliberatelyhe employed this art of insinuation insuch a way as to draw the reader on to look forhidden meanings where none really exists. Weare made an unwilling accomplice in his obscenity,and this perhaps, though a legitimate device,is the most objectionable feature of his suggestivestyle.

One may concede so much and yet dislike suchbroad accusations of immorality as are sometimeslaid against him. I cannot see what harm cancome to a mature mind from either Rabelais orSterne. And if thepueris reverentia be taken asthe criterion (the effect actually produced on thosewho are as yet unformed, for good or ill, by theexperience of life) I am inclined to think that thereally dangerous books are those like theVenusand Adonis, which throw the colours of a glowingimagination over what is in itself perfectly naturaland wholesome; I am inclined to think thatShakespeare has debauched more immature mindsthan ever Sterne could do, and that even Pantagruelismis more inflammatory than Shandeism.[Pg 208]So far as morals alone are concerned there is atouch of what may be called inverted cant in thisdiscrimination between the wholesome and theunwholesome. Sir Walter Scott, in his straight-forward,manly way, put the matter right once forall: "It cannot be said that the licentious humourofTristram Shandy is of the kind which appliesitself to the passions, or is calculated to corruptsociety. But it is a sin against taste if allowedto be harmless as to morals." The question withSterne's writings, as with his life, is not so muchone of morality as of taste. And if we admit thathe occasionally sinned against these inexorablelaws, this does not mean that his book as a wholewas ill or foully conceived. He merely erred attimes by excess of his method.

The first two volumes ofTristram Shandy werewritten in 1759, when Sterne was forty-six, andwere advertised for sale in London on the firstday of the year following. Like many anothertoo original work, it had first to go a-begging fora publisher, but the effect of it on the great world,when once it became known, was prodigious.The author soon followed his book to the city toreap his reward, and the story of his fame inLondon during his annual visits and of his receptionin Paris reads like enchantment. "MyLodging," he writes to his dear Kitty in the firstflush of triumph, "is euery hour full of yourGreat People of the first Rank, who striue whoshall most honor me;—euen all the Bishops have[Pg 209]sent their Complim^tṣ to me, & I set out on MondayMorning to pay my Visits to them all. I amto dine w^ḥ Lord Chesterfield this Week, &c. &c.,and next Sunday L^ḍ Rockingham takes me toCourt." Nor was his reward confined to theempty plaudits of society. Lord Falconberg presentedhim with the perpetual curacy of Coxwold,a comfortable charge not twenty miles from Sutton.The "proud priest" Warburton sent hima purse of gold, because (so the story ran, but itmay well have been idle slander) he had heardthat Sterne contemplated introducing him into alater volume as the tutor of Tristram.

Sterne planned to bring out two successivevolumes each year for the remainder of his life,and the number did actually run to nine withoutgetting Tristram much beyond his childhood'smisadventures. At different times, also, he publishedtwo volumes ofSermons by Mr. Yorick,which, in their own way, and considered as moralessays rather than as theological discourses, areworthy of a study in themselves. They are forone thing almost the finest example in Englishof that style which follows the sinuosities andsubtle transitions of the spoken word.

But soon his health, always delicate, began togive way under the strain of reckless living.Long vacations in Paris and the South of Francerestored his strength temporarily, and at the sametime gave him material for the travel scenes inTristram Shandy and for theSentimental Journey.[Pg 210]But that "vile asthma" was never long absent,and there is something pitiable in the quipsand jests with which he covers his dread of thespectre that was pursuing him. We have seenhow the travail of his broken body wails intheJournal to Eliza; and his last letter, writtenfrom his lodging in London to his truestand least equivocal friend, was, as Thackeraysays, a plea for pity and pardon: "Do, dear Mrs.J[ames], entreat him to come to-morrow, or nextday, for perhaps I have not many days, or hoursto live—I want to ask a favour of him, if I findmyself worse—that I shall beg of you, if in thiswrestling I come off conqueror—my spirits arefled—'tis a bad omen—do not weep my dear Lady—yourtears are too precious to shed for me—bottlethem up, and may the cork never be drawn.—Dearest,kindest, gentlest, and best of women!may health, peace, and happiness prove yourhandmaids.—If I die, cherish the remembrance ofme, and forget the follies which you so often condemn'd—whichmy heart, not my head, betray'dme into. Should my child, my Lydia want amother, may I hope you will (if she is left parentless)take her to your bosom?"—I cannot but feelthat the man who wrote that note was kind andgood at heart, and that through all his waywardtricks and sham sentiment, as through the incoherenceof his untrimmed language, there ran avein of genuine sweetness.

He sent this appeal from Bond Street, on Tues[Pg 211]day,the 15th of March, 1768. On Friday, the18th, a party of his roistering friends, nobles andactors and gay livers, were having a grand dinnerin a street near by, when some one in the midstof their frolic mentioned that Sterne was lying illin his chamber. They dispatched a footman toinquire of their old merry-maker, and this is thereport that he wrote in later years; it is unique inits terrible simplicity:

We have seen Corporal Trim in the kitchendropping his hat as a symbol of man's quick andhumiliating collapse, but I think the attitude ofpoor Yorick himself lying in his hired chamber,with hand upraised to stop the invisible blow, a[Pg 212]work of greater and still more astounding genius.It was devised by the Master of gesture indeed,by him whose puppets move on a wider stagethan that of Shandy Hall.

J. HENRY SHORTHOUSE

Probably few people expected a work of morethan mediocre interest when they heard that Mrs.Shorthouse was preparing her husband'sLettersand Literary Remains for the the press.[9] The lifeof a Birmingham merchant, who in the course ofhis evenings elaborated one rather mystical noveland then a few paler and abbreviated shadows ofit, did not, indeed, promise a great deal, and thereis something to make one shudder in the verysound of "literary remains." Nor would it havebeen reassuring to know that these remains werefor the most part short essays and stories read atthe social meetings of the Friends' Essay Societyof Birmingham. The manuscript records of sucha club are not a source to which one would naturallylook for exhilarating literature, yet fromthem, let me say at once, the editor has drawn avolume both interesting and valuable. Mr. Shorthousecontributed to these meetings for sometwenty years, from the age of eighteen until hewithdrew to concentrate his energies uponJohnInglesant, and it is worthy of notice that his early[Pg 214]sketches are, on the whole, better work than themore elaborate essays, such as that onThe Platonismof Wordsworth, which followed the productionof his masterpiece. He was to an extraordinarydegreehomo unius libri, almost of a single thought,and there is a certain freshness in his immaturepresentation of that idea which was lost after itonce received the stamp of definitive expression.Hawthorne, we already knew, furnished themodel for his later method, but we feel a pleasantshock, such as always accompanies the perceptionof some innate consistency, on opening to the veryfirst sentence in his volume of Remains, and findingthe master's name: "I have been all my lifewhat Nathaniel Hawthorne calls 'a devoted epicureof my own emotions.'" That, I suppose,was written about 1854, when Hawthorne's firstlong romance had been published scarcely fouryears, and shows a remarkable power in theyoung disciple of finding his literary kinship.Indeed, not the least of his resemblances to Hawthorneis the fact that he seems from the first tohave possessed a native sense of style; what othermen toil for was theirs by right of birth. In theearliest of these sketches the cadenced rhythmsofJohn Inglesant are already present, lacking alittle, perhaps, in the perfect assurance that camelater, but still unmistakable. And at times—inThe Autumn Walk, for instance, with its "attemptto find language for nameless sights and voices,"inSundays at the Seaside, with their benediction[Pg 215]of outpoured light upon the waters, offering tothe beholder as it were the sacrament of beauty,or in theRecollections of a London Church,—attimes, I say, we seem almost to be reading somelost or discarded chapter of the finished romance.This closing paragraph of theRecollections, writtenapparently when Shorthouse was not much morethan a boy—might it not be a memory of KingCharles's cavalier himself?—

And the Life, too, in an unpretentious way, isdecidedly more interesting than might have beenexpected. The narrative is simply told, and theletters are for the most part quiet expositions ofthe idea that dominated the writer's mind. Hereand there comes the gracious record of some dayof shimmering lights among the Welsh hills;—"awonderful vision of sea and great mountains in a[Pg 216]pale white mist trembling into blue," as he writesto Mr. Gosse from Llandudno, and we know weare with the author ofJohn Inglesant. JosephHenry Shorthouse was born in Birmingham onSeptember 9th, 1834. His parents belonged to theSociety of Friends, and the boy's first schoolingwas at the house of a lady who belonged to thesame body. He was, however, of an extremelysensitive and timid disposition, and even the excitementof this homelike school affected him deplorably."I have now," says his wife, "the oldcopy of Lindley Murray's spelling book which heused there. His mother saw, to her dismay,when she heard him repeat the few small wordsof his lesson, that his face worked painfully, andhis little nervous fingers had worn away the bottomedges of his book, and that he was beginningto stammer." He was immediately taken fromschool, but the affection of stammering remainedwith him through life and cut him off from muchactive intercourse with the world. He acknowledgedthat without it he would probably neverhave found time for his studies and productivework, and the eloquence of his pen was due inpart to the lameness of his tongue. At a laterdate he went for a while to Tottenham College,but his real education he got from tutors and stillmore from his own insatiable love of books.

It appears that all his family associations wereof a kind to foster the peculiar talents that were tobring him fame. His father while dressing used[Pg 217]to tell the boy of his travels in Italy, and so imbuedhim with a love for that wonderful countrywhich he himself was never to see. In afteryears, when the elder Shorthouse came to readhis son's novel, he was surprised and delightedto find the scenes he had described all written outwith extraordinary accuracy. Even more beneficialwas the influence of his grandmother, RebeccaShorthouse, and her home at Moseley,where every Thursday young Henry and his fourgirl cousins, the Southalls, used to foregather andspend the day. One of the cousins has left arecord of this garden estate and of these weeklyvisits which might have been written by Shorthousehimself, so illuminated is it with that subduedradiance which rests upon all his works. Icould wish it were permissible to quote at evengreater length from these pages, for they are thebest possible preparation for an understanding ofJohn Inglesant:

Qualis ab incepto! Are we not in fancy carriedstraightway to that scene where the boy Inglesantgoes back to his first schoolmaster, whom he findssitting amid his flowers, and who tells him marvellousthings concerning the search for the DivineLight? or to that other scene, where he talks withDr. Henry More in the garden of Oulton, andhears that rare Platonist discourse on the gloriesof the visible world, saying: "I am in fact 'Incolacœli in terrâ,' an inhabitant of paradise and heavenupon earth; and I may soberly confess that sometimes,walking abroad after my studies, I havebeen almost mad with pleasure,—the effect ofnature upon my soul having been inexpressiblyravishing, and beyond what I can convey toyou." Indeed, not onlyJohn Inglesant, but allof Mr. Shorthouse's stories could not be better[Pg 219]described than as a writing out at large of thewistful memory of that time when men heard thevoice of the Lord God walking in the garden inthe cool of the day—and were still not afraid.But we must not pass on without observing themore individual traits of the boy noted down inthe record:

But life was not all play with young Shorthouse.At the age of sixteen his father took himinto the chemical works which had been foundedby the great-grandfather, and, although his fatherand later his brother were indulgent to him inmany ways, the best of his energies went to thisbusiness until within a few years of his death.There is something incongruous, as has been remarked,in the manufacture of vitriol and thewriting of mystical novels. In 1857 he marriedSarah Scott, whom he had known for a numberof years, and the young couple took a house inEdgbaston, the suburb of Birmingham in whichthey had both grown up and where they continuedto live until the end. Mrs. Shorthousetells of the disposition of his hours. He wentregularly to business at nine, came home to dinnerin the middle of the day, and returned to towntill nearly seven. The evenings, after the firsthour of relaxation, were mostly devoted to studyingGreek, reading classics and divinity, and theseventeenth-century literature, which had alwayspossessed a peculiar fascination for him. Duringthe years from 1866 to 1876 he was slowly puttingtogether his story ofJohn Inglesant, and withthe exception of his wife, no one saw the writing,or, indeed, knew that he had a work of any suchmagnitude on hand. For four years he kept thecompleted manuscript, which was rejected by oneor two publishers, and then, in 1880, he printedan edition of a hundred copies for private distri[Pg 221]bution.One of these fell into the hands of Mrs.Humphry Ward, and through her the Macmillansbecame interested in the book, and requestedto publish it. No one was more amazed at thereception of the story than was the author himself.He was immediately a man of mark, andthe doors of the world were thrown open to him.Other stories followed, beautiful in thought andexpression, but too manifestly little more in substancethan pale reflections of his one great book;his message needed no repetition. He died in1903, beloved and honoured by all who knew him,and it is characteristic of the man that during hislast years of suffering one or another of the volumesofJohn Inglesant was always at his side, acomfort and a consoling voice to the author as ithad been to so many other readers.

Religion was the supreme reality for him as aboy, and as a man nearing the hidden goal. Hisfamily were Quakers, but in 1861 he and his wifebecame members of the Church of England, andit was under the influence of that faith his bookswere written. Naturally his letters and the recordof his life have much to say of religious matters,but in one respect they are disappointing. Itwould have been interesting to know a little moreprecisely the nature of his views and the steps bywhich he passed from one form of belief to theother. That the anxiety attendant on the changecost him heavily and for a while broke down hishealth, we know, and from his published writings[Pg 222]it is easy to conjecture the underlying cause ofthe change, but the more human aspect of thestruggle he underwent is still left obscure.

Nor is his relation to the three-cornered embrogliowithin the Church itself anywhere setforth in detail. Almost it would seem as if hedwelt in some charmed corner of the fold intowhich the reverberations of those terrific wordsBroad andHigh andLow penetrated only as asubdued muttering. To supplement this defect Ihave myself been reading some of the literatureof that contest, and among other things a seriesof able papers onLe Mouvement Ritualiste dansl'Église Anglicane, which M. Paul Thureau-Danginhas just published in theRevue des DeuxMondes. The impression left on my own mindhas been in the highest degree contradictory andexasperating. One labours incessantly to knowwhat all this tumult is about, and I should supposethat no more inveterate and vicious displayof parochialism was ever enacted in this world.To pass from these disputes to the religious conflictthat was going on in France at the same timeis to learn in a striking way the difference betweenwords and ideas; and even our own pet transcendentalhubbub in Concord is in comparison withthe Oxford debate vast and cosmopolitan in significance.The intrusion of a single idea intothat mad logomachy would have been a phenomenonmore appalling than the appearance of anaked body in a London drawing-room, and it is[Pg 223]not without its amusing side that one of Newman'sassociates is said to have dreaded "thepreponderance of intellect among the elements ofcharacter and as a guide of life" in that perplexedapologist. Ideas are not conspicuous anywherein English literature, least of all in its religiousbooks, and often one is inclined to extend Bagehot'scynical pleasantry as a cloak for deficiencieshere, too: the stupidity of the English is the salvationof their literature as well as of their politics.For it is only fair to add that this ecclesiasticalbattle, if paltry in abstract thought, was rich inhuman character and in a certain obstinate perceptionof the validity of traditional forms; it wasat bottom a contest over the position of the Churchin the intricate hierarchy of society, and purereligion was the least important factor underconsideration.

Two impulses, which were in reality one, wereat the origin of the movement. Religion hadlagged behind the rest of life in that impetuousawakening of the imagination which had comewith the opening of the nineteenth century; it retainedall the dryness and lifeless cant of thepreceding generation, which had marked aboutthe lowest stage of British formalism. Enthusiasmof any sort was more feared than sin. Perhapsthe first widely recognized sign of changewas the publication, in 1827, of Keble'sChristianYear, although the "Advertisement" to thatfamous book showed no promise of a startling[Pg 224]revolution. "Next to a sound rule of faith,"said the author, "there is nothing of so muchconsequence as a sober standard of feeling in mattersof practical religion"; and certainly, to onewho reads those peaceful hymns to-day, sobrietyseems to have marked them for her own. Yettheir effect was undoubtedly to import into theChurch and into the contemplation of churchmensomething of that enthusiasm, trained now andsubdued to authority, which had been the possessionof infidels and sectaries.

such words men read in the hymn forChristmasDay, and they were thrilled to think that theimaginative glow, which for a score of years hadburned in the secular poets, was at last impressedinto the service of the sanctuary.

Another impulse, more definite in its nature,was the shock of the reform bill. In hisApologia,Cardinal Newman, looking back to the early daysof the Tractarian Movement, declared that "thevital question was, How were we to keep theChurch from being Liberalised?" and in his eyesthe sermon preached by Keble, July 14, 1833, onthe subject ofNational Apostasy, was the first[Pg 225]sounding of the battle cry. Impelled by the fearof the new democratic tendencies, which threatenedto lay hold of the Church and to use it forutilitarian ends, the leaders of the oppositionsought to go back beyond the ordinances of theReformation, and to emphasise the close relationof the present forms of worship with those of thefirst Christian centuries; against the invasions ofthe civil government they raised the notion of theChurch universal and one. The first of thefamous Tracts, dated September 9, 1833, puts thequestion frankly:

A layman might reply simply,On the truth,and Shorthouse, as we shall see, had such ananswer to make, though couched in more circuitouslanguage. But not so the Tract:

That was the Tractarian, or Oxford, Movement,which united the claims of the imaginationwith the claims of priestcraft, and by a logical[Pg 226]development led the way to Rome. In the Churchat large, the new leaven worked its way slowly andconfusedly, but in the end it created a tripartitedivision, which threatened for a while to bringthe whole establishment down in ruins. Thefirst of these, the High Church, is indeed essentiallya continuation, and to a certain extent avulgarisation, of the Oxford Movement. Whathad been a kind of epicurean vision of holy things,reserved for a few chosen souls, was now madethe vehicle of a wide propaganda. The beautifulrites of the ancient worship were a powerful seductionto wean the rich from worldly living andno less a tangible compensation for the poor andoutcast. At a later date, under the stress of persecution,the leaders of the party formulated theso-called Six Points on which they made a finalstand: (1) The eastward position; (2) the eucharisticvestments; (3) altar candles; (4) water mingledwith the wine in the chalice; (5) unleavenedbread; (6) incense—without these there was noworship; barely, if at all, salvation. The LowChurch was, in large part, a state of pure hostilityto these followers of the Scarlet Woman; it wasloudly Protestant, confining the virtue of religionto an acceptance of the dogmas of the Reformation,distrusting the symbolical appeal to theimagination, and finding the truth too often inwhat was merely opposition to Rome. Contraryto both, and despised by both, was the BroadChurch, which held the sacraments so lightly[Pg 227]that, with the Dean of Westminster, it joined incommunion with Unitarians, and which treateddogma so cavalierly that, with Maurice, it thoughta subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles thequickest way to liberty of belief. Yet I cannotsee that this boasted freedom did much more thanintroduce a kind of license in the interpretationof words; it transferred the field of battle fromforms to formulæ.

From this unpromising soil (intellectually, forin character it possessed its giants) was to springthe one great religious novel of the English language.I have thought it worth while to recallthus briefly, yet I fear tediously, the chief aspectsof the controversy, because only as the result of aprofound and, in many respects, violent nationalupheaval can the force and the inner veracity ofJohn Inglesant be comprehended. Mrs. Shorthousefails to dwell on this point; indeed, it wouldappear from her record that the noise of the disputereached her husband only from afar off. Yetduring the years of composition he was dwellingin a house at Edgbaston within a stone's throwof the Oratory, where, at that time and to theend of his life, Cardinal Newman resided, havingfound peace at last in the surrender of his doubtsto authority. The thought of that venerable manand of the agony through which he had comemust have been often in the novelist's mind.And it was during these same ten years of compositionthat the forces of Low and High were[Pg 228]lined up against each other like two hostilearmies, under the banners of the English ChurchUnion and the Church Association. The activityof this latter body, which was founded in 1865for the express purpose of "putting down" theheresy of ritualism, may be gathered from the factthat at a single meeting it voted to raise a fund ofsome $250,000 for the sake of attacking HighChurch clergymen through the processes of law.Not without reason was it dubbed the PersecutionCompany limited.

Now it may be possible with some ingenuity ofargument—Laud himself had aforetime made suchan attempt—to regard the Battle of the Churchesas a contest of the reason; in practice its provincialismis due to the fact that it was concerned,not with the truth, but with what men had heldto be the truth. That Mr. Shorthouse was ableto write a book which is in a way the direct fruitof this conflict, and which still contains so muchof the universal aspect of religion, came, I think,from his early Quaker training and from hisGreek philosophy. It would be a mistake tosuppose that, on entering the Church of England,he closed in his own breast the door tothat inner sanctuary of listening silence, theinnocuæ silentia vitæ, where he had been taughtto worship as a child. At the time of the changehe could still write to one who was distressed athis decision: "I grant that Friends, at their commencement,held with a strong hand perhaps the[Pg 229]most important truth of this system, the indwellingof the Divine Word." In reality, there wasno "perhaps" in Mr. Shorthouse's own adherenceto this principle, both before and after his conversion;only he would place a new emphasis onthe word "indwelling." The step signified tohim, as I read his life, a transition from the religionof the conscience to that of the imagination,from morality to spiritual vision. This voice,which the Quakers heard in their own heartsalone, and which was an admonition to separatethemselves from all the false splendours of theworld, he now heard from stream and floweringmeadow and from the decorum of courtly society,bidding him make beautiful his life, as well asholy. Henceforth he could say that "all historyis nothing but the relation of this great effort—thestruggle of the divine principle to enter intohuman life." And in the same letter in whichthese words occur—an extraordinary epistle toMatthew Arnold, asking him to embody thewriter's ideas in an essay—he extends his Quakerinheritance so far as to make it a cloak for humour,a humour, as he says, in "a sense beyond, perhaps,that in which it ever has been understood,but which, it may be, it is reserved toyou to revealto men." One would like to have Mr.Arnold's reply to this divagation onDon Quixote.Mr. Shorthouse had, characteristically, adaptedthe book to his own spiritual needs as a representation"of the struggles of the divine[Pg 230]principle to enter into the everyday details ofhuman life."

It was, I say, his unforgotten discipleship toGeorge Fox and to Plato which preserved Mr.Shorthouse from the narrowness of the movementwhile permitting him to be faithful to the Church.In the Introduction to the Life an ecclesiasticalfriend distinguishes him from the partisan schoolsas a "Broad Church Sacramentarian." I confessin general to a strong dislike for these technicalphrases, which always savour a little of an evasionof realities, and bear about the same relation toactual human experience as do the pigeonholes ofa lawyer's desk; but in this case the words have auseful brevity. They show how he had been ableto take the best from all sides of the controversyand to weld these elements into harmony with thephilosophy of his inheritance and education. Theposition of Mr. Shorthouse was akin to that of theLow-Churchmen in his hostility to the Romanisingtendencies and his distrust of priestcraft, buthe differed from them still more essentially in hisrecognition of the imagination as equally potentwith the moral sense in the upbuilding of character.To the Broad-Churchman he was unitedchiefly in his abhorrence of dogmatic tests. Oneof his few published papers (reprinted in the Life)is a plea forThe Agnostic at Church,—a pleawhich may still be taken to heart by thosetroubled doubters who are held aloof by thedogmas of Christianity, yet regret their lonely[Pg 231]isolation from the religious aspirations of thecommunity:

But he separated himself from the Broad Churchin making religion a culture of individual holinessrather than a message for the "unlovely massesof people," in caring more for the guidance of theInner Voice than for the brotherhood of charityor the association of men in good works. In hisidea of worship he was near to the High Church,but he differed from that body in ranking sacerdotalismand dissent together as the equal foesof religion. The efficacy of the sacrament camefrom its historic symbolism and its national[Pg 232]acceptance, and needed not, or scarcely needed, theministration of the priest. He thus extended themeaning of the word far beyond the narrow rangeof ecclesiasticism. "This sunshine upon thegrass," he wrote, "is a sacrament of remembranceand of love." When, in his early days, Newmanvisited Hurrell Froude's lovely Devonshire home,there arose in his mind a poignant strife betweenhis loyalty to created and to uncreated beauty.In a stanza composed for a lady's autographalbum he gave this expression to his hesitancy:

No such note is to be found in the letters writtenby Mr. Shorthouse during his holidays amongthe Welsh hills; he looked upon the inheritedChurch as the instrument chosen by many generationsof men for their approach to God, but hewas not afraid to see the communion service onthe ocean waters when the heavenly light pouredupon them, even as he saw it at the altar table.

If he differed from the Broad Church mainly inhis loyalty to Quaker mysticism, it was Platonismwhich made the bounds of the High Church too[Pg 233]narrow for his faith. He did not hesitate at onetime to say that Plato possessed a truer spiritualinsight than St. Paul, and it was in reality a mereextension of the sphere of Platonism when, inwhat appears to be the last letter he ever wrote(or dictated rather, for his hands were alreadyclasped in those of beneficent Death), he avowedhis creed: "That Image after which we werecreated—the Divine Intellect—must surely beable to respond to the Divine call. The greatestadvance which has ever been made was the teaching,originally by Aristotle, of the receptivity ofmatter.... I should be very glad to seethis idea ofJohn Inglesant worked out by an intelligentcritic." Beauty was for him a kind oftransfiguration in which the world, in its responseto the indwelling Power, was lifted into somethingno longer worldly, but divine; and he couldspeak of our existence on this earth as lighted by"the immeasurable glory of the drama of God inwhich we are actors." It was not that he, likecertain poets of the past century, attempted togive to the crude passions of men or the transientpomp of earth a power intrinsically equivalent tothe spirit; but he believed that these might bemade by faith to become as it were an illusoryand transparent veil through which the visionaryeye could penetrate to the mystic reality.

For the particular act in this drama, which hewas to write out in his religious novel, he wentback to the seventeenth century, when, as it[Pg 234]seemed to him, the same problem as that of thenineteenth arose to trouble the hearts of Englishmen,but in nobler and more romantic forms.There was, in fact, a certain note of reality aboutthe earlier struggle of Puritan, Churchman, andRoman Catholic, which was lacking to the quarrelof his own day. John Inglesant is the youngerof twin sons born in a family of Catholic sympathies.A Jesuit, Father Hall, who reminds onenot a little of Father Holt inHenry Esmond, isput in charge of the boy and trains him up to bean intermediary between the Church of Englandand the Church of Rome. To this end his Mentorkeeps his mind in a state of suspense between thefaiths, and the inner and real drama of the bookis the contest in Inglesant's own mind, after hisimmediate debt to Rome has been fulfilled, betweenthe two forms of worship.

In part the actual narrative is well conducted.Johnnie's relations to Charles I., and especiallyhis share in that strange adventure when the Kingwas terrified by a vision of the dead Strafford, aretold with a good deal of dramatic skill. So, too,his own trial, the murder of his brother by theItalian, his visits to the household of the Ferrarsat Little Gidding, and some of the events in Italy—thesein themselves are sufficient to make anovel of unusual interest. On the human side,where the emotions are of a dreamy, half-mysticalsort, the work is equally successful; in its ownkind the love of Inglesant and Mary Collet is[Pg 235]beautiful beyond the common love of man andwoman. But the novel fails, it must be acknowledged,in the expression of the more ordinarymotives of human activity. Johnnie's ingrainedobedience to the Jesuit is one of the mainspringsof the plot, yet there is nothing in the story tomake this exaggerated devotion seem natural.In the same way Johnnie's attachment to hisworldly brother is unexplained by the author,and sounds fantastic. A considerable portion ofthe book is taken up with Inglesant's search forhis brother's murderer, and here again the vacillatingdesire of vengeance is a false note which noamount of exposition on the part of the authormakes convincing. Mr. Shorthouse's hero burnsfor revenge one day, and on the next is obliviousof his passion, in a way that simply leaves thereader in a state of bewilderment. Curiouslyenough, it was one of the incidents in this hide-and-seekportion of the story, found by Mr.Shorthouse in "a well-known guide-book," thatactually suggested the novel to him. For my ownpart, the sustained charm of the language, a stylemidway, as it were, between that of Thackerayand that of Hawthorne, not quite so negligentlygraceful as the former nor quite so deliberate asthe latter, yet mingling the elements of both in ahappy compound—the language alone, I say,would be sufficient to carry me through these inadequatelyconceived parts of the story. But Ican understand, nevertheless, how in the course[Pg 236]of time this feebleness of the purely human motivesmay gradually deprive the book of readers, for itis the human that abides unchanged, after all,and the divine that alters in form with the passingages. Hawthorne, in this respect, is betterequipped for the future; his novels are not concernedwith phases of religion, but with the moralconsciousness and the feeling of guilt, which areeternally the same.

And yet it will be a real loss to letters if thisnearest approach in English to a religious novelof universal significance should lose its vitalityand be forgotten. Almost, but not quite, Mr.Shorthouse has gone below the shifting of formsand formulæ to the instinct that lies buried in theheart of each man, seeking and awaiting thelight. I have already referred to those earlychapters, the most perfect in the book I think,wherein is told how Johnnie, a grown boy now,visits his childhood's masters and questions themabout the Divine Light which he would beholdand follow amid the wandering lights of thisworld. Mr. Shorthouse believed, as he had beentaught at his mother's knee, that such a Guidedwelt in the breasts of all men, and that we needonly to hearken to its admonition to attain holinessand peace. He thought that it had spokenmore clearly to certain of the poets and philosophersof Greece than to any others, and that "theideal of the Greeks—the godlike and the beautifulin one"—was still the lesson to be practised to-[Pg 237]day."What we want," he said, "is to apply itto real life. We all understand that art shouldbe religious, but it is more difficult to understandhow religion may be an art." And this, as heavows again and again in his letters, was thepurpose of his book; "one of many failures toreconcile the artistic with the spiritual aspect oflife," he once calls it.

But if, intellectually, the vision of the DivineLight was vouchsafed to Plato more than to anyother man, historically it had been presented tothe gross, unpurged eyes of the world in the lifeand death of Jesus. The precision of dogma,even the Bible, meant relatively little to Mr.Shorthouse. "I do not advocate belief inthe Bible," he wrote; "I advocate belief inChrist." Somehow, in some way beyond thescope of logic, the idea which Plato had beheld,the divine ideal which all men know and doubt,became a personality that one time, and henceforththe sacraments that recalled the drama ofthat holy life were the surest means of obtainingthe silence of the world through which the InnerVoice speaks and is heard.

To some, of course, this will appear the oneflaw in the author's logic—this step from thevague notion of the Platonic ideas dwelling inthe world of matter, and shaping it to their ownbeautiful forms, to the belief in the actual Christiandrama as the realisation of the Divine Naturein human life. Yet the step was easy, was almost[Pg 238]necessary, for one who held at the same time thedoctrines of the Friends and of Plato; their unionmight be called the wedding of pure religion andpure philosophy, wherein the more bigoted andinhuman character of the former was surrendered,while to the latter was added the power to touchthe universal heart of man. As Mr. Shorthouseheld them, and as Inglesant came to view them,the sacraments might be called a memorial of thatmystic wedding. They brought to it the historicconsciousness and the traditional brotherhood ofmankind; they were the symbolism through whichmen sought to introduce the light into their ownlives as a religious art. Now an art is a matterto be perceived and to be felt, whereas a science,as Newman and others held religion to be, is asubject for demonstration and argument. Howmuch religion in England suffered from the attemptto prove what could not be caught in themesh of logic, and from the endeavour to makewords take the place of ideas, we have alreadyseen. You may reason about abstract truth, youcannot reason about a symbolism or a form ofworship. The strength ofJohn Inglesant lies inits avoidance of rationalism or the appeal toprecedent, and in its frank search for the humanand the artistic.

It was in this sense that Mr. Shorthouse couldspeak of his book as above all an attempt "topromote culture at the expense of fanaticism, includingthe fanaticism of work": but we shall[Pg 239]miss the full meaning of his intention if we omitthe corollary of those words, viz.: "to exalt theunpopular doctrine that the end of existence isnot the good of one's neighbour, but one's ownculture." I do not know, indeed, but this exaltationof the old theory that the chief purpose ofreligion is the worship and beatitude of the individualsoul, in opposition to the humanitariannotions which were even then springing intoprominence, is the central theme of the story.Certainly with many readers the scene that remainsmost deeply impressed in their memory isthat which shows Inglesant coming to Serenusde Cressy at the House of the Benedictines inParis, and, like the young man who came toJesus, asking what he shall do to make clear theguidance of the Inner Light. There, in thosemarvellous pages, Cressy points out the divergenceof the ways before him: "On the one hand, youhave the delights of reason and of intellect, thebeauty of that wonderful creation which Godmade, yet did not keep; the charms of Divinephilosophy, and the enticements of the poet's art;on the other side, Jesus." And then as the oldman, who had himself turned from the gardensof Oxford to the discipline of a monastery, seesthe hesitation of his listener, he breaks forth intothis eloquent appeal:

We are told that every word went straight toInglesant's conviction, and that no single notejarred upon his taste. He implicitly believed thatwhat the Benedictine offered him he should find.But he also knew that this was not the only wayof service—nor even, perhaps, the highest. Heturned away from the monastery sadly, but firmly,and continued his search for the light in thatdirection whither the culture of his own natureled him; he showed—though this neither he norMr. Shorthouse, perhaps, would acknowledge—thatat the bottom of his heart Plato and notChrist was his master, and that to him practicalChristianity was only one of the many historicforms which the so-called Platonic insight assumesamong men. To some, no doubt, this attemptto make of religion an art will savour of thatpeculiar form of hedonism, or bastard Platonism,[Pg 241]which Walter Pater introduced into England, andJohn Inglesant will be classed withMarius theEpicurean as a blossom of æsthetic romanticism.There is a certain show of justification in thecomparison, and the work of Mr. Shorthousequite possibly grants too much to the enervatingacquiescence in the lovely and the decorous; itlacks a little in virility. But the difference betweenthe two books is still more radical than thelikeness. Though absolute truth may not bewithin the reach of man, nevertheless the life ofJohn Inglesant is a discipline and a growth towarda verity that emanates from acknowledgedpowers and calls him out of himself. The senseshave no validity in themselves. He aims to makean art of religion, not a religion of art; the distinctionis deeper than words. The true parentageof the work goes back, in some ways, toShaftesbury, with whom an interesting parallelmight be drawn.

In the end Inglesant returns to England, afteryears spent in France and Italy among RomanCatholics, and accepts frankly the religious formsof his own land. His character had been strengthenedby experience, and in following the higherinstincts of his own nature he had attained theassurance and the sanctity of one who has notquailed before a great sacrifice. The last scenein the book, the letter which relates the conversationwith Inglesant in the Cathedral Church atWorcester, should be read as a complement to the[Pg 242]earlier chapters which describe his boyish searchfor what he was not to find save through the lessonof years; the whole book may be regarded asa link between these two presentations of thehero's life. It would require too many words torepeat Inglesant's confession even in outline."The Church of England," says the writer of theletter, "is no doubt a compromise, and is powerlessto exert its discipline.... If there beabsolute truth revealed, there must be an inspiredexponent of it, else from age to age it could notget itself revealed to mankind." And Inglesantreplies: "This is the Papist argument, there isonly one answer to it—Absolute truth is not revealed.There were certain dangers which Christianitycould not, as it would seem, escape. Asit brought down the sublimest teaching of Platonismto the humblest understanding, so it wascompelled, by this very action, to reduce spiritualand abstract truth to hard and inadequate dogma.As it inculcated a sublime indifference to thethings of this life, and a steadfast gaze upon thefuture, so, by this very means, it encouragedthe growth of a wild unreasoning superstition."

It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that thosewords, taken with the plea which follows, expressthe finest wisdom struck out of the long and forthe most part futile Battle of the Churches; theywere the creed of Mr. Shorthouse, as they werethe experience of the hero of his book. I wouldend with that image of life as a sacred game with[Pg 243]which Inglesant himself closed his confession offaith at the Cathedral door:

THE QUEST OF A CENTURY

The story is told of Dante that in one of hisperegrinations through Italy he stopped at a certainconvent, moved either by the religion of theplace or by some other feeling, and was therequestioned by the monks concerning what hecame to seek. At first the poet did not reply,but stood silently contemplating the columns andarches of the cloister. Again they asked himwhat he desired; and then slowly turning hishead and looking at the friars, he answered,"Peace!" The anecdote is altogether too significantto escape suspicion; yet asThe DivineComedy is supposed to contain symbolically thehistory of the human spirit in its upward growthand striving, so this fable of the divine poetmay be held to sum up in a single word theaim and desire of the spirit's endless quest.So clearly is the object of our inner search this[Pg 245]"peace" which Dante is said to have sought,and so close has the spirit come again andagain to attaining this goal, that it should seemas if some warring principle within ourselvesturned us back ever when the hoped-for consummationwas just within reach. As Vaughan saysin his quaint way:

It is possible, I believe, to view the ceaselessintellectual fluctuations of mankind backward andforward as the varying fortunes of the contest betweenthese two hostile members of our being,—betweenthe deep-lying principle that impels us toseek rest and the principle that drags us back intothe region of change and motion and forever forbidsus to acquiesce in what is found. And Ibelieve further that the moral disposition of anation or of an individual may be best characterisedby the predominance of the one or the otherof these two elements. We may find a people,such as the ancient Hindus, in whom the longingafter peace was so intense as to make insignificantevery other concern of life, and among whom theaim of saint and philosopher alike was to closethe eyes upon the theatre of this world's shiftingscenes and to look only upon that changelessvision of

The spectacle of division and mutation became tothem at last a mere phantasmagoria, like themorning mists that melt away beneath the upspringingday-star.

Again, we may find a race, like the Greeks, inwhom the imperturbable stillness of the Orientand the restless activity of the Occident meet togetherin intimate union and produce that peculiarrepose in action, that unity in variety, which wecall harmony or beauty and which is the specialfield of art. But if this harmonious union was asource of the artistic sense among the Greeks,their logicians, like logicians everywhere, werenot content until the divergent tendencies weredrawn out to the extreme; and nowhere is theconflict between the two principles more vividlydisplayed than in that battle between the followersof Xenophanes, who sought to adapt the worldof change to their haunting desire for peace bydenying motion altogether, and the disciples ofHeraclitus, who saw only motion and mutation inall things and nowhere rest. "All things flowand nothing abides," said the Ephesian, andlooked upon man in the midst of the universe asupon one who stands in the current of a ceaselesslygliding river. The brood of Sophists,carrying this law into human consciousness, disclaimedthe possibility of truth altogether; and itis no wonder that Plato, while avoiding the otherextreme of motionless pantheism, regarded thesophistic acceptance of this law of universal flux[Pg 247]as the last irreconcilable enemy of philosophy andmorality alike. "The war over this point is indeedno trivial matter and many are concernedtherein," said he, not without bitterness.

It is, when rightly considered, this same questionthat lends dramatic unity and human value tothe long debate of the mediæval schoolmen. Theirdispute may be regarded from more than one pointof view,—as a struggle of the reason against thebondage of authority, as an attempt to lay barethe foundation of philosophy, as a contest betweenscience and mysticism; but above all it seems tome a long conflict in words between these twowarring members within us. The desire of infinitepeace was the impulse, I think, which droveon the realists to that "abyss of pantheism," fromthe brink of which the vision of most men recoilsas from the horror of shoreless vacuity. In thisway Erigena, the greatest of realists, spoke ofGod as that which neither acts nor is acted upon,neither loves nor is loved; and then, as if frightenedby these blank words, avowed that Godthough he does not love is in a way Love itself,defining love as thefinis quietaque statio of thenatural motion of all things that move. On theother hand it was the impulse toward unrestingactivity which led the nominalists to deny realityto the stationary ideas of genera and species, andto fix the mind upon the shifting combinations ofindividual objects. In this direction lay thelabour of accurate observation and experimental[Pg 248]classification, and it is with prefect justice thatHauréau, the historian of scholastic philosophy,closes his chapter on William of Occam, the lastof the schoolmen, with these words: "It is thenin truth on this soil so well prepared by the princeof the nominalists that Francis Bacon founded hiseternal monument,"—and that monument is thescientific method as we see it developed in thenineteenth century.

The justification of scholastic philosophy, as Iunderstand it, was the hope of finding in the dictatesof pure reason an immovable resting-placefor the human spirit; the recoil from the abyss ofpantheism and absolute quietism was the work ofthe nominalists who in William of Occam finallywon the day; and with him scholastic philosophybrought an end to its own activity. But a greaterchampion than William was needed to wipe awaywhat seems to the world the cobwebs of mediævallogomachy. Kant'sCritique of Pure Reason accomplishedwhat the nominalistic schoolmen failedto achieve: it showed the impossibility of establishingby means of logic the dogma of God orany absolute conception of the universe. Henceforththe real support of metaphysics was takenaway, and the study fell more and more into disreputeas the nineteenth century waxed old.Not many men to-day look to the pure reason foraid in attaining the consummation of faith. Thatconsummation, if it be derived at all from externalaid, must come henceforth by way of the[Pg 249]imagination and of the moral sense. We saywith Kant: "Two things fill the mind with ever-newand increasing admiration and reverence, theoftener and the more persistently they are reflectedon: the starry heaven above me, and the morallaw within me."

But neither the imagination nor the consciencealone, any more than reason, can create faith.They may prepare the soil for the growth of thatperfect flower of joy, but they cannot plant theseed or give the increase; for they, both the imaginationand the conscience, are concerned in theend with the light of this life, and faith looks forguidance to a different and rarer illumination.Faith is a power of itself;fidem rem esse, nonscientiam, non opinionem vel imaginationem, saidZwingle. It is that faculty of the will, mysteriousin its source and inexplicable in its operation,which turns the desire of a man away from contemplatingthe fitful changes of the world towardan ideal, an empty dream it may be, or a shadow,or a mere name, of peace in absolute changelessness.Reason and logic may have no words toexpress the object of this desire, but experienceis rich with the influence of such an aspiration onhuman character. To the saints it was that peaceof God which passeth all understanding; to themystics it was figured as the raptures of a celestiallove, as the yearning for that

To the ignorant it was the unquestioning trust inthose who seemed to them endowed with a gracebeyond their untutored comprehension.

Even if the imagination or the conscience couldlift us to this blissful height, they would avail uslittle to-day; for we have put away the imaginationas one of the pleasant but unfruitful play-thingsof youth, and the conscience in this age ofhumanitarian pity has become less than ever asense of man's responsibility to the supermundanepowers and more than ever a feeling of brotherhoodamong men. Of faith, speaking generally,the past century had no recking, for it turneddeliberately to observe and study the phenomenaof change. We call that time, which is still ourown time, the age of reason, but scarcely withjustice. The Middle Ages, despite the obscurantismof the Church, had far better claim to thattitle. One needs but to turn the pages of thedoctors, even before the day of Abelard who issupposed first to have been the champion of reasonagainst authority, to see how profound was theirconviction that in reason might be discovered ajustification of the faith they held. And indeedAbelard is styled the champion of reason becauseonly with him do men begin to perceive the inabilityof reason to establish faith. Better weshould call ours an age of observation, for neverbefore have men given themselves with such completeabandon to observing and recording systematically.By long and intent observation of[Pg 251]the phenomenal world the eye has discovered aseeming order in disorder, the shifting visions oftime have assumed a specious regularity whichwe call law, and the mind has made for itself ahome on this earth which to the wise of oldseemed but a house of bondage.

From this wealth of observation and record themodern age, and especially the century just past,has developed two fields of intellectual activity tosuch an extent as almost to claim the creation ofthem. Gradually through accumulated observationthe nineteenth century came to look on humanaffairs in a new light; like everything else theywere seen to be subject to the Heraclitean ebb andflow; and history was written from a new point ofview. We learned to regard eras of the past as subjecteach to its peculiar passions and ambitions,and this taught us to throw ourselves back intotheir life with a kind of sympathy never beforeknown. We did not judge them by an immutablecode, but by reference to time and place. Nor isthis all. Within the small arc of our observationwe observed a certain regularity of change similarto the changes due to growth in an individual, and[Pg 252]this we called the law of progress. History wasthen no longer a mere chronicle of events or, ifphilosophical, the portrayal and judgment ofcharacters from a fixed point of view; it becameat its best the systematic examination of thecauses of progress and development. And naturallythis attention to change and motion, thishistoric sense, was extended to every other branchof human interest: in religion it taught Christiansto accept the Bible as the history of revelationinstead of something complete from the beginning;in literature it taught us to portray the developmentof character or the influence of environmenton character rather than the interplay offixed passions; in art it created impressionismor the endeavour to reproduce what the individualsees at the moment instead of a rationalised picture;in criticism it introduced what Sainte-Beuve,the master of the movement, sought towrite, a history of the human spirit.

But history, like Cronos of old, possessed astrange power of devouring its own offspring.Gradually, from the habit of regarding humanaffairs in a state of flux and more particularlyfrom the growth of the idea of progress, the pastlost its hold over men. It became a matter ofcuriosity but not of authority, and history as itwas understood in Renan's day has in ours almostceased to be written. Science on the other handis the observation of phenomena regarded chieflyin the relation of space—for it is correct, I believe,[Pg 253]to assert that the laws of energy may be reducedto this point—and as such is not subject to thisdevouring act of time. It frankly discards thepast and as frankly dwells in the present. It isnot my purpose, indeed it would be quite superfluous,to reckon up the immense acquisitions ofthe scientific method in the past century: they arethe theme of schoolboys and savants alike, thepride and wonder of our civilisation. Nor need Idwell on the new philosophy which sprang upfrom the union of the historic and the scientificsense and still subsists. Not the system of Hegelor Schopenhauer or of any other professor ofmetaphysics is the true philosophy of the age;these are but echoes of a past civilisation, voicesandpræterea nil. Evolution is the living guideof our thought, assigning to the region of the unknowablethe conceptions of unity and perfect rest,and building up its theories on the visible experienceof motion and change and development.It has reduced the universal flux of Heraclitus toa scientific system and assimilated it to our innergrowth; it has become as essentially a factor ofour attitude toward the natural world as Newton'slaws of gravitation.

But if our thoughts are directed almost whollyto the sphere of motion, yet this does not meanthat the longing after quietude and peace haspassed entirely from the mind of man; the thirstof the human heart is too deep for that. Onlythe world has learned to look for peace in another[Pg 254]direction. In place of that faith which woulddeny valid reality to changing forms, we havetaught ourselves to find a certain order in disorder,which we call law,—whether it be the law of progressor the law of energy,—and on the stabilityof this law we are willing to stake our desiredtranquillity.

In this way, through what may be called theoffspring begotten on the historic sense by science,the mind has turned its regard into the future andseemed to discern there a continuation of the samelaw of progress which it saw working in the past.Hence have arisen the manifold dreams andvisions of socialism, altruism, humanitarianism,and all the other isms that would fix the hope ofmankind upon some coming perfectibility of humanlife, and that like Prometheus in the playhave implanted blind hopes in the hearts of men.It is indeed one of the most curious instances ofthe recrudescence of ideas to see the mediævalvisions of a city of golden streets and eternal blissin another existence brought down to the futureof this world itself. What to the mystic of thatage was to come suddenly, with the twinkling ofan eye, when we are changed and have put awaymortal things, when the angel of the Apocalypsehas sworn that time shall be no longer,—all this,the heavenly city of joy and endless content, isnow to be the natural outcome here in this worldof causes working in time. The theory is beautifulin itself and might satisfy the hunger of the[Pg 255]heart, even though its main hope concerns onlygenerations to come, were it not for a lingeringand fatal suspicion that progress does not involveincreased capability of happiness to the individual,and that somehow the race does not move towardcontent. Physical comfort has perhaps becomemore widely distributed, but of the placid joy oflife the recent years have known singularly little;we need but turn over the pages of the more representativepoets and prose writers of the pastsixty years to discover how deep is the unrest ofour souls. The higher literature has come to bechiefly the "blank misgivings of a creature movingabout in worlds not realised"; and missingthe note of deeper peace we sigh at times even for

Alas, those who would find a resting-place forthe spirit in the relations of man to man seemnot to reckon that the very essence—if such aterm may be used of so contingent a nature—thatthe very essence of this world's life ismotion and change and contention, and that Peacespreads her wings in another and purer atmosphere.One might suppose that a single glanceinto the heart would show how vain are suchaspirations, and how utterly dreary and illusoryis every conceived ideal of progress and socialismbecause each and all are based on an inherent contradiction.He who waits for peace until thecourse of events has become stable is like the silly[Pg 256]peasant by the river side, watching and waitingwhile the current flows forever and will ever flow.

Not less vain is the hope of those who wouldfind in the laws of science a permanent abidingplace—perhaps one should say was rather than is,for the avowed gospel of science which was tousurp the office of olden-time religious faith isalready like the precedent historic sense, itself becominga thing of the past. Yet the much discussedwar between science and religion is nonethe less real because to-day the din of battle hasceased. It does not depend on criticism of theMosaic story of creation by the one, nor on hostilityto progress offered by the other. Thesethings were only signs of a deeper and moreradical difference: religion is the voice of faithuttering in symbols of the imagination its distrustof the world as a scene of deception and unreality,whereas science is the attempt to discover fixedlaws in the midst of this very world of change.If to-day the strife between the two seems reconciled,this only means that faith has grown dimmerand that science has learned the futility of itsmore dogmatic assumptions.[10]

The very growth of science is in fact a gradualrecognition of motion as the basis of phenomenaand an increasing comprehension of what may becalled the laws of motion. When motion was regardedas simple and regular, it seemed possibleto explain phenomena by correspondingly simpleand regular laws; but when each primary motion[Pg 258]was seen to be the resultant of an infinite seriesof motions the question became in like manner infinitelycomplex, or in other words insoluble.But to be clear we must consider the matter morein detail.

From the days of the old Greek Heraclitus, whobuilt up his theory of the world on the axiom ofeternal flux and change, the Doctrine of Motionas a distinct enunciation has lingered on in theworld well-nigh unnoticed and buried from sightin the bulk of suppositions and guesses that havemade up the passing systems of philosophy.Now and then some lonely thinker took up thedoctrine, but only to let it drop back into obscurity;until during the great burst of scientificenquiry in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries itassumed new significance and began to grow.From that time to this its progress in acceptanceas the basis of phenomena may be regarded as ameasure of scientific advance.

By a strange fatality Kant, who had been soefficient as an iconoclast in metaphysics, was perhapswith his nebular hypothesis, followed laterby the work of Goethe on animal and plant variations,the one most largely responsible for the newhope that in science at last was to be found ananswer to the riddle of existence which had baffledthe search of pure reason. The achievement ofKant both destructive and constructive is wellknown, if vaguely understood, by the world atlarge; but it is not so well known that a contem[Pg 259]poraryof Kant did precisely for science what thesage of Königsberg accomplished in metaphysics.In the very decade in whichThe Critique of PureReason saw the light, Lagrange, a scholar ofFrance, published a work which carried the analyticmethod, or the method of motion, to itsfarthest limit. In this work, theMécaniqueAnalytique, Lagrange develops an equation fromwhich it can be proved conclusively that to explainany group of phenomena measured byenergy an infinite number of hypotheses may beemployed. So, for instance, if we establish anyone theory which will sufficiently account for theknown phenomena of light, such as reflection, refraction,polarisation, etc., there will yet remainan infinite number of other hypotheses equallycapable of explaining the same group of phenomena.Or to use the words of Poincaré: "Ifthen we can give one complete mechanical explanationof a phenomenon, there will also bepossible an infinite number of others which willaccount equally well for all the particulars revealedby experiment." That is to say, noexperimentumcrucis can be imagined which willreveal the truth or error of any given theory.This restriction on the finality of our knowledgeis borne out in all physical reasoning,—and Iventure also to say in the other sciences; thus inoptics we can perform no experiment which willestablish as finally true the theory that light iscaused by the motion of corpuscles of matter[Pg 260]emitted from a luminous body, or that it is due tovibrations propagated through a medium by awave motion, or that it is generated by certaindisturbances in the electrical state of bodies.Each of these hypotheses has its advantages anddisadvantages; and in our choice we merely adoptthat theory which explains the greater number ofphenomena in the simplest way.

If any one should here ask: Granted that fromphenomena expressed in terms of energy no ultimatelaw can be educed, yet may not some otherview of phenomena lead to other results? Weanswer that no other view is possible. Not thatthe system of the universe, if we may use such anexpression, is necessarily constructed on what wecall energy, but that our minds can conceive itonly in terms of energy. An analysis of the conceptswhich enter into the idea of energy mustmake it evident that in our understanding of naturewe cannot go beyond this point.

There is an agreement among philosophers andscientists that the concept of space is not derivedfrom external experience, but is inherently intuitive.As stated by Kant:

The concept of space therefore makes possible theintuition of external phenomena; but these phenomenato be realised must appeal to one of oursenses, and this connecting link between the outerworld and our consciousness is the concept whichwe call time. Quoting again from Kant:

It follows, then, that our simplest possible expressionfor phenomena will be in terms of space andtime, and that beyond this the human mind cannotgo.

Turning here from metaphysical to scientificlanguage, we speak of space and time as thefundamental units from which we deduce thelaws of the external world. The fact that spaceappeals to us only through time furnishes us withour concept or unit of motion, which is the ratioof space to time. The external phenomena sorevealed to us we call the manifestations of massor energy, thus providing ourselves with a secondunit. It must be observed, however, that massor energy is not a new concept, but bears preciselythe same relation to motion as Kant'sDing-an-[Pg 262]sichbears to space and time: it is the unknowablecause of motion—or more properly speaking it isthe ability residing in an object to change themotion of another object and is measured by thedegree of change it can produce. And I say massor energy, advisedly, for the two are merely differentnames or different views of the same thing;we cannot conceive of matter without energy orof energy without matter. Our choice betweenthe two depends solely on the simplicity and conveniencewith which deductions may be madefrom one or the other. From a physical standpointthe concept energy is rather the simpler, butmathematically our deductions flow more readilyfrom the concept mass.

If then our explanations of phenomena mustultimately involve the two units of motion andof energy or mass, and if it can be demonstratedthat on this basis we may account for any groupof phenomena in an infinite number of ways, whatshall we say but that the attempt to attain anyresting-place for the mind in the laws of nature is,and must always be, futile? Further than this,any given law is itself only an approximate explanationof phenomena, and must be continuallymodified as we add to our experimental knowledge.In all cases a law must be considered validonly within the limits of the sensitiveness of theinstruments by which we get our measurements.With more delicate instruments variations will beobserved that must be expressed by additional[Pg 263]terms in the formula. Thus we maintain thatthe law of gravitation is true only within therange of our observation; it does not apply tomasses of molecular dimensions. Another formula,the well-known law of the pressure of gases,can be shown by experiment to be merely anapproximation, because the variations in it arenot of a dimension negligible in comparison withthe sensibility of our instruments. As the pressureincreases the error in the formular equationbecomes constantly greater. To remedy this asecond approximation, which is still inadequate,has been added to the equation by Van der Waals;yet greater accuracy will require the addition ofother terms; and a complete demonstration woulddemand an infinite series of approximations.

The meaning of all this is quite plain: there isno reach of the human intellect which can bridgethe gap between motion and rest. Our sensesare adapted to a world of universal flux which is,so far as we can determine, subject to no absolutelaw but the law of probabilities. He who attemptsto circumscribe the ebb and flow of circumstancewithin the bounds of our spiritual needs, he whoattempts to find peace in any formula of scienceor in any promise of historic progress, is like onewho labours on the old and vain problem of squaringthe circle:

The desire of peace, as the world has known it inpast times, signified always a turning away fromthe flotsam and jetsam of time and an attempt tofix the mind on absolute rest and unity,—the desireof peace has been the aspiration of faith.And because the object of faith cannot be seen bythe eyes of the body or expressed in terms of theunderstanding, a firm grasp of the will has beennecessary to keep the desire of the heart fromfalling back into the visible, tangible things ofchange and motion. For this reason, when thewill is relaxed, doubts spring up and men givethemselves wholly to the transient intoxicationof the senses. Yet blessed are they that believeand have not seen. It was the peculiar quest ofthe nineteenth century to discover fixed laws andan unshaken abiding place for the mind in thevery kingdom of unrest; we have sought to chainthe waves of the sea with the winds.

And how does all this affect one who standsapart, striving in his own small way to live in theserene contemplation of the universe? I cannotdoubt that there are some in the world to-day wholook back over the long past and watch the toilingof the human race toward peace as a travellerin the Alps may with a telescope follow the mountain-climbersin their slow ascent through thesnows of Mont Blanc; or again they watch ourlabours and painstaking in the valley of the sensesand wonder at our grotesque industry; or lookupon the striving of men to build a city for the[Pg 265]soul amid the uncertainties of this life, as menlook at the play of children who build castles anddomes in the sands of the seashore and cry outwhen the advancing waves wash all their hopesaway. I think there are some such men in theworld to-day who are absorbed in the fellowshipof the wise men of the East, and of the no lesswise Plato, with whom they would retort upon theaccusing advocates of the present: "Do you thinkthat a spirit full of lofty thoughts, and privilegedto contemplate all time and all existence, canpossibly attach any great importance to this life?"They live in the world of action, but are not of it.They pass each other at rare intervals on thethoroughfares of life and know each other by asecret sign, and smile to each other and go ontheir way comforted and in better hope.

FOOTNOTES

THE END.

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	PAGE
The Correspondence of William Cowper	1
Whittier the Poet	28
The Centenary of Sainte-Beuve	54
The Scotch Novels and Scotch History	82
Swinburne	100
Christina Rossetti	124
Why is Browning Popular?	143
A Note on Byron's "Don Juan"	166
Laurence Sterne	177
J. Henry Shorthouse	213
The Quest of a Century	244

Movatterモバイル変換

The Project Gutenberg eBook ofShelburne Essays, Third Series

E-text prepared by Bryan Ness
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
(http://www.pgdp.net)
from page images generously made available by the
Google Books Library Project
(http://books.google.com)

Shelburne Essays

Paul Elmer More

The Knickerbocker Press, New York

ADVERTISEMENT

CONTENTS

SHELBURNE ESSAYS

THIRD SERIES

THE CORRESPONDENCE OF WILLIAM
COWPER

WHITTIER THE POET

THE CENTENARY OF SAINTE-BEUVE

THE SCOTCH NOVELS AND SCOTCH
HISTORY

SWINBURNE

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI

WHY IS BROWNING POPULAR?

A NOTE ON BYRON'S "DON JUAN"

LAURENCE STERNE

J. HENRY SHORTHOUSE

THE QUEST OF A CENTURY

FOOTNOTES

THE END.

Shelburne Essays

By Paul Elmer More

Contents

A Few Press Criticisms on
Shelburne Essays

The Jessica Letters

An Editor's Romance

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

G. P. Putnam's Sons
New York	London

G. P. Putnam's Sons
New York	London

G. P. Putnam's Sons
New York	London

Movatterモバイル変換

The Project Gutenberg eBook ofShelburne Essays, Third Series

E-text prepared by Bryan Ness and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by the Google Books Library Project (http://books.google.com)

Shelburne Essays

Paul Elmer More

The Knickerbocker Press, New York

ADVERTISEMENT

CONTENTS

SHELBURNE ESSAYS

THIRD SERIES

THE CORRESPONDENCE OF WILLIAMCOWPER

WHITTIER THE POET

THE CENTENARY OF SAINTE-BEUVE

THE SCOTCH NOVELS AND SCOTCHHISTORY

SWINBURNE

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI

WHY IS BROWNING POPULAR?

A NOTE ON BYRON'S "DON JUAN"

LAURENCE STERNE

J. HENRY SHORTHOUSE

THE QUEST OF A CENTURY

FOOTNOTES

THE END.

Shelburne Essays

By Paul Elmer More

Contents

A Few Press Criticisms onShelburne Essays

The Jessica Letters

An Editor's Romance

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

E-text prepared by Bryan Ness
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
(http://www.pgdp.net)
from page images generously made available by the
Google Books Library Project
(http://books.google.com)

THE CORRESPONDENCE OF WILLIAM
COWPER

THE SCOTCH NOVELS AND SCOTCH
HISTORY

A Few Press Criticisms on
Shelburne Essays